'Awakenings' author, neurologist Oliver Sacks dies at 82

In this Oct. 26, 2005, file photo, Dr. Oliver Sacks speaks about Alzheimer's disease to an audience at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Conn. Sacks, a neurologist and writer, died Sunday, Aug. 30, 2015.
In this Oct. 26, 2005, file photo, Dr. Oliver Sacks speaks about Alzheimer's disease to an audience at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Conn. Sacks, a neurologist and writer, died Sunday, Aug. 30, 2015.

NEW YORK — Dr. Oliver Sacks, whose books like The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat probed distant ranges of human experience by compassionately portraying people with severe and sometimes bizarre neurological conditions, has died. He was 82.

Sacks died Sunday at his home in New York City, his assistant, Kate Edgar, said.

Sacks had announced in February 2015 that he was terminally ill with a rare eye cancer that had spread to his liver.

As a practicing neurologist, Sacks looked at some of his patients with a writer's eye and found publishing gold.

In his best-selling 1985 book, he described a man who really did mistake his wife's face for his hat while visiting Sacks' office, because his brain had difficulty interpreting what he saw. Another story in the book featured autistic twins who had trouble with ordinary math but who could perform other amazing calculations.

Discover magazine ranked it among the 25 greatest science books of all time in 2006, declaring, "Legions of neuroscientists now probing the mysteries of the human brain cite this book as their greatest inspiration."

Sacks' 1973 book, Awakenings, about hospital patients who'd spent decades in a kind of frozen state until Sacks tried a new treatment, led to a 1990 movie in which Sacks was portrayed by Robin Williams. It was nominated for three Academy Awards.

Sacks reflected on his own life in 2015 when he wrote in the New York Times that he was terminally ill. "I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions," he wrote.

In the time he had remaining, he said, he would no longer pay attention to matters like politics and global warming because they "are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people. ... I feel the future is in good hands."

"I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. ... Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure."

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