WIKIMEDIA, MARIA POPOVAOliver Sacks, a physician and author of popular books on the magnificence and malfunctioning of the brain, died Sunday (August 30). He was 82.
He is perhaps best known for his books The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, Musicophilia, and others. The stories that populated his writings were often inspired from his experiences treating patients with mental maladies, such as face blindness—a condition Sacks himself lived with—musical hallucinations, and Tourette’s syndrome.
“He was an extraordinary and exemplary doctor,” Jerome Groopman wrote in The New Yorker Sunday. “He questioned absolutist categories of normal and abnormal, healthy and debilitated. He did not ignore or romanticize the suffering of the individual. He sought to locate not just the affliction but a core of creative possibility and a reservoir of potential that was untapped in the patient.”
In February, Sacks announced that an ocular melanoma had metastasized to his ...
