- Oct 9, 1999
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Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and acclaimed author who explored some of the brains strangest pathways in best-selling case histories like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, using his patients disorders as starting points for eloquent meditations on consciousness and the human condition, died Sunday at his home in New York City. He was 82.
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As a medical doctor and a writer, Dr. Sacks achieved a level of popular renown rare among scientists. More than a million copies of his books are in print in the United States, his work was adapted for film and stage, and he received about 10,000 letters a year. (I invariably reply to people under 10, over 90 or in prison, he once said.)
Dr. Sacks variously described his books and essays as case histories, pathographies, clinical tales or neurological novels. His subjects included Madeleine J., a blind woman who perceived her hands only as useless lumps of dough; Jimmie G., a submarine radio operator whose amnesia stranded him for more than three decades in 1945; and Dr. P. the man who mistook his wife for a hat whose brain lost the ability to decipher what his eyes were seeing.
Describing his patients struggles and sometimes uncanny gifts, Dr. Sacks helped introduce syndromes like Tourettes or Aspergers to a general audience. But he illuminated their characters as much as their conditions; he humanized and demystified them.
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I had always liked to see myself as a naturalist or explorer, Dr. Sacks wrote in A Leg to Stand On (1984), about his own experiences recovering from muscle surgery. I had explored many strange, neuropsychological lands the furthest Arctics and Tropics of neurological disorder.
His intellectual curiosity took him even further. On his website, Dr. Sacks maintained a partial list of topics he had written about. It included aging, amnesia, color, deafness, dreams, ferns, Freud, hallucinations, neural Darwinism, phantom limbs, photography, pre-Columbian history, swimming and twins.
We lost an amazing and unique man today.