Neurologist, author Oliver Sacks dies

Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and popular author of Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other books, died Sunday of cancer.

Sacks, 82, wrote in a Times essay in February that he was in the late stages of a melanoma that had spread to his liver. He died at his home in New York City, longtime personal assistant Kate Edgar told the The New York Times.

Sachs was a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine. However, it was as an author writing about science, medicine and the mind that he was known to millions.

Many of Sacks' books used case histories of his patients as the basis for essays about the brain, the mind and the human condition. His 1973 book Awakenings, about a group of encephalitis patients who briefly regained their mental faculties only to lose them again, inspired the 1990 Oscar-nominated film of the same name starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro.

In bestsellers The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) and An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), Sacks wrote movingly and insightfully about his patients struggling to live with conditions such as autism, Tourette's syndrome and Parkinson's. Other books explored deafness, colorblindness, migraines, hallucinations and other phenomena.

In 2006, Sacks was diagnosed with a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Radiation and treatment removed the tumor but left him blind in that eye. He wrote about the experience, and the experience of others with rare eye conditions, in his 2010 book The Mind's Eye.

Although painfully shy, as a writer Sacks was fearless, penning the op-ed, titled "My Own Life: Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer," in the Times. In his essay, Sacks wrote that while he felt some despair about death, what he was most filled with was gratitude at having loved and been loved and at having been given much and have given something in return.

"Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure," he wrote.

He also spoke of continuing to feel alive despite the diagnosis.

"I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life," he wrote. "On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight."

In his autobiography On the Move: A Life, published in 2015, Sacks described his boundless curiosity about science and especially about how human beings perceive the world around them, the interest that led him to specialize in neurology.

The London-born Sacks received his medical degree at Oxford University and did residencies and fellowship work at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA. In 2002, he was awarded Rockefeller University's Lewis Thomas Prize, which recognizes the scientist as poet.

Sacks had lived in New York since 1965. He is survived by his partner of seven years, Billy Hayes.