Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and acclaimed author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, has died aged 82 in New York.
He had revealed earlier this year that he was in the late stages of terminal cancer, after a melanoma in his eye spread to his liver.
Sacks won widespread attention in 1973 with his book Awakenings, which was later adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.
The book told of a group of patients suffering from a rare type of encephalitis at a hospital where he worked. When Sacks joined in 1966, many of the patients were catatonic. After administering them with a drug called L-dopa, he watched as they wakened and recorded their responses.
Sacks was the author of several other books about unusual medical conditions, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat — the story of a patient with visual agnosia — and The Island of the Colourblind.
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He described his books and essays as case histories, pathographies, clinical tales or neurological novels. His subjects included a blind woman who perceived her hands as useless “lumps of dough”, a submarine radio operator whose amnesia meant he couldn’t remember anything after 1945 and a man whose brain lost the ability to decipher what his eyes were seeing.
His work helped to introduce syndromes such as Tourette’s and Asperger’s to a general audience. According to his website, Sacks’ other fields of interest included aging, deafness, dreams, Freud, hallucinations, phantom limbs, photography and twins.
Sacks was the youngest of four children born to a north London Jewish couple who were both doctors. Aged six, he was sent away to a boarding school, where he was bullied.
He studied medicine at the University of Oxford and later moved to New York, where he spent the rest of his life writing and practising neurology.
Revealing his illness in his op-ed piece in The New York Times in February, Sacks wrote: “A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day.
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“But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. The radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye.
“But though ocular melanomas metastasize in perhaps 50 per cent of cases, given the particulars of my own case, the likelihood was much smaller. I am among the unlucky ones.”
He added: “I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
“Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”