Oliver Sacks

Died: August 30, 2015

Oliver Sacks, who has died of cancer aged 82, was an inspirational, colourful and often unorthodox neurologist and writer who became famous for his treatment of highly unusual conditions.

His most famous book was The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, which was published in 1985 and related some of Sacks's cases. The case that inspired the title of the book was about a man who had visual agnosia, a condition in which the patient cannot recognise people and objects for what they really are – in one case, a patient really did come into Sacks's office and started speaking to a hat as if it was his wife. The book was a huge hit and eventually inspired an opera of the same name.

Sacks' other big success as a writer was the book Awakenings, which told the story of how the doctor treated patients who had suffered many years in a catatonic state. It was made into film with Robin Williams playing Sacks and was nominated for three Oscars - including Best Picture, in 1991. More recently, Sacks published a memoir On The Move which related his experiences of terminal illness, but also his adventurous time as a young gay man experimenting with drugs.

Sacks was born in London in 1933 into a family of physicians and scientists - his mother was a surgeon and his father a general practitioner.

He earned his medical degree at Oxford University (Queen's College), and did residencies and fellowship work at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA. He had lived in New York since 1965, practising as a neurologist. As a young man, he was interested in body-building and motorbikes and would often go for long, solitary rides into the American countryside.

From 2007 to 2012, he served as a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Centre, and he was also designated the university's first Columbia University Artist.

Latterly, he had been a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine, where he practised as part of the NYU Comprehensive Epilepsy Centre.

In 1966, Dr Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a chronic care hospital where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement.

He recognised these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life.

They became the subjects of his book, Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter - A Kind of Alaska - and the film version.

Dr Sacks was perhaps best known though for his collections of case histories, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer's disease.

An Anthropologist on Mars also related the story of a 50-year-old man who suddenly regained sight after nearly a lifetime of blindness and how he struggled to cope. After a full and rich life as a blind person, Sacks said, the patient became "a very disabled and miserable partially sighted man. When he went blind again, he was rather glad of it."

Sacks went on to investigate the world of deaf people and sign language in Seeing Voices, and a rare community of colour blind people in The Island of the Colour Blind.

He also wrote about his experiences as a doctor in Migraine and as a patient in A Leg to Stand On. His autobiographical Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood was published in 2001, and his most recent books have included Musicophilia, The Mind's Eye, and Hallucinations.

Dr Sacks's work appeared regularly in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, as well as various medical journals. He has been referred to as the poet laureate of medicine, and in 2002 he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University, which recognises the scientist as poet. When Sacks received the prize, the citation declared, "Sacks presses us to follow him into uncharted regions of human experience — and compels us to realise, once there, that we are confronting only ourselves."

He was an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and held honorary degrees from many universities, including Oxford, the Karolinska Institute, Georgetown, Bard, Gallaudet, Tufts, and the Catholic University of Peru. He was made a CBE in 2008 in the Queen's Birthday Honours.

Although he was hugely popular with his readers, the medical fraternity was not always so friendly, with some considering his anecdotal approach unscientific. One jealous rival wrote that Sacks was "a much better writer than he is a clinician".

He announced in February that he was terminally ill. He said that he had multiple metastases in the liver, and was now "face to face with dying".

"It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can," he said.

In the later stages, he said he had come to terms with what was happening. "I have been able to see my life," he said, " as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts."