Oliver Sacks was born in England in 1933. He earned his medical degree at Queen’s College, Oxford University and did residencies and fellowship work at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Sacks moved to New York City in 1965, where he began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx. His work there led him to write Awakenings, a book about a group of patients who had survived the great encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the early twentieth century. The book inspired the 1990 Academy Award-nominated feature film of the same title.
From 2007 to 2012, Sacks served as a Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and he was also designated the university’s first Columbia University Artist. In 2012, he also taught as a Professor of Neurology at the New York University School of Medicine, where he practiced as part of the NYU Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Warwick. He died from uveal melanoma in 2015.
Sacks is best known for his collections of neurological case histories, including The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat published in 1985, An Anthropologist on Mars published in 1995 and Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain published in 2007. He was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The New York Times referred to him as “the poet laureate of medicine".
Sacks delivered the Beatty Lecture on September 30, 1997, titled “Neurology and the Soul”.
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