Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks was born in England, and received his medical degree from Oxford in 1960. Afterwards, he interned at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, followed by UCLA. He worked as a neurologist at a hospital in the Bronx, where he came across a group of patients who had been comatose ever since the 1920s “sleepy-sickness” epidemic. Sacks’s research on these patients, culminating in his use of the L-Dopa drug to revive them from their comas, formed the basis for his book Awakenings (1973). Since the seventies, Sacks has written books on a large number of medical topics, including Migraine (1970), An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), Hallucinations (2012), and two memoirs—Uncle Tungsten (2001) and On the Move (2015). Sacks was known for being a brilliant but often painfully shy man. It wasn’t until well into middle age that Sacks realized that he suffered from face blindness, a condition that left him unable to recognize his own face in the mirror. In his final book, On the Move, Sacks addressed the subject of his homosexuality, which he’d previously concealed from all but his closest friends. He died of a tumor in August 2015, one of the most respected and beloved science writers of the twentieth century.