Oliver Sacks

Neurologist and author

Dr Oliver Sacks is a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and also the university's first Columbia University Artist. He has been described by the New York Times as “the poet laureate of medicine,” and he is best known for his compassionate explorations of the far borderlands of neurological experience. In books of "clinical tales" such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1995) and An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette’s syndrome to autism, Parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, retardation,and Alzheimer’s disease.

In 1966, Sacks began working at a chronic care hospital in the Bronx, where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognised these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of encephalitis lethargica, the "sleepy sickness" that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings, which later inspired the Harold Pinter play A Kind of Alaska and the Oscar-nominated feature film, Awakening with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.