With his absorbing and accessible yet profound accounts of neurological cases and conditions, Oliver Sacks, who has died aged 82, brought the clinical science of the brain to life for countless readers.
Although his first book, Migraine (1970), marked a relatively conventional beginning, Sacks’s decision to write about a neurological disorder with complex psychological precipitants and concomitants, and one from which he himself suffered, pointed in the direction of his future interests.
His second book, Awakenings (1973) appeared when Sacks was 40 and brought his work to a wide audience. Effusively praised by the critics, it describes the effects of L-Dopa, then recently recognised as an effective treatment for Parkinson’s disease, in a group of patients who had lived in something close to suspended animation since the epidemic of the “sleeping sickness”, encephalitis lethargica, swept the world at the end of the First World War.
Awakenings later became a successful feature film, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
Sacks’s many subsequent books ranged across and beyond the territory of clinical neurology, but his work always remained rooted in his fascination with the brain. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) and An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) are collections of essays on patients with disorders of sensation and perception (such as the agnosic Dr. P, who mistook his wife for a hat, and the colour-blind painter Mr. I); of memory, language and movement (like “Witty Ticcy Ray” and the surgeon Dr. Carl Bennett, both sufferers from Tourette syndrome , with its combination of intense physical tics and psychological compulsions); and of “social cognition” more broadly, as in the case of the autistic academic Temple Grandin, who described herself feeling as if she were “an anthropologist on Mars”, so mysterious did she find the ways of her fellow humans.
Frank autobiography He was born in north London. His father, Samuel, was a general practitioner, his mother, Muriel, a surgeon and pathologist. His future interests and talents were shaped and nurtured by his large, rumbustious, cultivated, polymathic Jewish family, evocatively described in his memoir Uncle Tungsten . He was a shy man, and, Uncle Tungsten apart, his private life remained very private, until the publication of his compelling autobiography, On the Move (2015). It told of his early interest in gay sex and fascination with motorbikes, leathers and drug experiences, and his 35 years of celibacy until, in 2008, he became the partner of the writer Bill Hayes, who survives him.
— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015
