ABSTRACT
Oliver Sacks is probably the best-known physician-writer alive today. Born in London in 1933, he qualified as a doctor from Oxford University, and later emigrated to the USA where he specialised in neurology. The collections of his narratives of clinical cases – erudite, poetically written and deeply humane – have become modern classics. Of his nine books, perhaps the most famous is a collection of clinical narratives, based on his neurological cases, entitled The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat (1985). His other books include Awakenings (1973), A Leg To Stand On (1984), An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), The Island of the Color Blind (1997) and an autobiography, Uncle Tungsten (2001). Sacks still practises as a neurologist in New York, where he is a clinical professor in neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and an adjunct professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine.
