Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks (1933 to 2015) was a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science and writer, born in London. He took his medical degree at The Queen's College, Oxford, in 1958 and then moved to the United States, where he trained in San Francisco and at the University of California, Los Angeles, in neurology and neuropathology. At the chronic-care facility of Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx he worked with survivors of the sleeping sickness epidemic of the 1920s, encephalitis lethargica, who had been unable to move on their own for decades, and his treatment of them became the basis of his 1973 book Awakenings, later made into a film. His other best-selling books were mostly case studies of people with neurological disorders, himself included, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat became an opera. The New York Times called him a poet laureate of contemporary medicine. Journals and letters found after his death indicate that some of his work was embellished or exaggerated.