Oliver Sacks, 82, neurologist and author dies of cancer

Oliver Sacks wrote that memorable piece in February in the New York Times divulging his terminal cancer to the reading public and saying it brought a "sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential." He died Sunday at home in New York City. Sacks has been our time's best writer about the brain and how it works and interprets life, starting with his 1973 book “Awakenings,” about patients with an atypical form of encephalitis that became a movie starring Robin Williams and Robert de Niro. Sacks also wrote not long ago about his time in Southern California discovering psychedelic drugs in Topanga Canyon while a fellow at UCLA.

From today's New York Times obituary:

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 Tourette’s or Asperger’s to a general audience. But he illuminated their characters as much as their conditions; he humanized and demystified them.

In his emphasis on case histories, Dr. Sacks modeled himself after a questing breed of 19th-century physicians, who well understood how little they and their peers knew about the workings of the human animal and who saw medical science as a vast, largely uncharted wilderness to be tamed.

“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 office posted an account of his final days. His final book, "On the Move: A Life," is an autobiography that for the first time discussed that he was gay. His is survived by the writer Bill Hayes, his partner of six years.