Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of Oliver Sacks

Oliver Wolf Sacks (9 July 1933 – 30 August 2015) was a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and writer.

This profile of Oliver Sacks covers Early Life and Family Background, Study of medicine, Beginning life in North America, Career and Rise to Fame and Writing.

Born in London, Sacks received his medical degree in 1958 from The Queen's College, Oxford, before moving to the United States, where he spent most of his career. He interned at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and completed his residency in neurology and neuropathology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Later, he served as neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital's chronic-care facility in the Bronx, where he worked with a group of survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica epidemic, who had been unable to move on their own for decades. His treatment of those patients became the basis of his 1973 book Awakenings, which was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated feature film, in 1990, starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. His other best-selling books were mostly collections of case studies of people, including himself, with neurological disorders. He also published hundreds of articles (both peer-reviewed scientific articles and articles for a general audience), about neurological disorders, history of science, natural history, and nature. Journals and letters written by Sacks, but discovered after his death, indicate that some of his work was embellished or exaggerated.

The New York Times called him a "poet laureate of contemporary medicine", and "one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century". Some of his books were adapted for plays by major playwrights, feature films, animated short films, opera, dance, fine art, and musical works in the classical genre. His book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which describes the case histories of some of his patients, became the basis of an opera of the same name. The television series Brilliant Minds is based on his life.

Early Life and Family Background of Oliver Sacks

Oliver Wolf Sacks was born in Cricklewood, London, England, the youngest of four children born to Jewish parents: Samuel Sacks, a Lithuanian Jewish doctor (died June 1990), and Muriel Elsie Landau, one of the first female surgeons in England (died 1972), who was one of 18 siblings. She would sometimes bring home deformed fetuses from work, where she would dissect them with her son as a way for him to learn about human anatomy. Sacks had an extremely large extended family of eminent scientists, physicians and other notable people, including the director and writer Jonathan Lynn and first cousins the Israeli statesman Abba Eban and the Nobel Laureate Robert Aumann.

In December 1939, when Sacks was six years old, he and his older brother Michael were evacuated from London to escape the Blitz, and sent to a boarding school in the English Midlands where he remained until 1943. Unknown to his family, at the school, he and his brother Michael "subsisted on meager rations of turnips and beetroot and suffered cruel punishments at the hands of a sadistic headmaster." This is detailed in his first autobiography, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. Beginning with his return home at the age of 10, under his Uncle Dave's tutelage, he became an intensely focused amateur chemist. Later, he attended St Paul's School in London, where he developed lifelong friendships with Jonathan Miller and Eric Korn.

Study of medicine of Oliver Sacks

During adolescence he shared an intense interest in biology with these friends, and later came to share his parents' enthusiasm for medicine. He chose to study medicine at university and entered The Queen's College, Oxford in 1951. The first half studying medicine at Oxford is pre-clinical, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in physiology and biology in 1956.

Although not required, Sacks chose to stay on for an additional year to do research after he had taken a course by Hugh Macdonald Sinclair. Sacks recalls, "I had been seduced by a series of vivid lectures on the history of medicine and nutrition, given by Sinclair... It was the history of physiology, the ideas and personalities of physiologists, which came to life." Sacks then became involved with the school's Laboratory of Human Nutrition under Sinclair. Sacks focused his research on the patent medicine Jamaica ginger, a toxic and commonly abused drug known to cause irreversible nerve damage. After devoting months to research he was disappointed by the lack of help and guidance he received from Sinclair. Sacks wrote up an account of his research findings but stopped working on the subject. As a result he became depressed: "I felt myself sinking into a state of quiet but in some ways agitated despair."

His tutor at Queen's and his parents, seeing his emotional state, suggested he extricate himself from academic studies for a period. His parents then suggested he spend the summer of 1955 living on Israeli kibbutz Ein HaShofet, where the physical labour would help him. Sacks later described his experience on the kibbutz as an "anodyne to the lonely, torturing months in Sinclair's lab". He said he lost 60 pounds (27 kg) from his previously overweight body as a result of the healthy, hard physical labour he performed there. He spent time travelling around the country with time spent scuba diving at the Red Sea port city of Eilat, and began to reconsider his future: "I wondered again, as I had wondered when I first went to Oxford, whether I really wanted to become a doctor. I had become interested in neurophysiology, but I also loved marine biology;... But I was 'cured' now; it was time to return to medicine, to start clinical work, seeing patients in London."

In 1956, Sacks began to study medicine at the University of Oxford and Middlesex Hospital Medical School. For the next two-and-a-half years, he took courses in surgery, orthopaedics, paediatrics, neurology, psychiatry, dermatology, infectious diseases, obstetrics and other disciplines. During his years as a student, he helped home-deliver several babies. In 1958, he graduated with Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (BM BCh) degrees, and, as was usual at Oxford, his BA was later promoted to a Master of Arts (MA Oxon) degree.

After completing his medical degree, Sacks began his pre-registration house officer rotations at Middlesex Hospital the following month. "My eldest brother, Marcus, had trained at the Middlesex," he said, "and now I was following his footsteps." Before beginning his house officer post, he said he first wanted some hospital experience to gain more confidence, and took a job at a hospital in St Albans where his mother had worked as an emergency surgeon during the war. He then did his first six-month post in Middlesex Hospital's medical unit, followed by another six months in its neurological unit. He completed his pre-registration year in June 1960, but was uncertain about his future.

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Sacks), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.