Oliver Sacks

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Oliver Sacks (2009)

Oliver Wolf Sacks CBE (born July 9, 1933 in London , † August 30, 2015 in New York City ) was a British neurologist and writer . He became known in particular for his popular science books, in which he described complex clinical pictures using case studies in an informal, anecdotal style. The film adaptation of his first major work of coherent case histories, The Time of Awakening (published in 1973, filmed in 1990 with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro ), which received several Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, made his works known internationally to a wider audience.

His goal has always been not to lose sight of the people concerned in addition to modern science, to recognize the individual fate behind every disease and to question one's own normality. Similar to the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander R. Lurija , he drew on the medical-literary tradition of the 19th century, which placed the sick person at the center of scientific considerations. Lurija called this a "romantic" science.

Life

Oliver Sacks was born in Cricklewood , North West London, the youngest of four children . The parents came from Jewish Orthodox families; his father Samuel was a general practitioner, his mother Muriel Elsie Landau one of the first surgeons in England. His three brothers also became physicians. Sacks' cousins ​​are the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban , the British film director, screenwriter and actor Jonathan Lynn and the mathematician and Nobel Prize winner Robert Aumann .

After attending St Paul's School (London) Sacks acquired in 1954 at Queen's College (Oxford) the bachelor's degree in physiology and biology . After further training at the Middlesex Hospital in London and as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Human Nutrition at Oxford University , the Masters (MA) and BM BCh ( Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery ) were added there in 1958 . Sacks then worked as an intern at Middlesex College and Birmingham. In 1960 he accepted a position as research assistant in the Parkinson's Department at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco , where he became an assistant doctor in 1961 ("rotating internship") and continued his specialist training in neurology and neuropathology ("residency") from 1962 to 1965 at the University of California, Los Angeles . He was then at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the New York borough of Bronx, initially a “ Fellow ”, from 1966 “Instructor in Neurology”, from 1975 “Assistant Professor of Neurology”, from 1978 “Associate Professor of Neurology” and finally from 1985 to 2007 "Clinical Professor of Neurology".

During his research on migraines in 1966 at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, he came across some patients who had been frozen for about 40 years: survivors of European sleeping sickness (encephalitis lethargica) , a worldwide epidemic from 1916 to 1927. After completion of the migraine studies that he published in 1970, he devoted himself more intensively to the patient group. The individual case studies were the subject of his book Awakenings - Zeit des Erwachens ( OT : Awakenings ). In the course of the experiments with L-Dopa , a precursor of the neurotransmitter dopamine , the patients reacted unusually: They “woke up” briefly, sometimes even showing an over-motivated zest for life, until they finally fell back into their rigidity. For Awakenings , Sacks received the Hawthornden Prize in 1974 .

Some of the case studies in this book themed first Harold Pinter play A Kind of Alaska before 1990 under the title Awakenings (Awakenings) with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro were successfully filmed in the lead roles. The adaptation made Oliver Sacks known worldwide, and many of his books that have since been published have met with great demand. International attention continued after his death in 2015, his last book The Stream of Consciousness (OT: River of Consciousness ) appeared in 2017, Sacks sketched the idea in the last weeks of his life.

In addition to other stories about other neurological cases involving Parkinson's disease , Tourette's syndrome , autism , agnosia and deafness , he also described the consequences of one of his own in The Day My Leg Gone (OT: A Leg to Stand On ) Hiking accident. Apparently he only tore the tendon of one anterior thigh muscle (quadriceps) , and for a long time he lived like this (mainly) from the patient's perspective.

In his bestseller The man who mistook his wife for a hat (OT: The Man Who mistook His Wife for a Hat ) tells Oliver Sacks twenty stories of people who have fallen out of the "normal" because physical changes or injuries Have caused mental disorders in the brain . Sacks writes: "A tiny brain injury, a little tumult in cerebral chemistry - and we get into another world". The book is written in a generally understandable manner and hardly deals with the medical- neuropsychological side, but rather illustrates the world in which these people live. It explains how perception depends solely on the brain and how our sense of reality arises there. Sacks describes "serious and exciting at the same time" ( Süddeutsche Zeitung ) how it can be that a man confuses his wife with a hat or that a patient's eyesight (visual perception) and speech are intact, but he does not see what is shown can call more by name ( link it with its semantic memory ) and thus identify a rose, for example, as a “red, folded structure with a straight green appendage”. The cover story became the subject of the opera of the same name by Michael Nyman in 1987 .

In another bestseller, the 2007 non-fiction book Der einarmige Pianist . About music and the brain (OT Musicophilia : Tales of Music and the Brain ) he first briefly explains the basic functioning of our hearing and possible effects of damage to the auditory system in a way that is understandable for laypeople. In addition, again using a large number of (patient- ) Examples depicting numerous phenomena at the intersection of music and neuroscience. These include, for example, the effect of music therapy on aphasia , amnesia , dementia , Tourette and Parkinson's patients; the connection between blindness and absolute hearing or special musical talent as well as the basic mode of action of music in the brain, especially in the temporal lobe , which is also evident in neurological patients, e.g. B. in temporal lobe epilepsy ( epileptic seizures triggered by scarring, lesions or tumors ) and associated (sometimes musical) déjà vu experiences, or in so-called musicolepsy or musicogenic epilepsy - this is referred to as music-induced (triggered) epileptic Seizures.

Sacks' works have so far been translated into 21 languages. Since 1996 he has been an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters . In 2002 he was awarded the Wingate Literary Prize and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

At the beginning of the fall semester 2007, Sacks accepted a position at Columbia University . There he taught not only as a doctor, but also in several other specialist areas, including music theory .

Bill Hayes, Sacks' partner in the last six years of his life

Sacks was never married and lived alone for most of his life. In his second autobiography, On the Move , which he completed a few days before his cancer diagnosis in December 2014 and which was published immediately before his death in August 2015, Sacks first commented on his homosexuality . After more than 35 years of celibacy, he met Bill Hayes , a science journalist and photographer who primarily worked for the New York Times . The friendship between the two writers led to a love affair and life partnership that lasted until his death.

As Oliver Sacks describes in On the Move , his great passion was motorcycling . As a young man, especially with his "beloved" BMW R 60/2 , he completed many tours across the USA , often over long distances - sometimes even at night: "I drove all night and lay on the tank - although the machine had only thirty horsepower, but when I flattened myself I could do a little more than 160 kilometers per hour; huddled like that I could go straight for hours. Illuminated by my headlights - or the full moon , if it was there - mine was the silvery shimmering road Front wheel sucked up. Sometimes I had strange distortions and delusions of perception during these hours. So occasionally I got the feeling of drawing a line on the surface of the earth, and then again I hung motionless in space while the whole planet rotated noiselessly far below me. "

In February 2015, he wrote an essay for The New York Times about his cancer and how to deal with his impending death. Nine years earlier, he had been due to a malignant melanoma treated at the eye, which he lost the vision in that eye (whereupon it The Mind's Eye , dt. The inner eye , authored). In view of the liver metastases now diagnosed in him , his death is foreseeable. He wants to finish more literary works. Sacks gave the "okay" for the publication of the text on the operating table, the article was published on the day after the life-extending operation. According to his partner, the "overwhelming and compassionate responses to 'My Life'" moved him deeply and led to a number of other and very personal articles for the New York Times in the months that followed. The fourth was completed at last strength in August 2015 and published two weeks before his death. Sacks died in his Manhattan apartment on August 30, 2015, aged 82 . Shortly afterwards, the small band appeared gratitude ( Gratitude ). This contains four of the last essays published in the New York Times, in which he dealt more than in his earlier works with the fundamental questions of life about death, faith, religion and science. His partner Bill Hayes wrote the foreword together with Kate Edgar and contributed photographs from the couple's private collection.

Works

Books

items

  • Sabbath. In: The New York Times . Sunday Review, August 14, 2015 (full text) . Released in Gratitude. Picador, 2015, ISBN 978-1-5098-2280-5 .
    • German: Sabbath. In: gratitude. Translated by Hainer Kober. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-498-06440-2 .
  • My Periodic Table. In: The New York Times. Sunday Review, July 24, 2015 (full text) . Released in Gratitude. Picador, 2015, ISBN 978-1-5098-2280-5 .
    • German: My periodic system. In: gratitude. Translated by Hainer Kober. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-498-06440-2 .
  • Mishearings. In: The New York Times. Sunday Review, June 7, 2015 (full text) .
  • My own life. Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer. In: The New York Times. Sunday Review, February 19, 2015 (Preview) . Released in Gratitude. Picador, 2015, ISBN 978-1-5098-2280-5 .
    • German: My life. In: gratitude. Translated by Hainer Kober. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-498-06440-2 .
  • The Joy of Old Age. (No kidding.). In: The New York Times. Sunday Review, July 7, 2013 (full text) . Released in Gratitude under the title Mercury. Picador, 2015, ISBN 978-1-5098-2280-5 .
    • German: Mercury. In: gratitude. Translated by Hainer Kober. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-498-06440-2 .
  • This year, change your mind. In: The New York Times. Sunday Review, September 21, 2010 (full text) .

Film adaptations of his books

year Film title (German) Film title (original) Underlying work Screenwriters Directors Producers
1990 Time of awakening Awakenings Awakenings (1973) Steven Zaillian Penny Marshall Walter F. Parkes and Lawrence Lasker
1999 At first glance At first sight To See and Not See ( Essay in: An Anthropologist on Mars , 1995) Steve Levitt Irwin Winkler Rob Cowan and Irwin Winkler
2011 The Music Never Stopped The Last Hippie (Essay in: An Anthropologist on Mars , 1995) Gwyn Lurie and Gary Marks Jim Kohlberg Jim Kohlberg, Julie W. Noll, Peter Newman , Greg Johnson

literature

Web links

Commons : Oliver Sacks  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Oliver Sacks, Neurologist - Obituary. In: The Daily Telegraph . August 30, 2015 (English). Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  2. ↑ To Anthropologist on Mars. Knopf, 1995, p. 70; Andrew Gordon: Oliver Sacks Profile: Seeing Double. In: The Guardian . March 5, 2005 (English).
  3. ↑ a b c d Oliver Sacks: Oliver Sacks: Sabbath. In: The New York Times . August 14, 2015, accessed August 30, 2015 .
  4. ↑ Oliver Sacks: Abba Eban, My Extraordinary Cousin. In: Web of Stories. October 2, 2012.
  5. ↑ OLIVER SACKS, MD, FRCP, CBE , on www.oliversacks.com
  6. ↑ a b Markus C. Schulte von Drach: Oliver Sacks turns 75. Brain research with compassion. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . May 17, 2010.
  7. ↑ Where the music plays in the brain. In: Wissenschaft.de (online presence of the popular scientific monthly magazine Bild der Wissenschaft ). Released July 15, 2008. Accessed April 28, 2019.
  8. ↑ Members: Oliver Sacks. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 24, 2019 .
  9. ↑ Motoko Rich: Oliver Sacks Joins Columbia Faculty as 'Artist'. In: The New York Times . September 1, 2007. Retrieved September 2, 2007.
  10. ↑ Chimpanzees don't dance . In: Der Spiegel . No. 11 , 2008, p. 146-148 ( online - March 10, 2008 , interview).
  11. ↑ Oliver Sacks: On The Move. My life . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek 2015, ISBN 978-3-498-06433-4 , p. 125 f .
  12. ↑ Oliver Sacks: My Own Life. Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer. In: The New York Times. February 19, 2015. Retrieved February 19, 2015.
  13. ↑ Preface to gratitude. 3. Edition. 2016.
  14. ^ Gregory Cowles: Oliver Sacks Dies at 82; Neurologist and Author Explored the Brain's Quirks. In: The New York Times . August 30, 2015 (English). Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  15. ↑ Julie Wise: Pingelap: Island of the Colorblind. In: Biology 103. Collection of scientific papers, published in autumn 2001 in the university cooperation project Serendip (serendipstudio.org). Retrieved April 28, 2019.
  16. ↑ Oliver Pfohlmann: Oliver Sacks' next trick. The neurologist also has hallucinations. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . June 26, 2013. Retrieved August 21, 2014.
  17. ^ Johanna Adorjan: A particularly rapid life. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 24, 2015, accessed on July 30, 2020 .
  18. ↑ About fathers and sons - or: About the power of music. The Music Never Stopped. Film review on Filmrezension.de
personal data
SURNAME Sacks, Oliver
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sacks, Oliver Wolf (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British neurologist and author of popular science books
DATE OF BIRTH July 9, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH August 30, 2015
Place of death New York City