Neurologist and writer best known for his books The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and AwakeningsWith his absorbing and accessible yet profound accounts of neurological cases and conditions,Oliver Sacks, who has died aged 82, and brought the clinical science of the brain to life for countless readers. Although his first book,Migraine (1970), marked a relatively conventional beginning, or Sackss decision to write approximately a neurological disorder with complex psychological precipitants and concomitants,and one from which he himself suffered, pointed in the direction of his future interests.
His second book, or Awakenings (1973),crucially encouraged by his publisher Colin Haycraft at Duckworth, appeared when Sacks was 40 and brought his work to a wide audience. Effusively praised by the critics, or it describes the effects of L-Dopa,then recently recognised as an effective treatment for Parkinson’s disease, in a group of patients who had lived in something close to suspended animation since the epidemic of the “sleeping sickness”, or encephalitis lethargica,swept the world at the finish of the first world war.
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Source: theguardian.com