There was the blind man who had the disastrous experience of regaining his sight. The surgeon who developed a sudden passion for music after being struck by lightning. And most famously, the man who mistook his wife for a hat.
Those stories and many more, taking the reader to the distant ranges of human experience, came from the pen of Oliver Sacks.
Sacks, 82, died on Sunday at his home in New York City, his assistant, Kate Edgar, said. In February, he had announced that he was terminally ill with a rare eye cancer that had spread to his liver.
Photo: AFP
As a practicing neurologist, Sacks looked at some of his patients with a writer’s eye and found publishing gold.
In his best-selling 1985 book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, he described a man who really did mistake his wife’s face for his hat while visiting Sacks’ office, because his brain had difficulty interpreting what he saw.
Discover magazine ranked it among the 25 greatest science books of all time in 2006, declaring, “Legions of neuroscientists now probing the mysteries of the human brain cite this book as their greatest inspiration.”
Sacks’ 1973 book, Awakenings, about hospital patients who had spent decades in a kind of frozen state until Sacks tried a new treatment, led to a 1990 movie in which Sacks was portrayed by Robin Williams. It was nominated for three Academy Awards.
An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, published in 1995, described cases like a painter who lost color vision in a car accident, but found new creative power in black-and-white, and a 50-year-old man who suddenly regained sight after nearly a lifetime of blindness — the experience was a disaster; the man’s brain could not make sense of the visual world. It perceived the human face as a shifting mass of meaningless colors and textures.
Despite the drama and unusual stories, his books were not literary freak shows.
“Oliver Sacks humanizes illness ... he writes of body and mind, and from every one of his case studies there radiates a feeling of respect for the patient and for the illness,” Roald Hoffmann, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, said in 2001. “What others consider unmitigated tragedy or dysfunction, Sacks sees, and makes us see, as a human being coping with dignity with a biological problem.”
When Sacks received the prestigious Lewis Thomas Prize for science writing in 2002, the citation declared, “Sacks presses us to follow him into uncharted regions of human experience — and compels us to realize, once there, that we are confronting only ourselves.”
His 2007 book, Musicophilia, examines the relationship between music and the brain, including its healing effect on people with such conditions as Tourette’s syndrome, autism and Alzheimer’s.
Oliver Wolf Sacks was born in 1933 in London, son of husband-and-wife physicians. Both were skilled at recounting medical stories, and Sack’s own writing impulse “seems to have come directly from them,” he said in his memoir, On the Move.
After earning a medical degree at Oxford, Sacks moved to the US in 1960 and completed a medical internship in San Francisco and a neurology residency at the University of California, Los Angeles. He moved to New York in 1965 and began decades of neurology practice.
Even apart from his books, he wrote prolifically. He began keeping journals at age 14, and in his memoir he said he’d filled more than a thousand at last count.
His memoir, On the Move, was published this year.
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