66 Facts About Oliver Sacks

Oliver Wolf Sacks was a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and writer.

Oliver Sacks interned at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and completed his residency in neurology and neuropathology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Oliver Sacks published hundreds of articles, not only about neurological disorders but insightful book reviews and articles about the history of science, natural history, and nature.

Oliver Sacks's writings have been featured in a wide range of media; The New York Times called him a "poet laureate of contemporary medicine", and "one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century".

Oliver Sacks's books include a wealth of narrative detail about his experiences with his patients and his own experiences, and how patients and he coped with their conditions, often illuminating how the normal brain deals with perception, memory, and individuality.

Oliver Sacks was appointed a CBE for services to medicine in the 2008 Birthday Honours.

Oliver Sacks once stated that the brain is the "most incredible thing in the universe".

Oliver Sacks became widely known for writing best-selling case histories about both his patients' and his own disorders and unusual experiences, with some of his books adapted for plays by major playwrights, feature films, animated short films, opera, dance, fine art, and musical works in the classical genre.

Oliver Wolf Sacks was born in Cricklewood, London, England, the youngest of four children born to Jewish parents: Samuel Sacks, a Lithuanian Jewish doctor, and Muriel Elsie Landau, one of the first female surgeons in England, who was one of 18 siblings.

Oliver Sacks had an extremely large extended family of eminent scientists, physicians and other notable individuals, including the director and writer Jonathan Lynn and first cousins, the Israeli statesman Abba Eban the Nobel Laureate Robert Aumann.

In December 1939, when Oliver Sacks was six years old, he and his older brother Michael were evacuated from London to escape the Blitz, and sent to a boarding school in the English Midlands where he remained until 1943.

Oliver Sacks chose to study medicine at university and entered The Queen's College, Oxford in 1951.

Oliver Sacks focused his research on Jamaica ginger, a toxic and commonly abused drug known to cause irreversible nerve damage.

Oliver Sacks wrote up an account of his research findings but stopped working on the subject.

Oliver Sacks said he lost 60 pounds from his previously overweight body as a result of the healthy, hard physical labour he performed there.

In 1956, Oliver Sacks began his clinical study of medicine at the University of Oxford and Middlesex Hospital Medical School.

Oliver Sacks then did his first six-month post in Middlesex Hospital's medical unit, followed by another six months in its neurological unit.

Oliver Sacks completed his pre-registration year in June 1960 but was uncertain about his future.

Oliver Sacks left Britain and flew to Montreal, Canada, on 9 July 1960, his 27th birthday.

Oliver Sacks visited the Montreal Neurological Institute and the Royal Canadian Air Force, telling them that he wanted to be a pilot.

Oliver Sacks used the next three months to travel across Canada and deep into the Canadian Rockies, which he described in his personal journal, later published as Canada: Pause, 1960.

Oliver Sacks then made his way to the United States, completing an internship at Mt.

Oliver Sacks described some of his experiences in a 2012 New Yorker article, and in his book Hallucinations.

Oliver Sacks wrote that after moving to New York City, an amphetamine-facilitated epiphany that came as he read a book by the 19th-century migraine doctor Edward Liveing inspired him to chronicle his observations on neurological diseases and oddities; to become the "Liveing of our Time".

Oliver Sacks served as an instructor and later clinical professor of neurology at Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine from 1966 to 2007, and held an appointment at the New York University School of Medicine from 1992 to 2007.

Oliver Sacks was a visiting professor at the University of Warwick in the UK.

Oliver Sacks returned to New York University School of Medicine in 2012, serving as a professor of neurology and consulting neurologist in the school's epilepsy centre.

Oliver Sacks's work at Beth Abraham Hospital helped provide the foundation on which the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function is built; Oliver Sacks was an honorary medical advisor.

Oliver Sacks maintained a busy hospital-based practice in New York City.

Oliver Sacks accepted a very limited number of private patients, in spite of being in great demand for such consultations.

Oliver Sacks served on the boards of The Neurosciences Institute and the New York Botanical Garden.

In 1967 Oliver Sacks first began to write of his experiences with some of his neurological patients.

Oliver Sacks's books have been translated into over 25 languages.

Oliver Sacks was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science in 2001.

Oliver Sacks's work is featured in a "broader range of media than those of any other contemporary medical author" and in 1990, The New York Times wrote he "has become a kind of poet laureate of contemporary medicine".

Oliver Sacks considered his literary style to have grown out of the tradition of 19th-century "clinical anecdotes", a literary style that included detailed narrative case histories, which he termed novelistic.

Oliver Sacks described his cases with a wealth of narrative detail, concentrating on the experiences of the patient.

Oliver Sacks writes in the book's preface that neurological conditions such as autism "can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence".

Later, along with Paul Alan Cox, Oliver Sacks published papers suggesting a possible environmental cause for the disease, namely the toxin beta-methylamino L-alanine from the cycad nut accumulating by biomagnification in the flying fox bat.

Oliver Sacks sometimes faced criticism in the medical and disability studies communities.

Oliver Sacks was called "the man who mistook his patients for a literary career" by British academic and disability rights activist Tom Shakespeare, and one critic called his work "a high-brow freak show".

Oliver Sacks is the author of The Mind's Eye, Oaxaca Journal and On the Move: A Life.

Oliver Sacks specified the order of his essays in River of Consciousness prior to his death.

Oliver Sacks was a prolific handwritten-letter correspondent and he never communicated by e-mail.

In 1996, Oliver Sacks became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Oliver Sacks was named a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1999.

In 2000, Oliver Sacks received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Oliver Sacks was a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.

Oliver Sacks was awarded honorary doctorates from Georgetown University, College of Staten Island, Tufts University, New York Medical College, Medical College of Pennsylvania, Bard College, Queen's University at Kingston, Gallaudet University, University of Oxford, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Oliver Sacks received the position "Columbia Artist" from Columbia University in 2007, a post that was created specifically for him and that gave him unconstrained access to the university, regardless of department or discipline.

In 2008, Oliver Sacks was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire, for services to medicine, in the Queen's Birthday Honours.

In February 2010, Oliver Sacks was named as one of the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.

Oliver Sacks described himself as "an old Jewish atheist", a phrase borrowed from his friend Jonathan Miller.

Oliver Sacks never married and lived alone for most of his life.

Oliver Sacks declined to share personal details until late in his life.

Oliver Sacks addressed his homosexuality for the first time in his 2015 autobiography On the Move: A Life.

Oliver Sacks himself shared personal information about how he got his first orgasm spontaneously while floating in a swimming pool, and later when he was giving a man a massage.

Oliver Sacks admits having "erotic fantasies of all sorts" in a natural history museum he visited often in his youth, many of them about animals, like hippos in the mud.

Oliver Sacks noted in a 2001 interview that severe shyness, which he described as "a disease", had been a lifelong impediment to his personal interactions.

Oliver Sacks believed his shyness stemmed from his prosopagnosia, popularly known as "face blindness", a condition that he studied in some of his patients, including the titular man from his work The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

Oliver Sacks especially became publicly well-known for Open water swimming when he lived in the City Island section of the Bronx, as he would routinely swim around the entire island, or swim vast distances away from the island and back.

Oliver Sacks underwent radiation therapy in 2006 for a uveal melanoma in his right eye.

Oliver Sacks discussed his loss of stereoscopic vision caused by the treatment, which eventually resulted in right-eye blindness, in an article and later in his book The Mind's Eye.

Oliver Sacks announced this development in a February 2015 New York Times op-ed piece and estimated his remaining time in "months".

Oliver Sacks expressed his intent to "live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can".

Oliver Sacks died from the disease on 30 August 2015 at his home in Manhattan at the age of 82, surrounded by his closest friends.