Dr. Oliver Sacks, one if whose books was turned into an Academy Award-winning movie, died on Sunday in New York City at the age of 82.
He never married. Among his cousins are Nobel Prize Winner Robert Aumann of Israel and the late Abba Eban, former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations.
Sacks – a professor, writer and neurologist – authored more than a dozen books, including “Awakenings.” His book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” helped demystify Tourette’s, Alzheimer’s.
He was professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University between 2007 and 2012 and was on the clinical faculty of Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Dr. Sacks was born in London, from where he was evacuated during the Blitz. His best-selling books included case studies of people with neurological disorders.
After the war, he learned physiology and biology and later earned his medical degree at The Queen’s College, Oxford.
He later moved to Canada and then to the United States, where he learned neurology] and experimented with various recreational drugs, which he described in an article in The New Yorker three years ago and in his book “Hallucinations.”
Dr. Sacks was diagnosed with cancer this past January and wrote in The New York Times in February that he had “months” left in his life and wrote that he hoped the time he had left would be spent “in in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can”.