Oliver Sacks biography

Oliver Sacks Biography

Oliver Sacks, M.D. was a physician, a best-selling author, and a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine.

He is best known for his collections of neurological case histories, including The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat(1985), Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007) and The Mind's Eye (2010). Awakenings (1973), his book about a group of patients who had survived the great encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the early twentieth century, inspired the 1990 Academy Award-nominated feature film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. The New York Times has referred to him as "the poet laureate of medicine."

Dr. Sacks was a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Sacks announced that he was in the late stages of terminal cancer in February 2015 in an Op-Ed essay in The New York Times. He continued to chronicle his final months, including a piece in a late July edition headlined "My Periodic Table." He died August 29 in New York.

Oliver Sacks's website

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