Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) was a British neurologist and writer whose case-history books, including Awakenings (1973) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), brought neurology to a general readership. Oliver Wolf Sacks was born in Cricklewood, London, on 9 July 1933 to a family of doctors and died of cancer at his home in Manhattan on 30 August 2015, aged 82.

He studied at The Queen's College, Oxford, qualifying in medicine in 1958, and moved to the United States in 1961, training at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and UCLA. From 1966 he worked at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx with survivors of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic, whose response to L-DOPA he described in Awakenings; the book inspired Harold Pinter's play A Kind of Alaska (1982) and the 1990 film with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. He taught at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Columbia and New York University. His other books include Migraine (1970), A Leg to Stand On (1984), An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), Uncle Tungsten (2001), Musicophilia (2007), Hallucinations (2012) and the memoir On the Move (2015). He was appointed CBE in 2008. Papers found after his death suggest some case studies were embellished.

For collectors

His key books appeared first in London: Awakenings was first published by Duckworth in 1973, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Duckworth in 1985, with Summit Books publishing it in the United States. Later British editions of Awakenings came from Pelican (1976, revised) and Picador (1991), so look for the Duckworth imprint on a first.