Oliver Sacks: neurologist, pianist, scholar

Oliver Wolf Sacks (1933-2015) was born in London, youngest of four sons of two Lithuanian Jewish doctors. Oliver spent most of his childhood in London, though his GP father and surgeon moth­er sent him to a rural boarding school for 4 years in WW2 to es­c­ape the horr­ific air raids. Sacks hated bullying and cruelty and 4 years later, back home, he hid in his base­ment chem­istry lab. Uncle Tung­sten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) discussed how growing up in a home of poly­maths fostered his investigative skills.

Dr Sacks favourite activities:
playing the piano and writing books

He got a bachelor’s degree in physiol­ogy (1954) & medicine (1958) from Queens College Oxford. He did his house-year at Mid­dlesex Hospital London in 1959 and was house-surgeon at Queen Elizabeth, Birm­ing­ham in 1960. Dr Sacks moved to the US to work at Mt Zion Hospital, San Francisco (1961–62), then a neurology residency at Uni of Calif.

Sacks moved to NY in 1965 for a fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, becoming a cl­inical Prof of Neurology (1966–75). He also joined the charitable Bet Abraham Hosp­ital NY as a staff neurologist (1966–2007), meeting patients who’d contract­ed a sl­eeping sickness, encephalitis lethar­g­ica, during a much earlier ep­id­emic (1917-27). These patients had survived sleeping sickness only to develop a Parkinson’s that caused immob­ility, depression, speechlessness or catatonia! Dr Sacks gave them the drug L-dopa, emerging as a treat­ment for similar symptoms in Parkins­on’s. His clinical work at Bet Abraham led to his book Awakenings (1973). This book, about a group of patients with atypical enceph­alitis, won widespread attention.

Sacks was led by Russia's neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria (1902–77). Luria's vital research was in linguistic aphasia, ant­erior lobe pathology, speech dysfunction and child neuro­psychology. The two men never met, but they maintained a 5-year corresp­ondence and in 1977, Sacks wrote his mentor’s obituary for The London Times.

Explore strange brain pathways in famous case histories like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986), using his pat­ients’ disord­ers to discuss the human condition i.e he carefully ill­um­inated pat­ients’ exist­en­tial AND pathological condit­ions. Some critics called his blend of medicine & phil­osophy ins­ight­ful eg The Independent of London called him the “presiding genius of neuro­logical drama”. Reviewers praised his graceful prose.

Some critics found him infuriat­ing, accusing Sacks of expl­oit­ing his subjects. Scientists said that his clinical stories over-emphasised the stories and under-emphasised the clinical. A London neuro­­scientist doubted whether Sacks had provided any scientific in­sights into the neurolog­ical con­ditions he had written about in his many books (Guardian 2005).

A million copies of Sack’s books were printed in the U.S and his acc­ounts of neur­ol­ogical oddities were soon adapted for Hol­lywood, opera, theatre and literature. An opera based on The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat premiered in London in 1986 and in the Lin­coln Centre NY in 1988. Robin Wil­liams portrayed a Sacks-like doctor in the film ver­s­ion of Aw­ak­enings (1990), along with Robert De Niro. Rich­ard Powers based a central character on him in his novel The Echo Maker (2006). The Girl in the Letter (2018) and The Missing Daughter (2019) by Emily Gunnis did very well.

Recording personal experiences in volumes written for popular aud­iences did well. Having injured a leg in a moun­t­aineering accident, he learned first hand how a physician’s dismissal of ­a patient’s condition hinder­ed rec­uperation, as he told in A Leg to Stand On (1984).

Still recording the amazing circumstances of the pat­ients he met and their remarkable adaptations, Sacks wrote See­ing Voices (1989). He exp­lored the ways in which sign language provided the deaf with commun­ic­ation AND served as a discrete culture. In An Anth­rop­ol­ogist on Mars (1995), he documented the lives of 7 pat­ients living with difficult conditions including autism, and how they created functional lives.

Trips abroad were important. On his journey to Micronesia Sacks studied a population with a high incidence of colour blindness and to Guam to study a mysterious form of paralysis in The Island of the Col­ourblind (1997). He presented further case stud­ies in The Mind Travel­ler (1998), a programme produced for tv. The Mind’s Eye (2010) in­vestigated the compensatory mechanisms employed by people with sensory disorders. Hal­lucin­at­ions (2012) recorded con­ditions from epilep­sy and drug use, to sens­ory depriv­at­ion that caused hallucin­at­ions.

In 1989 Sacks won a Guggenheim fellowship for his studies of the influence of culture on the abnormal neurological processes underlying the rare inherited disease, Tourette Syndrome. Sacks also introduced Asperger Syndrome to lay audiences, humanising his patients.

Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, 2007

The relationship between music and the mind

This skilled pianist analysed the relationship between music and the mind, and of patients with conditions relating to music in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007). He pointed to mus­ic’s ability to reach dementia patients, showing that music app­rec­iat­ion is hard-wired into the brain. Sacks believed Mozart made him a better neurologist!

Though Sacks remained in the U.S, he never gave up Brit­ish citizenship and he was made Commander British Empire in 2008. Other awards incl­uded honours from Guggenheim Foundation, Americ­an Acad­emy of Arts & Letters, National Sc­ience Foundation and Royal College of Physicians.

He wrote up his adventures On The Move (2015). And he also discussed his sexual identity for the first time, since realising he was gay in his teens. He settled into a LONG period of celibacy that lasted 35 years before he met and fell in love with writer Bill Hayes in 2008.

Dr Sacks remained active with age. In 2007, at 74, he accepted an int­er­­disciplinary teaching position at Columbia. From 2012–15 he returned again to the New York Uni School of Medicine in Neurol­ogy. And despite the enormous success of his books, he never gave up his “unglam­orous” medical practice, because it prov­ided him with data and because he loved working with patients.

In Feb 2015 he announced his own terminal can­cer. The ocular mel­an­oma had spread to his liver, and he died at 82. His essays were pub­lished posthumously as The River of Consc­ious­ness (2017). The document­ary Oliv­er Sacks: His Own Life was published in 2019.

For a slightly new angle, read Fenella Souter 2015 who wrote that this doctor was famous for his books about people with bizarre neurological disorders. But Dr Sacks had some very impressive mental quirks of his own.