Monday, August 31, 2015

Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author, dies aged 82


Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who was the acclaimed author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, has died aged 82.

Sacks, who had revealed in February that he was in the late stages of terminal cancer, died in New York on August 29 2015. He had been born in London in 1933 into a family of physicians and scientists - his mother was a surgeon and his father a general practitioner.
Dr Sacks wrote about the brain’s pathways and used his patients’ disorders as starting points for eloquent books and essays. 

His clinical anecdotes – drawn from collections including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and the bestselling Awakenings, which described his work in the late Sixties at the Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, treating survivors of the Twenties epidemic of encephalitis lethargica or “sleepy sickness” – have been adapted for theatre and film, a ballet, and an opera by Michael Nyman.
More


And at The Guardian

Oliver Sacks obituary

No comments: