When his book about these studies was turned into a film, Sacks was suddenly propelled to the forefront of his profession, where he has stayed for more than 30 years as one of the most important voices for (and practitioners of) compassionate neurological care. Tragically, these awakenings were not permanent, and all the patients eventually returned to their previous catatonic states. It was there that his famous experiments with the drug “L-dopa” led to the miraculous awakenings in which many of his patients returned from their comas wondering where all the years had gone - some still stuck in 1927 or 1949. Then began a long, winding journey that brought him to New York to work as a clinical neurologist. Initially, he did so with mixed motivations and to not much success, until he landed an internship at the university’s hospital. In California he acquired an addiction to amphetamines and to riding his motorcycle at dangerous speeds along the coast, sometimes riding from Venice’s Muscle Beach to the Grand Canyon nonstop for 12 hours to see the sunrise.Įventually Sacks found his way to UCLA, where he studied medicine. Oliver Sacks writing in his apartment in 2015, the year he died. In late adolescence, when Sacks admitted under questioning from his father that he “liked boys better than girls,” his mother told him she “wished he had never been born.” He left the UK on his 28th birthday for California and remained celibate for the next 35 years. His mother, a renowned British surgeon, would bring home dead fetuses from time to time and even suggested that 10-year-old Sacks dissect one.ĭuring the London Blitz of World War II, he and his brother were sent to a boarding school for safety, where they found themselves the victims of extreme bullying and frequent beatings. His older brother of two years suffered from schizophrenia and ultimately committed suicide. A troubled youth, he battled addiction and recalled being suicidal as a young adult. Fans of Oliver Sacks - the neurologist whose book “Awakenings,” which became a hit movie in 1990 and starred Robin Williams - already know the important role he has played over the last 30 years in popularizing neurological science and turning the “medical case study” into a literary genre all its own.īut I didn’t realize until I saw the new documentary, “Oliver Sacks: In His Own Life,” that more than a talented writer and dedicated clinician, Sacks was what Henri Nouwen would have called “a wounded healer”: someone who through suffering great personal difficulties transforms himself into a healer of those very same maladies.
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