'Awakenings' author, neurologist Oliver Sacks dies at 82

NEW YORK -- There was the blind man who had the disastrous experience of regaining his sight. The surgeon who developed a sudden passion for music after being struck by lightning. And most famously, the man who mistook his wife for a hat.

Those stories and many more, taking the reader to the distant ranges of human experience, came from the pen of Dr. Oliver Sacks.

Sacks, 82, died Sunday at his home in New York City, his assistant, Kate Edgar, said. In February, he had announced 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, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," 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 twins with autism who had trouble with ordinary math but who could perform other amazing calculations.

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.

Oliver Wolf Sacks was born in 1933 in London, son of husband-and-wife physicians. Both were skilled at recounting medical stories, and Sack's writing impulse "seems to have come directly from them," he said in his 2015 memoir, "On the Move."

In childhood he was drawn to chemistry (his 2001 memoir is titled "Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood") and biology.

About age 11, fascinated by how ferns slowly unfurl, he set up a camera to take pictures every hour or so of a fern and then assembled a flip book to compress the process into a few seconds.

After earning a medical degree at Oxford, Sacks moved to the United States in 1960 and completed a medical internship in San Francisco and a neurology residency at the University of California, Los Angeles. He moved to New York in 1965 and began decades of neurology practice. At a Bronx hospital, he met the profoundly disabled patients he described in "Awakenings."

Among his other books were "The Island of the Colorblind" (1997) about a society where congenital colorblindness was common, "Seeing Voices" (1989) about the world of deaf culture, and "Hallucinations" (2012), in which Sacks discussed his own hallucinations as well as those of some patients.

Sacks reflected on his life this year when he wrote in the New York Times 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 no longer would pay attention to matters such as 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."