Oliver W. Sacks, MD, Neurologist - Author, Awakenings

As a physician and a writer, Oliver Sacks is concerned above all with the link between body and mind, and the ways in which the whole person adapts to different neurological conditions.

Oliver Sacks was born July 9, 1933 in London (both of his parents were physicians), and he obtained his medical degree in 1958 from Oxford University. In the early 1960s, he moved to the United States, where he did an internship at Mount Zion Hospital (UCSF) in San Francisco and then a residency in neurology at UCLA. Since 1965 he has lived in New York, where he is clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor and Beth Abraham Hospital.

In 1966 Dr Sacks went to work in a chronic hospital in the Bronx (Beth Abraham Hospital) where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, unable to initiate movement, like human statues -- they were survivors of the great epidemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916-1927. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings (1973), which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter, “A Kind of Alaska,” and the 1990 Hollywood movie, “Awakenings,” starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

Dr Sacks is perhaps best known for his best selling 1985 collection of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and in 1989 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on the neuroanthropology of Tourette's syndrome, a condition marked by involuntary tics and utterances.

His seven books, which also include Migraine, A Leg To Stand On, Seeing Voices, An Anthropologist On Mars, and The Island Of The Colorblind, are international bestsellers. In the fall of 2001, Dr.. Sacks released his memoir, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, in which he looks back on his childhood in wartime London, revealing his boyhood love of chemistry as the source of his life long scientific curiosity.

Dr Sacks has disclosed the following relationships:

• Speakers' Bureau: Royce Carlton, Inc

Dr Sacks has indicated that he will not include reference to any off-label/unapproved uses of drugs or devices in his presentation.