Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) was a London-born neurologist and writer who spent most of his professional life in New York. Educated in medicine at Oxford, he worked with patients for more than five decades and taught neurology at institutions including NYU School of Medicine. He also contributed regularly to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

Sacks wrote narrative nonfiction rooted in clinical observation. His case histories examine memory, perception, language, music and identity, but diagnosis is rarely the endpoint. He follows how people build lives around unusual neurological experiences, combining medical detail with biography and philosophical inquiry.

His books include Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars, Seeing Voices and Musicophilia. Awakenings, about patients who survived the encephalitis lethargica epidemic and were later treated with L-dopa, inspired the 1990 film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. In 2001, Sacks received Rockefeller University’s Lewis Thomas Prize, which honors literary achievement in science.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is the best starting point. Its compact case histories introduce Sacks’s characteristic method through people living with disrupted recognition, memory and bodily awareness. The title case, concerning a musician who can see details but cannot reliably identify what he sees, quickly establishes the book’s central concern: how a person preserves a sense of self when perception no longer behaves as expected.