Oliver Sachs is known all over the world as a neurologist and neuropsychologist, writer and popularizer of medicine. He became the successor of the genre of the so-called "clinical literature" and wrote many books with the stories of his patients: schizophrenics, autists, epileptics.
Biography
The future neuropsychologist was born in London, in 1933, into a Jewish family. His father was from Lithuania, and his mother was from Belarus. The parents were doctors, and Oliver followed in their footsteps. Among his relatives there are celebrities: ministers, actors, mathematicians.
Sachs also became a celebrity not only in the field of neuropsychology - his books on the patients of the clinic have been translated into 20 languages.
Oliver received a fundamental education - he graduated from Oxford. It is not known what prompted him to become a neurologist, but already in 1965 he began working in New York as a practicing specialist.
A year later, he began working in the Bronx, at the Beth Abraham Hospital, where he met the first characters of his future book. These were patients who had been immobile for many years. The brave young doctor decided to conduct an experiment and treated these patients with the experimental drug L-dopa. Many of the patients got to their feet, so they later became the protagonists of Sachs's book, The Awakened. The book has been translated into Russian.
Sachs' books
In all of his books, Oliver described the stories of his patients - how they got sick, how they were treated and what are the results of medical intervention. However, there was not much pure medicine in his literary work, but there are a lot of interesting descriptions of the experiences of people forced to live with incurable or intractable diseases: parkinsonism, autism syndrome, epilepsy, schizophrenia.
In 2007, Sachs was transferred to Columbia University in the Department of Neurology. Around this time, he was one of a group of scholars who spoke out against torture at Guantanamo Prison, where prisoners were particularly brutalized.
His other books are dedicated to deaf and dumb people who communicate using gestures. And also known for his works "Anthropologist on Mars", "Foot to get up" and "The man who mistook his wife for a hat." His last book is called Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.
Sachs communicated and discussed his ideas with other scientists - in particular, he wrote a lot to the Soviet neuropsychologist A. R. Lurie, and also gave examples of his experiments in his books.
The neuropsychologist also has an autobiographical creation: Uncle Wolfram: Memories of Chemical Adolescence, which was published in 2001.
In 2015, it became known that Sachs was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. As a true scientist, he commented on this in an article, describing his condition and thanking life for everything it gave him, calling it "a privilege and an adventure."
Personal life
From his youth, Sachs discovered homosexual inclinations. However, his parents were so categorically opposed to his sexual orientation that he suffered psychological trauma and lived alone for many years. When he met publicist Billy Hayes, he realized that he would no longer be alone. They lived together for six years, and Sachs wrote in his farewell article that he was happy in his personal life.
