Oliver Sacks Biography

Oliver Sacks was a neurologist and lecturer who wrote about the peculiarities of the brain, in books such as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. With a medical degree from Queen’s College at Oxford, he moved to the United States in 1961, first San Francisco and then New York, where he practiced neurology and taught at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (and later, Columbia University). He first gained national attention for bringing patients out of catatonia, as told in his 1973 book, Awakenings (made into a 1990 movie with Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro). Sacks had a career of describing case histories of neurological disorders that included hallucinations and various levels of conciousness, and was known to have plenty of personal experience with mind-altering drugs. His other books include The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), Seeing Voices (1989), This Island of the Color Blind (1997), Musicophilia (2007), Hallucinations (2012) and his memoir On the Move (2015).