Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks: The Poet Laureate of Medicine

He received something like ten thousand letters a year and had a standing rule about them: "I invariably reply to people under 10, over 90 or in prison." It is a very Sacksian rule — whimsical, precise, and quietly organised around the people the rest of the world was not listening to. That was his whole method, applied to neurology for fifty years.

A Household of Doctors

Oliver Wolf Sacks was born in London on 9 July 1933. Medicine was the family trade: his mother was a surgeon, his father a general practitioner. He took his medical degree at Queen's College, Oxford, then crossed the Atlantic for residencies and fellowships at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA — a young man on a motorcycle, as far from the consulting rooms of north London as he could arrange.

In 1965 he moved to New York, and in 1966 took a post as consulting neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx. It was meant to be unremarkable work in a chronic-care institution. It became the defining encounter of his life.

The Sleepers

Beth Abraham held survivors of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic that had swept the world between roughly 1916 and 1927. They had been frozen for decades — conscious, largely immobile, warehoused. Sacks treated them with L-dopa, and they came back: speaking, moving, re-entering lives that had stopped forty years earlier. Then, for many, the drug's effect became unmanageable and they receded again.

*Awakenings* (1973) is the book he made of it, and it established the form he would use for the rest of his career: the extended clinical case history written as literature, with the patient as a person rather than a lesion. It was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film in 1990, with Robin Williams playing a version of Sacks and Robert De Niro as a patient.

The Long Shelf

What followed was one of the most durable bodies of popular medical writing ever assembled: *Migraine*; *A Leg to Stand On*, drawn from his own injury; *The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat* (1985), the title case of visual agnosia that made him famous; *Seeing Voices* on deafness and sign language; *An Anthropologist on Mars*; *The Island of the Colorblind*; *Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood* (2001); *Musicophilia* (2007); *The Mind's Eye* (2010); *Hallucinations* (2012), a subject he approached partly through his own youthful experiments with LSD; and *The River of Consciousness*. More than a million copies of his books were in print in the United States alone. He gave a TED talk on hallucinations in 2009 and became a recurring voice on American public radio.

He held a chair in neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center from 2007 to 2012, where he was also named the university's first Columbia University Artist — a title invented for him — and was Professor of Neurology at NYU School of Medicine from 2012 to 2015, working with its Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. He was a visiting professor at Warwick. The honours ran from the Lewis Thomas Prize at Rockefeller University in 2002 to honorary fellowships of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and honorary degrees from Oxford, the Karolinska Institute, Georgetown, Gallaudet, Bard, Tufts and the Catholic University of Peru.

Why Oliver Is Called a Genius

The faculty was observational and literary rather than experimental. Sacks's gift was for noticing what a neurological deficit revealed about the architecture of an ordinary mind — treating the man who could not recognise his wife's face not as a broken machine but as evidence of how much unnoticed labour normal perception performs. He then wrote it in prose good enough that a general reader felt the vertigo of it. Doing both at once is rare. The New York Times called him the poet laureate of medicine, and Columbia's willingness to invent an "Artist" title for a working neurologist is a fair measure of how the institutions themselves classified him.

The counter-case starts with that same classification. Sacks made no fundamental discovery. He did not develop L-dopa; he administered an existing drug to a forgotten population and reported what happened. His characteristic instrument, the single case history, is the least generalisable form of medical evidence, and he was practising it in decades when the profession was organising itself around controlled trials and statistics. It is telling that his major honours — the Lewis Thomas Prize for the scientist as writer, a fellowship of the Academy of Arts and Letters, an artist's title — are literary rather than scientific. He was not awarded, and did not seek, the prizes given for results.

There is also a persistent unease about the genre itself: a neurologist builds a large public reputation on the narrated suffering of patients who cannot answer back, and the line between compassionate attention and exhibition is drawn by the author alone. Sacks was conscious of this and wrote against it, but the objection does not disappear. What survives is a genuine claim of a specific kind: not that he found something new about the brain, but that he changed what doctors and readers thought a patient was.

Legacy

He had spent a career writing about other people's neurology; at the end he wrote about his own. Ocular melanoma had already cost him vision and supplied material for *The Mind's Eye* and *Hallucinations*. In February 2015 he announced in a New York Times essay that the cancer had spread to his liver, and he spent his last months publishing short pieces on mortality and on what it had meant to live, as he put it, a good and worthwhile life. His memoir *On the Move: A Life* appeared that year, followed by the essay collection *Gratitude*; *Everything in Its Place* was published posthumously in 2019.

He died in New York on 30 August 2015, aged eighty-two. The clearest measure of his influence is that the case history — the thing medicine had reduced to a form to be filled in — is once again a place where writers go looking for what it is like to be a person.

Achievements

• Commander of the Order of the British Empire
• Lewis Thomas Prize — 2001
• Hawthornden Prize — 1974
• Notable work: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
• Notable work: Awakenings
• Held posts at Columbia University, Grossman School of Medicine and Albert Einstein College of Medicine
• Fields: neurology