Sloan Foundation, regularly appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, as well as various medical journals. Sacks’s work, which was supported by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Alfred P. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter (“A Kind of Alaska”) and the Oscar-nominated feature film (“ Awakenings”) with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. He recognized 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. 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 was also a visiting professor at the University of Warwick. Sacks was a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine, where he practiced as part of the NYU Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. In 1965, he moved to New York, where he was a practicing neurologist and author until his death in 2015.įrom 2007 to 2012, he served as a Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and he was also designated the university’s first Columbia University Artist. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA.

He earned his medical degree at Oxford University (Queen’s College), and did residencies and fellowship work at Mt. Oliver Sacks, neurologist and best-selling author was born in 1933 in London, England into a family of physicians and scientists (his mother was a surgeon and his father a general practitioner).

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