Oliver Sacks

The fourth and youngest child of a prosperous North London Jewish medical family: his father, Sam, a doctor; his mother, Elsie, a surgeon. Aged six, in 1939, his parents sent him to a boarding school in the Midlands for four years to keep him out of harm's way.^[1]

Sacks earned a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in physiology and biology from The Queen's College, Oxford University in 1954. He proceeded to graduate with a Master of Arts (MA) from the same college in 1958. Furthermore, he also graduated with a MB ChB in 1958; in so doing, he qualified as a doctor.

Professional life

After converting his British qualifications to American recognition (i.e., an MD as opposed to MB ChB), Sacks moved to New York, where he has lived since 1965, and taken twice weekly therapy sessions since 1966.^[1]

In 1966, Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital (now Beth Abraham Health Services), a chronic care facility in the Bronx. It was here that he first encountered a group of patients, many of whom had spent decades unable to initiate movement due to the devastating effects of the 1920s sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica.^[2] His work at Beth Abraham provided the foundation on which the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function (IMNF), where Sacks is currently an honorary medical advisor, is built.^{citation needed} In 2000, he was honored with the IMNF’s Music Has Power Award for his contributions towards advancing knowledge of the power of music to awaken and heal, and again in 2006 to commemorate his 40th year at Beth Abraham and recognize his dedication to its patients.^{citation needed}

Literary work

Sacks considers that his literary style follows the tradition of 19th-century "clinical anecdotes," a literary style that included informal case histories, following the writings of Alexander Luria^[4] as well as Hughlings Jackson.^{citation needed}

In 2007,^[3] Columbia University, where Sacks serves as Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, appointed Sacks as "its first Columbia artist, a newly created designation."^{citation needed}

Sacks describes his cases with little clinical detail, concentrating on the experiences of the patient (in the case of his A Leg to Stand On, the patient was himself). The patients he describes are often able to adapt to their situation in different ways despite the fact that their neurological conditions are usually considered incurable.^[5] His most famous book, Awakenings, upon which the movie of the same name is based, describes his experiences using the new drug L-Dopa on Beth Abraham post-encephalitic patients in 1969. Awakenings was also the subject of the first film made in the British television series Discovery.

In his other books, he describes cases of Tourette syndrome and various effects of Parkinson's disease. The title article of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is about a man with visual agnosia and was the subject of a 1986 opera by Michael Nyman. According to a Letter to the Editor published by the Journal of autism and developmental disorders, the exact details in the book should not be taken literally and there are alternate, skeptical views.^[6] The title article of An Anthropologist on Mars is about Temple Grandin, a professor with high-functioning autism. In his book The Island of the Colorblind he describes the Chamorro people of Guam, who have a high incidence of a form of ALS known as Lytico-bodig (a devastating combination of ALS, dementia, and parkinsonism). Along with Paul Cox, Sacks is responsible for the resurgence in interest in the Guam ALS cluster, and has published papers setting out an environmental cause for the cluster, namely toxins such as beta-methylamino L-alanine (BMAA) from the cycad nut accumulating by biomagnification in the flying fox bat.^[7]^[8]

Awards and mention

Books

Essays and articles

References

^ ^a ^b Andrew Brown (5 March 2005). "Oliver Sacks Profile: Seeing double". The Guardian.
^ Music Has Power Awards Event Journal, Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, November 2006
^ ^a ^b Motoko Rich (1 September 2007). "Oliver Sacks Joins Columbia Faculty as ‘Artist’". The New York Times. “The appointment grew out of conversations that Dr. Sacks had with several people, including Eric Kandel, a Nobel laureate in medicine and a professor at Columbia, and Gregory Mosher, director of the Arts Initiative at Columbia, which aims to incorporate an interdisciplinary approach to the arts into the undergraduate experience.”
^ All in the Mind (2 April 2005). "The Inner Life of the Broken Brain: Narrative and Neurology". Radio National.
^ Sacks, Oliver [1995] (1996-01-12). "Preface", An Anthropologist on Mars, New Ed, London: Picador, xiii–xviii. ISBN 0-330-34347-5. “"The sense of the brain's remarkable plasticity, its capacity for the most striking adaptations, not least in the special (and often desperate) circumstances of neural or sensory mishap, has come to dominate my own perception of my patients and their lives."”
^ Yamaguchi M (August 2007). "Questionable aspects of Oliver Sacks' (1985) report" (PDF). J Autism Dev Disord 37 (7): 1396; discussion 1389–9, 1401. doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0257-0. PMID 17066308.
^ Occurrence of beta-methylamino-l-alanine (BMAA) in ALS/PDC patients from Guam, National Institutes of Health, October 11, 2004
^ Cycad neurotoxins, consumption of flying foxes, and ALS-PDC disease in Guam, National Institutes of Health, November 26, 2002
^ Forcefeeding and restraint of Guantanamo Bay hunger strikers, The Lancet, Volume 367, Number 9513, March 11, 2006.
^ London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 58729, page 25, 14 June 2008.

Contents

Early life and education