Oliver Sacks, the eminent neurologist and writer garlanded as the

poet laureate of medicine, has died at his home in New York City. He
was 82.
The cause of death was cancer, Kate Edgar, his longtime personal
assistant, told the New York Times, which had published an essay by
Sacks in February revealing that an earlier melanoma in his eye had
spread to his liver and that he was in the late stages of terminal
cancer.
Oliver Sacks obituary
The London-born academic, whose book Awakenings inspired the
Oscar-nominated film of the same name, wrote: A month ago, I felt
that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile
a day. But my luck has run out a few weeks ago I learned that I have
multiple metastases in the liver.
Sacks was the author of several books about unusual medical
conditions, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and The
Island of the Colourblind. Awakenings was based on his work with
patients treated with a drug that woke them up after years in a
catatonic state.
Sacks came across the patients in 1966 while working as a consulting
neurologist for Beth Abraham hospital, a chronic care hospital, in the
Bronx. Many patients had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like
human statues. He recognised them as survivors of the encephalitis
epidemic that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated
them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to
recover.
These patients became the subjects of Awakenings, which later
inspired a play by Harold Pinter A Kind of Alaska. The 1990 film
version, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, was nominated
for three Oscars including best picture.
Oliver Sacks, who died from terminal cancer on Sunday, describes the
pleasure writing gives him. In the video posted on his YouTube
channel, he says it takes him to another place where he lets go of
worries
A figure of the arts as much as the sciences, Sacks counted among
his friends WH Auden, Thom Gunn and Jonathan Miller. As tributes
were paid from across the world, Michiko Kakutani, the New York
Times writer, praised his ability to make connections across the
disciplines.
Clinician of compassion: Oliver Sacks opened a window to the
extraordinary

She wrote: [He] was a polymath and an ardent humanist, and

whether he was writing about his patients, or his love of chemistry or
the power of music, he leapfrogged among disciplines, shedding light
on the strange and wonderful interconnectedness of life the
connections between science and art, physiology and psychology, the
beauty and economy of the natural world and the magic of the human
imagination.