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| 1991
Award for Education in Neuroscience |
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Drs.
Edwin J. Furshpan, Edward A. Kravitz, and David D. Potter
 As
a physician and a writer, Oliver Sacks is concerned above all with the
link between body and mind, and the ways in which the whole person
adapts to different neurological conditions.
Oliver Sacks was born in London, England
(both of his parents were physicians, trained in neurology), and he
obtained his medical degree in Oxford. In the early 1960s, he moved to
the United States, where he interned in San Francisco and then did his
residency in neurology at UCLA. Since 1965 he has lived in New York,
where he is clinical neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor and
Beth Abraham Hospital.
n 1966 Dr. Sacks went to work in a Bronx
charity hospital where he encountered an extraordinary group of
patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states,
unable to initiate movement--like human statues--survivors of the great
epidemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916-1927.
They became the subjects of his book Awakenings (1973), which
later inspired a play by Harold Pinter, "A Kind of Alaska,"
and the Hollywood movie, "Awakenings," starring
Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
Dr. Sacks is perhaps best known for his
best-selling 1985 collection of case histories from the far borderlands
of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat,
and 1989 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on the
neuroanthropology of Tourette's syndrome, a condition marked by
involuntary tics and utterances.
His seven books, which also include Migraine,
A Leg to Stand On, Seeing Voices, An
Anthropologist on Mars, and, most recently, The Island of the
Colorblind are international bestsellers, and he has recently been
elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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