SACKS, OLIVER WOLF

1933–, American neurologist and author, b. London. Educated at Queens College, Oxford. In 1960 he emigrated to the United States where he continued his medical training. He began an association with Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City in 1965, later becoming a professor of neurology there. He also works in area psychiatric centers and nursing homes. A creative medical thinker, Sacks is known for an approach to medicine that humanizes the patient and is concerned with the psychological, moral, and spiritual elements of illness and treatment. His books, which include Awakenings (1973), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), and The Island of the Colorblind (1997), describe case histories of people with neurological and perceptual disorders, and exhibit a fascination with the creativity of the human mind as it copes with such disabilities.

See his memoir of his boyhood, Uncle Tungsten (2001).

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright© 2004, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.

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