Before Awakenings, Oliver Sacks squatted 600 pounds and rode 100,000 motorcycle miles
The neurologist the New York Times called medicine's poet laureate spent his early American years lifting weights at Muscle Beach, where he briefly held a California squat record, and touring on a motorcycle. He also burned his first book in a fit of self-doubt. The patients came later.
Sacks was born in London in 1933, youngest of four children of two doctors; his mother was among England's first women surgeons. Evacuated during the Blitz at six, he and his brother spent years at a Midlands boarding school on meagre food under a harsh headmaster, a period he later recalled in Uncle Tungsten. Home again at ten, he threw himself into amateur chemistry under an uncle's guidance. At Oxford a stalled research project on a toxic patent medicine left him depressed, and a summer of hard labour on an Israeli kibbutz, where he shed 60 pounds, helped restore him.
After qualifying in 1958, he flew to Montreal on his 27th birthday in 1960 hoping to become a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force, which steered him to research until a run of lost data and broken slides raised doubts. He moved to the United States in 1961, interning in San Francisco, where he befriended the poet Thom Gunn, and training in neurology at UCLA. He lived in America for the rest of his life but never took citizenship, saying he liked thinking of himself as a resident alien.
In New York he worked at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx with survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness epidemic, frozen for decades. Treating them became Awakenings in 1973, filmed in 1990 with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro and nominated for an Academy Award. Later collections of case histories, one of which, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, was turned into an opera, reached readers in over 25 languages. His work at Beth Abraham also helped found an institute for music and neurological function.
He taught at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine from 1966 to 2007, then at Columbia and New York University. Journals and letters found after his death in 2015 suggest some of his accounts were embellished or exaggerated, a caveat that now sits beside the acclaim.
Source: Oliver Sacks
