Oliver Sacks

For more information on Oliver Wolf Sacks, visit Britannica.com.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks (born 1933) told "Psychology Today", "It is the remarkable which captures my attention." In a series of bestselling books drawn from his own remarkable life and clinical career, Sacks has been an explorer of unfamiliar territory in the human brain.

Sacks's work has been motivated not by an obsession with the bizarre but by a sense of wonder and respect at how human beings react and adapt to serious illness. A generalist and a humanist in a profession that inclines toward specialization, Sacks has seen his work inspire a hit film, Awakenings, a play, and even an opera. He has become one of the most celebrated and respected science writers in the United States.

Sent to Country School During War

Sacks was born in London, England, on July 9, 1933. His parents were both doctors, and they guided him from the start toward the medical profession. They were very different in personality; Sacks's father was fascinated by literature and human behavior, while his mother, who once (when he was a teenager) made him dissect the leg of a corpse of a young woman his own age, was mechanistically and mechanically inclined. "Her love of structure extended in all directions," Sacks wrote in his memoir Uncle Tungsten. She enjoyed tinkering with the family's grandfather clock, and "there was nothing she liked more," Sacks wrote, "than mending a leaky faucet or a toilet, and the services of outside plumbers were usually not required." Sacks's childhood was disrupted by Germany's air attacks against Britain during World War II. To get him and his brother Michael out of London during the worst of the bombing, their parents enrolled them in a boarding school, Braefield, in the English Midlands.

The headmaster there, Sacks wrote in Uncle Tungsten, "seemed to have become unhinged by his own power." Sacks and his brother were physically and psychologically abused. The food packages their parents sent were stolen, and they were fed vegetables normally meant for cattle. The experience sensitized Sacks to the plight of individuals trapped in situations caused by unfortunate circumstances, but it also did more. Over four years at the school, with only occasional (and bomb-riddled) visits to London, Sacks's brother Michael began to display psychotic symptoms. Yet what affected his brother was not exactly mental illness. "This is something I don't go into [in the new book]," Sacks told Publishers Weekly when Uncle Tungsten was published, "but when my brother Michael had his breakdown and became psychotic, one of the things he said was, don't call this a disease. It is my struggle, my world, my attempt to find meaning."

After the war, Sacks made his own attempt to find meaning, immersing himself in all kinds of scientific subjects. Chemistry was a special favorite, and the Uncle Tungsten described in his book stimulated his interest. He found company among several like-minded friends. "Life is not all electrostatics," one friend, Jonathan Miller, teased him while he was in a physics phase (as he recalled to Erica E. Goode of U.S. News & World Report). But Sacks looked up from his book and said, "Yes it is." Sacks and two of his friends went to visit science writer Julian Huxley in London. "I think the great man was both amused and impressed by such undersized, ink-stained, and sort of grim children," Sacks told Goode.

Finding his way back to the family profession, Sacks graduated from Queen's College, Oxford, in 1954 and went on for a series of medical degrees between 1954 and 1958. In 1960 he moved to the United States after first hitchhiking around Canada and working as a firefighter during the wild-fire season in British Columbia, Canada. He told Sandee Brawarsky of The Lancet that he had a "hunger for a new world. I felt, probably unfairly, that England was small and crowded and conservative, and that I might be able to make more of a life here in the states, which I imagined to be more spacious, in every way. I first went to California [in 1961] and somehow the physical spaciousness seemed to take on a moral and intellectual spaciousness as well."

Joined Biker Gang

Sacks did an internship at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco in 1961 and 1962, moving on to a residency in neurology at the University of California at Los Angeles from 1962 until 1965. The formerly bookish young doctor took to the athletic and outdoorsy aspects of the California lifestyle, winning a weightlifting championship and spending time with the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang. An avid cyclist, he sometimes rode from UCLA to the Grand Canyon on weekends. Even then, before American medicine had begun to take on qualities of an industrial assembly line, Sacks was noted for his one-on-one approach to patient care. He once smuggled a dying multiple sclerosis patient out of the hospital for a ride on the back of his motorcycle.

Sacks's unconventional ways did not always endear him to UCLA's medical faculty. When one teacher said (as he recalled to Psychology Today), "Sacks, I'm worried about you. You don't have any position," Sacks retorted, "Oh, yes I do…. I have a position in the heart of medicine." The remark was prophetic enough, but Sacks made one last stab at becoming a research scientist. In 1965 he accepted a fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in the New York City borough of the Bronx, becoming a researcher in neurochemistry and neuropathology. After several incidents of clumsiness that would have fascinated psychopathologists of everyday life, including one in which he dropped some hamburger into an expensive centrifuge, he accepted his medical destiny and became a staff neurologist Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx. He remained in the same position four decades later, but he also continued his association with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, serving as an instructor there from 1966 until 1975, and rising to assistant professor (1975 - 78), associate professor (1978 - 85), and clinical professor of neurology (from 1985 forward).

At Beth Abraham, Sacks soon encountered the first of the unusual patients who populated his books. But at first he dealt with sufferers of one of the most common neurological conditions: migraine headaches. He became fascinated by the condition, which has been well documented back to ancient times and seems to show up frequently among unusually creative figures. A reflexive writer and journal keeper since childhood - he estimated that he has written tens of millions of words - Sacks wrote a book about the migraine phenomenon in 1967. A superior warned him that he had nowhere near enough stature to publish a medical book, locked up the manuscript, and threatened his employment, but he persisted. Migraine gained positive reviews and went through several editions, remaining in print in the early 2000s.

Sacks was not against the use of drugs to treat neurological conditions, as his next book would show. But he tried to cultivate a holistic approach, evaluating patients individually and determining how their illnesses interacted with their lives in general. "In my early book, Migraine, I talk about all sorts of interventions," he pointed out to Psychology Today. "But I also say that just to throw down a medication and then continue rushing around may, in a sense, defeat the purpose, because the migraine is partly saying, 'Hey, stop, take it easy.'"

"Awakened" Patients

At Beth Abraham, Sacks encountered a group of 80 patients who had been in a lethargic trance for decades, not moving or speaking, and interacting with the outside world only in very limited ways. They suffered from a form of encephalitis commonly known as sleeping sickness. Sacks hypothesized that they might be helped by L-dopa, a new drug given to patients suffering from Parkinson's disease. The dosages of L-dopa that he administered in 1969 had seemingly miraculous results; the patients came to life and began to speak and move normally. But the treatment was far from a complete success; the drug had numerous side effects that caused one patient to dub it "hell-dopa." Some patients suffered hallucinations; others were disoriented by the new, modern world in which they found themselves. Some did go on to lead what Sacks on his website called "long and relatively rewarding lives."

The compulsive diarist Sacks filled notebooks with observations on his treatment, but he found medical journals uninterested in the articles he wrote about his experiences. So he compiled his observations into a book, Awakenings, which was published in 1973 and became a bestseller. Awakenings was made into a play, A Kind of Alaska, by Harold Pinter, and into the film Awakenings (1990), starring Robin Williams as a doctor clearly based on Sacks. The book made Sacks a well-known author, and he found a ready clientele among magazine editors for case studies he wrote about other patients he encountered. Many of these (the New Yorker was a common publication forum for Sacks) served as material for his later books.

In Sacks's next book, however, he was the patient, not the doctor. In 1976 he suffered a serious injury to his left leg in a mountain climbing accident in Scandinavia. Surgeons repaired the physical damage, but Sacks found that he still could not move his leg - it did not seem to be part of his own body. A Leg to Stand On (1984) recounted his recovery in detail. One form of therapy that helped was swimming. "I do a certain amount of my writing underwater,…" Sacks told The Writer. While working on A Leg to Stand On, he said, "I would swim for half an hour, come out dripping, and scribble. I remember sending my editor a water-stained manuscript. He said, 'No one has sent me a handwritten manuscript for 30 years, let alone a water-stained one." Even away from the pool, the most complicated word-processing technology Sacks has used is a typewriter.

Sacks published another of his most famous books in 1985; The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, this was a compilation of collected case studies of patients with perceptual difficulties arising from a variety of causes. The title study, which was the basis for an opera by composer Michael Nyman, concerned a music instructor who could not grasp objects as wholes and confused his wife's face for his hat, which he had hung on a nearby rack. Sacks became interested in the phenomenon of autism, which causes young people severe difficulties in social interaction but is sometimes accompanied by spectacular mental powers of a specialized nature. In both The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and a similar later book, An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), Sacks included sketches of so-called autistic savants.

Continuing to explore unfamiliar issues of human perception and mental functioning as the spirit moved him - he claimed on his website that his writing was "unanticipatable, unplanned, awaiting inspiration, nucleation" - Sacks wrote books about the culture of the deaf (Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf, 1989), and about a Pacific Ocean island where colorblindness was common (The Island of the Colorblind; and Cycad Island, (1997). His Oaxaca Journal (2002) grew from his interest in ferns, describing a naturalists' expedition to that Mexican region. Some scientists considered Sacks a pop neurologist, but he received a high scientific honor when he was made an honorary fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books have been translated into 22 languages, and the New York Times, according to his website, has proclaimed him "the poet laureate of medicine."

Books

Sacks, Oliver, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Knopf, 2001.

Periodicals

Book, November-December 2001.

Economist (US), March 15, 1997.

Lancet, October 11, 1997.

Psychology Today, February 1986; May-June 1995.

Publishers Weekly, October 1, 2001.

U.S. News & World Report, January 21, 1991.

Writer, April 2002.

Online

Oliver Sacks: author. neurologist, "Biography," http://www.oliversacks.com (January 11, 2006).

Oliver Sacks
Oliver Sacks in 2005
Born	9 July 1933 (1933-07-09) (age 76) London, England
Profession	Physician
Specialism	Neurology
Known for	Popular books containing case studies of some of his patients
Years active	1966 – present

Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE, FRCP (born 9 July 1933, London, England), is a British neurologist residing in New York City. He is a professor of neurology, psychiatry and writing at Columbia University, where he also holds the title of Columbia Artist. He previously spent many years on the clinical faculty of Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Sacks is the author of several bestselling books,^[1] including several collections of case studies of people with neurological disorders. His 1973 book Awakenings was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film of the same name in 1990 starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.^[2] Most recently, the author and his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain were the subject of an episode of the PBS series Nova.

Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Professional life 3 Literary work 4 Honors 5 Personal 6 Publications 7 References 8 External links

Early life and education

Sacks was the youngest of four children born to a North London Jewish couple: Samuel Sacks, a physician, and Muriel Elsie Landau, one of the first female surgeons in England.^[3] Sacks had a large extended family, and among his first cousins are Israeli statesman Abba Eban, writer and director Jonathan Lynn, and economist Robert Aumann. Two of Sacks's elder brothers, David and Marcus, were to become general medical practitioners in their own right.

When Sacks was six years old, he and his brother Michael were evacuated from London to escape The Blitz, retreating to a boarding school in the Midlands, where he remained until 1943.^[3] He attended St Paul's School, London, UK. During his youth, he was a keen amateur chemist, as recalled in his memoir Uncle Tungsten.^[4] He also learned to share his parents' enthusiasm for medicine and entered The Queen's College, Oxford University in 1951,^[3] from which he received a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in physiology and biology in 1954.^[5] At the same institution, in 1958 he went on to incept as a Master of Arts (MA) and earn an BM BCh, thereby qualifying to practice medicine.

Professional life

Neuropsychology

Topics Brain-computer interface Traumatic brain injury Brain regions Clinical neuropsychology Cognitive neuroscience Dissociation Human brain Misconceptions Neuroanatomy Neurophysiology Optogenetics Phrenology

Brain functions Arousal Attention Consciousness Decision making Executive functions Natural language Learning Memory Motor coordination Sensory perception Planning Problem solving Thought

People Arthur L. Benton David Bohm António Damásio Phineas Gage Norman Geschwind Elkhonon Goldberg Patricia Goldman Rakic Pasko Rakic Donald O. Hebb Kenneth Heilman Edith Kaplan Muriel Lezak Benjamin Libet Rodolfo Llinás Alexander Luria Brenda Milner Karl H. Pribram Oliver Sacks Mark Rosenzweig Roger W. Sperry H. M. K. C.

Tests Bender-Gestalt Test Benton Visual Retention Test Clinical Dementia Rating Continuous Performance Task Glasgow Coma Scale Hayling and Brixton tests Johari window Lexical decision task Mini-mental state examination Stroop effect Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Wisconsin card sorting

Mind and Brain Portal

v • d • e

After converting his British qualifications to American recognition (i.e., an MD as opposed to BM BCh), Sacks moved to New York, where he has lived and practiced neurology since 1965.

Sacks began consulting at chronic care facility Beth Abraham Hospital (now Beth Abraham Health Services) in 1966.^[6] At Beth Abraham, Sacks worked with a group of survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica, who had been unable to move on their own for decades.^[6] These patients and his treatment of them were the basis of Sacks' book Awakenings.^[6]

Sacks served as an instructor and later clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine from 1966 to 2007, and also held an appointment at New York University Medical School from 1999 to 2007. In July 2007, Sacks joined the faculty of Columbia University Medical Center as a professor of neurology and psychiatry. At the same time, he was appointed Columbia University's first Columbia University Artist at the university's Morningside campus, recognizing the role of his work in bridging the arts and sciences.

Since 1966, Sacks has served as a neurological consultant to various nursing homes in New York City run by the Little Sisters of the Poor, and from 1966 to 1991, he was a consulting neurologist at Bronx State Hospital.

Sacks' work at Beth Abraham helped provide the foundation on which the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function (IMNF) is built; Sacks is currently an honorary medical advisor.^[7] In 2000, IMNF honored Sacks with its first Music Has Power Award.^[8] The IMNF again bestowed a Music Has Power Award on Sacks in 2006 to commemorate "his 40 years at Beth Abraham and honor his outstanding contributions in support of music therapy and the effect of music on the human brain and mind".^[9]

Sacks remains a consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor, and maintains a practice in New York City. He serves on the boards of the Neurosciences Research Foundation and the New York Botanical Garden.

Literary work

Since 1970, Oliver Sacks has been writing books about his experience with neurological patients. Sacks's writings have been translated into over twenty five languages. In addition to his books, Sacks is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, as well as other medical, scientific, and general publications.^[10][11][12] He was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science in 2001.^[13]

Sacks's work has been featured in a "broader range of media than those of any other contemporary medical author"^[14] and in 1990, The New York Times said he "has become a kind of poet laureate of contemporary medicine".^[15] His descriptions of people coping with and adapting to neurological conditions or injuries often illuminate the ways in which the normal brain deals with perception, memory and individuality.

Sacks considers that his literary style grows out of the tradition of 19th-century "clinical anecdotes," a literary style that included detailed narrative case histories. He also counts among his inspirations the case histories of the Russian neuropsychologist A. R. Luria.^[16]

Sacks describes his cases with a wealth of narrative 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.^[17] His most famous book, Awakenings, upon which the 1990 feature film of the same name is based, describes his experiences using the new drug L-Dopa on Beth Abraham post-encephalitic patients.^[6] Awakenings was also the subject of the first documentary made (in 1974) for 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. The title article of An Anthropologist on Mars, which won a Polk Award for magazine reporting, is about Temple Grandin, a professor with high-functioning autism. Seeing Voices, Sacks' 1989 book, covers a variety of topics in deaf studies.

In his book The Island of the Colorblind Sacks describes the Chamorro people of Guam, who have a high incidence of a neurodegenerative disease known as Lytico-bodig (a devastating combination of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ALS, dementia, and parkinsonism). Along with Paul Cox, Sacks has published papers suggesting a possible environmental cause for the cluster, namely the toxin beta-methylamino L-alanine (BMAA) from the cycad nut accumulating by biomagnification in the flying fox bat.^[18][19]

Sacks's work is used by universities around the world, in courses as diverse as medical ethics, anthropology, writing, chemistry, music, and philosophy. However, he has sometimes faced criticism in the medical and disability studies communities. During the 1970s and 1980s, his book and articles on the "Awakenings" patients were criticized or ignored by much of the medical establishment, on the grounds that his work was not based on the quantitative, double-blind study model. His account of abilities of autistic savants has been questioned by the researcher Makoto Yamaguchi in Ref^[20], and Arthur K. Shapiro—described as "the father of modern tic disorder research"^[21]—referring to Sacks celebrity status and that his literary publications received greater publicity than Shapiro's medical publications, said he is "a much better writer than he is a clinician".^[22] Howard Kushner's A Cursing Brain? : The Histories of Tourette Syndrome, says Shapiro "contrasted his own careful clinical work with Sacks's idiosyncratic and anecdotal approach to a clinical investigation".^[23] More sustained has been the critique of his political and ethical positions. Although many characterize Sacks as a "compassionate" writer and doctor,^[24][25][26] others feel he exploits his subjects.^[27] Sacks was called "the man who mistook his patients for a literary career" by British academic and disability-rights activist Tom Shakespeare,^[28] and one critic called his work "a high-brow freak show".^[29] Such criticism was echoed in a review of the movie The Royal Tenenbaums, with the reviewer describing Bill Murray's comic portrayal of "an Oliver Sacks-like neurologist who snickers openly at his weirdo subjects".^[30] Sacks himself has stated "I would hope that a reading of what I write shows respect and appreciation, not any wish to expose or exhibit for the thrill," he sighs, "but it's a delicate business."^[31]

Honors

Since 1996, Sacks has been a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters (Literature).^[32] In 1999, Sacks became a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences.^[33] Also in 1999, he became an Honorary Fellow at The Queen's College, Oxford.^[34] In 2002, he became Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Class IV—Humanities and Arts, Section 4—Literature).^[35] and he was awarded the 2001 Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University.^[36]

Sacks has been awarded honorary doctorates from the College of Staten Island (1991),^[5] Tufts University (1991),^[37] New York Medical College (1991),^[5] Georgetown University (1992),^[38] Medical College of Pennsylvania (1992),^[5] Bard College (1992),^[39] Queen's University (Ontario) (2001),^[40] Gallaudet University (2005),^[41] University of Oxford (2005),^[42] Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (2006)^[43], and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (2008).

Oxford University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in June 2005.^[44]

He was made an honorary member of the honors society of Saint John's University on 5 October 2008.^{[citation needed]}

Sacks was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 Queen's Birthday Honours.^[45]

Asteroid 84928 Oliversacks, discovered in 2003 and 2 miles (3.2 km) in diameter, was named in his honor.^[46]

Personal

Sacks has been a longtime resident of City Island, Bronx.^[47]

Publications

• Migraine (1970)
• Awakenings (1973)
• A Leg to Stand On (1984), about Sacks' own experience of losing the control of one of his legs after an accident
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985)
• Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf (1989). Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-06083-0.
• An Anthropologist on Mars (1995)
• The Island of the Colorblind (1997) (total congenital color blindness in an island society)
• Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001)
• Oaxaca Journal (2002)
• Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007)
• "The Mind's Eye (Oliver Sacks)" (positive experiences of blind people)—published in The Best American Essays 2004, Ed. Robert Atwan

References

1. ^ "Borzoi Reader | Authors | Oliver Sacks". About the Author. Random House. http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/sacks/index.html. Retrieved 2009-03-05. 
2. ^ "Awakenings (1990)". IMDb: The Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099077/. Retrieved 2009-03-05. 
3. ^ ^{a b c} Brown, Andrew (5 March 2005). "Oliver Sacks Profile: Seeing double". The Guardian. http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1429477,00.html. Retrieved 2008-08-10. 
4. ^ Sacks, Oliver (2001). Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. Vintage Books. ISBN 0-375-40448-1. 
5. ^ ^{a b c d} "Oliver Sacks, MD, FRCP". Official site. http://www.oliversacks.com/cv.htm. Retrieved 2008-08-09. 
6. ^ ^{a b c d} "Biography . Oliver Sacks, MD, FRCP". Official website. http://www.oliversacks.com/about.htm. Retrieved 2008-08-09. 
7. ^ "About the Institute". Institute for Music and Neurologic Function. http://www.bethabe.org/About_the_Institute100.html. Retrieved 2008-08-09. 
8. ^ "Henry Z. Steinway honored with 'Music Has Power' award: Beth Abraham Hospital honors piano maker for a lifetime of 'affirming the value of music'". Music Trades Magazine. 1 January 2006. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Henry+Z.+Steinway+honored+with+%22Music+Has+Power%22+award:+Beth+Abraham...-a0140912433. Retrieved 2008-08-09. 
9. ^ Beth Abraham Family of Health Services (13 October 2006). "2006 Music Has Power Awards featuring performance by Rob Thomas, honoring acclaimed neurologist & author Dr. Oliver Sacks". Press release. http://www.pr.com/press-release/20023. Retrieved 2008-08-10. 
10. ^ "Archive: Search: The New Yorker—Oliver Sacks". http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?query=authorName:%22Oliver%20Sacks%22. Retrieved 2008-08-13. 
11. ^ "Oliver Sacks—The New York Review of Books". http://www.nybooks.com/authors/1246. Retrieved 2008-08-13. 
12. ^ "Oliver Sacks . Publications & Periodicals". www.oliversacks.com. http://www.oliversacks.com/peri1.htm. Retrieved 2008-08-13. 
13. ^ "Lewis Thomas Prize". The Rockefeller University. 18 March 2002. http://featuredevents.rockefeller.edu/event_detail.php?id=11&y=2002. Retrieved 2008-08-09. 
14. ^ Silberman, Steve. "The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks". Wired.com. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.04/sacks_pr.html. Retrieved 2008-08-10. 
15. ^ Broyard, Anatole (1 April 1990). "Good books abut (sic) being sick". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE4D8103FF932A35757C0A966958260. Retrieved 2008-08-10. 
16. ^ "The Inner Life of the Broken Brain: Narrative and Neurology". Radio National. All in the Mind. 2 April 2005. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/mind/stories/s1334384.htm. Retrieved 2008-08-10. 
17. ^ Sacks, Oliver (1996) [1995]. "Preface". An Anthropologist on Mars (New Ed 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."" 
18. ^ Murch SJ, Cox PA, Banack SA, Steele JC, Sacks OW (October 2004). "Occurrence of beta-methylamino-l-alanine (BMAA) in ALS/PDC patients from Guam". Acta Neurol. Scand. 110 (4): 267–9. doi:10.1111/j.1600-0404.2004.00320.x. PMID 15355492. 
19. ^ Cox PA, Sacks OW (March 2002). "Cycad neurotoxins, consumption of flying foxes, and ALS-PDC disease in Guam". Neurology 58 (6): 956–9. PMID 11914415. http://www.neurology.org/cgi/pmidlookup?view=long&pmid=11914415. 
20. ^ a criticism of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Yamaguchi M (August 2007). "Questionable aspects of Oliver Sacks' (1985) report". J Autism Dev Disord 37 (7): 1396; discussion 1389–9, 1401. doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0257-0. PMID 17066308. 
21. ^ Gadow KD, Sverd J (2006). "Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, chronic tic disorder, and methylphenidate". Adv Neurol 99: 197–207. PMID 16536367. 
22. ^ Kushner, HI. A Cursing Brain? : The Histories of Tourette Syndrome. Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 205. ISBN 0-674-00386-1
23. ^ Kushner (2000), p. 204
24. ^ Weinraub, Judith (13 January 1991). "Oliver Sacks: Hero of the Hopeless; The Doctor of 'Awakenings,' With Compassion for the Chronically Ill". The Washington Post. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1044036.html. Retrieved 2008-08-12. 
25. ^ Bianculli, David (25 August 1998). "Healthy Dose of Compassion in Medical 'Mind' Series". New York Daily News. http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/entertainment/1998/08/25/1998-08-25_healthy_dose_of_compassion_i.html. Retrieved 2008-08-12. 
26. ^ Kakutani, Michiko (14 February 1995). "Finding the Advantages In Some Mind Disorders". New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CEEDB1330F937A25751C0A963958260. Retrieved 2008-08-12. 
27. ^ Verlager, Alicia (August 2006). "Decloaking Disability: Images of Disability and Technology in Science Fiction Media" (Masters' thesis). MIT.edu. http://66.102.1.104/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:RiuhVitdqOoJ:cms.mit.edu/research/theses/Kestrell2006.pdf+%22the+man+who+mistook+his+patients+for+a+literary+career%22. Retrieved 2008-08-10. "However, Sacks's use of his preoccupation with people with disabilities as the foundation for his professional career has led many disability advocates to compare him to P. T. Barnum, whose own professional career (and its subsequent monetary profit) was based to a large degree upon his employment of PWD as 'freaks.' ... Note also the science fiction aspect to the title of Sacks's book, which frames the disabled people he writes about as 'aliens' from a different planet. One issue in the dynamic of the expert who appoints himself as the official storyteller of the experience of disability is that both the professional and financial success of the storyteller often rely upon his framing of the disabled characters as extraordinary, freakish, or abnormal. This is what disability studies scholars and disability advocates term the 'medicalization of disability' (Linton 1998, 1-2)." 
28. ^ Shakespeare, Tom (1996). "Book Review: An Anthropologist on Mars". Disability and Society 11 (1): 137–142. doi:10.1080/09687599650023380. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=14027836&site=ehost-live. Retrieved 2008-08-11. 
29. ^ Couser, G. Thomas (December 2001). "The case of Oliver Sacks: The ethics of neuroanthropology" (PDF). The Poynter Center, Indiana University. http://poynter.indiana.edu/publications/m-couser.pdf. Retrieved 2008-08-10. "One charge is that his work is, in effect, a high-brow freak show that invites its audience to gawk at human oddities ... Because Sacks' life writing takes place outside the confines of biomedicine and anthropology, it may not, strictly speaking, be subject to their explicit ethical codes." 
30. ^ Klawans, Stuart (20 December 2001). "Home for the Holidays". The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020107/klawans/2. Retrieved 2008-08-11. 
31. ^ Burkeman, Oliver (10 May 2002). "Sacks appeal". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2002/may/10/medicalscience.scienceandnature?gusrc=rss&feed=books. Retrieved 2008-08-18. 
32. ^ "Current Members". The American Academy of Arts and Letters. http://www.artsandletters.org/academicians2_current.php. Retrieved 2008-08-15. 
33. ^ "New York Academy of Sciences Announces 1999 Fellows". New York Academy of Sciences. 6 October 1999. http://www.nyas.org/about/newsDetails.asp?newsID=120&year=1999. Retrieved 2008-08-15. 
34. ^ "Honorary Fellows". The Queen's College, Oxford. http://www.queens.ox.ac.uk/academics/honorary-fellows/. Retrieved 2008-08-15. 
35. ^ "Class of 2002 - Fellows". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 2002. http://www.amacad.org/members/new2002list.aspx. Retrieved 2008-08-15. 
36. ^ "Oliver Sacks, Awakenings Author, Receives Rockefeller University's Lewis Thomas Prize". Rockefeller University. 2002. http://runews.rockefeller.edu/index.php?page=engine&id=139. Retrieved 2008-08-15. 
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47. ^ Golden, Tim. "Bronx Doctor Has Best Seller, Hit Movie and No Job", The New York Times, February 16, 1991. Accessed October 15, 2009. "Four white lab coats were known to be somewhere around his red-shingled house on City Island in the Bronx, just not anywhere in particular."

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Oliver Sacks

• Oliver Sacks website
• Official Oliver Sacks at Columbia University website
• New York Times Op-Ed by Oliver Sacks regarding the Island of Stability theory
• New York Times Op-Ed piece about encephalitis lethargica
• 2007 video of Oliver Sacks discussing his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (27 October 2007)
• Article in TATE ETC. Summer 2007 including exclusive stereograph of his first photograph, taken at age 12
• Sacks article archive from The New York Review of Books
• The New York Review of Books audio interview with Sacks on 'Mania, Memoir, and Music
• A 1989 Interview magazine profile of Sacks

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