File:Dr._Oliver_Sacks,_Physician,_Author.jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons
Oliver Sacks
Sign in to saveAlso known as Oliver Wolf Sacks, Oliver W. Sacks
British neurologist and writer (1933–2015)
Oliver Sacks was a British neurologist and writer who became famous for his ability to describe the experiences of people with neurological conditions in deeply human and compelling ways. His work matters because it changed how we understand the brain and nervous system by showing that behind every neurological disorder is a person with their own unique story and perspective.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
In the Vinony graph
Oliver Sacks appears in Vinony's American Academy of Arts & Sciences collection — one of 9,861 entries.
Vinony's link graph records 594 inbound references to Oliver Sacks, and connects out to University of Oxford, University of California, Los Angeles and music therapy.
It is catalogued under topics including 1933 births, 2015 deaths and 20th-century atheists.
Vinony links it to 46 Wikipedia language editions.
Person · Open Library
- Born
- 9 July 1933
- Died
- 2015-08-30
- Works
- 50
Top works
- The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island
- Musicophilia
- Letters
- Oliver Sacks Omnibus (A 4-in-1 book) (: AWAKENINGS, A LEG TO STAND ON, THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT, SEEING VOICES) (: AWAKENINGS, A LEG TO STAND ON, THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT, SEEING VOICES)
- Selected Letters
via Open Library + Wikidata
Music · MusicBrainz
- Type
- Person
- Gender
- Male
- Origin
- United States
- Active from
- 1933-07-09
- Active to
- 2015-08-30
via MusicBrainz · CC0
Listeners · Last.fm
- Listeners
- 1,577
- Total plays
- 21,425
Tags
Oliver Sacks (born July 9, 1933, London) is a neurologist who has written popular books about his patients. He considers it following the tradition of 19th-century "clinical anecdotes", a literary-style that included informal case histories. <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Oliver+Sacks">Read more on Last.fm</a>
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- The SILVA ribosomal RNA gene database project: improved data processing and web-based tools
· 2012 · cited 28,463x
- An improved technique for determining hardness and elastic modulus using load and displacement sensing indentation experiments
· 1992 · cited 24,472x
- Strategic Responses to Institutional Processes
· 1991 · cited 22,375x
- A global reference for human genetic variation
· 2015 · cited 17,405x
- Global burden of 369 diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019
· 2020 · cited 15,380x
via Crossref · CC0
Quotes
- “My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity—of the wonder of innumerable forms of life—has always thrilled me beyond anything else.”
- “Lemurs are close to the ancestral stock from which all primates arose, and I am happy to think that one of my own ancestors, 50 million years ago, was a little tree-dwelling creature not so dissimilar to the lemurs of today. I love their leaping vitality, their inquisitive nature.”
- “Temple is an intensely moral creature. She has a passionate sense of right and wrong, for example, in regard to the treatment of animals; and law, for her, is clearly not just the law of the land but, in some far deeper sense, a divine or cosmic law, whose violation can have disastrous effects—seeming breakdowns in the course of nature itself.”
- “Hydrogen selenide, I decided, was perhaps the worst smell in the world. But hydrogen telluride came close, was also a smell from hell. An up-to-date hell, I decided, would have not just rivers of fiery brimstone, but lakes of boiling selenium and tellurium, too.”
- “When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, “smoked salmon and Bach.” (Now, sixty years later, my answer would be the same.)”
- “And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. […] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals—my old and valued friends—Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.”
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
Wikidata facts
- Official website
- www.oliversacks.com
- Image
- 9.13.09OliverSacksByLuigiNovi.jpg
Show 7 more facts
- name in native language
- Oliver Wolf Sacks
- Commons category
- Oliver Sacks
- date of birth
- 1933-07-09
- date of death
- 2015-08-30
- social media followers
- 10600
- short name
- Oliver Sacks
- P12749
- Abu Bakr al-Qirbi
Sources (9)
via Wikidata · CC0
~29 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Oliver Wolf Sacks (9 July 1933 – 30 August 2015) was a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and writer.
Born in London, Sacks received his medical degree in 1958 from The Queen's College, Oxford, before moving to the United States, where he spent most of his career. He interned at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and completed his residency in neurology and neuropathology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Later, he served as neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital's chronic-care facility in the Bronx, where he worked with a group of survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica epidemic, who had been unable to move on their own for decades. His treatment of those patients became the basis of his 1973 book Awakenings, which was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated feature film, in 1990, starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. His other best-selling books were mostly collections of case studies of people, including himself, with neurological disorders. He also published hundreds of articles (both peer-reviewed scientific articles and articles for a general audience), about neurological disorders, history of science, natural history, and nature. Journals and letters written by Sacks, but discovered after his death, indicate that some of his work was embellished or exaggerated.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Oliver Sacks” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.