NEW
YORK: Dr Oliver Sacks, whose books like "The Man Who Mistook His Wife
For a Hat" probed distant ranges of human experience by compassionately
portraying people with severe and sometimes bizarre neurological
conditions, has died. He was 82.
Sacks died on Sunday at his home in New York City, his assistant, Kate Edgar, said.
Sacks had announced in February 2015 that he was terminally ill with a rare eye cancer that had spread to his liver.
As a practicing neurologist, Sacks looked at some of his patients with a writer's eye and found publishing gold.
In his bestselling 1985 book, he described a man who really did mistake
his wife's face for his hat while visiting Sacks's office, because his
brain had difficulty interpreting what he saw. Another story in the book
featured autistic twins who had trouble with ordinary math but who
could perform other amazing calculations.
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's 1973 book, "Awakenings," about hospital patients who'd 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.
Still another book, "An
Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales", published in 1995,
described cases like a painter who lost colour vision in a car accident
but found new creative power in black and white.
It also told
of 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.
After a full
and rich life as a blind person, he became "a very disabled and
miserable partially sighted man," Sacks recalled later. "When he went
blind again, he was rather glad of it."
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."
In a 1998 interview
with Associated Press, Sacks said he tries to make "visits to other
people, to other interiors, seeing the world through their eyes."
His 2007 book, "Musicophilia," looked at the relationship between music
and the brain, including its healing effect on people suffering from
such diseases as Tourette's syndrome, Parkinson's, autism and
Alzheimer's.
"Even with advanced dementia, when powers of
memory and language are lost, people will respond to music," he told the
AP in 2008.
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 2015 memoir, "On the Move".
In
childhood he was drawn to chemistry (his 2001 memoir is called, "Uncle
Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood") and biology. Around age 11,
fascinated by how ferns slowly unfurl, he set up a camera to take
pictures every hour or so of a fern and then assembled a flip book to
compress the process into a few seconds.
"I became a doctor a
little belatedly and a little reluctantly," he told one interviewer. "In
a sense, I was a naturalist first and I only came to individuals
relatively late."
After earning a medical degree at Oxford,
Sacks moved to the United States 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. At a Bronx hospital he met the profoundly
disabled patients he described in "Awakenings."
Among his
other books were "The Island of the Colorblind" (1997) about a society
where congenital colour blindness was common, "Seeing Voices" (1989)
about the world of deaf culture, and "Hallucinations" (2012), in which
Sacks discussed his own hallucinations as well as those of some
patients.
In the AP interview, Sacks was asked what he'd learned from peering into lives much different from the norm.
"People will make a life in their own terms, whether they are deaf or
colourblind or autistic or whatever," he replied. "And their world will
be quite as rich and interesting and full as our world."
Sacks
reflected on his own life in 2015 when he wrote in New York Times that
he was terminally ill. "I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent
enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions," he wrote.
In the time he had remaining, he said, he would no longer pay attention
to matters like politics and global warming because they "are no longer
my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted
young people. ... I feel the future is in good hands."
"I
cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of
gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I
have given something in return; I have read and travelled and thought
and written. ... Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking
animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an
enormous privilege and adventure."
