New York, NY – Renowned Jewish Neurologist And Author Dr. Oliver Sacks Succumbs To Cancer At 82 In New York City

New York City – On Sunday, renowned neurologist and author Dr. Oliver Sacks—who explored the inner-most intricacies of the human brain and then wrote about them in books like “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”—-died at the age of 82 at his New York City home following a battle with liver cancer.

NYTIMES.com (http://nyti.ms/1JEmP41) reports that Dr. Sacks had previously announced in February that cancer had spread to his liver and that his condition had been diagnosed as terminal.

Despite later describing himself as a “self-proclaimed atheist,” Sacks was born in London in 1933 to Jewish parents, both of whom were physicians, and who in hopes of keeping him safe from the Nazi Blitz on England sent him to a British boarding school in the Midlands along with his brother in the early 1940s.

It was there that the young Sacks first discovered what would turn out to be a life-long interest in science.

Sacks completed medical school in Britain and finally made his way the U.S. in the 1960s where he began his first clinical trials with the experimental drug known as “L-dopa” on a group of encephalitis lethargica patients who had been virtually frozen in a catatonic state for decades.

Despite its initial “awakening” affect on his patients, Sacks’s use of L-dopa later left his patients with problematic side effects including tics, seizures and manic depression.

Sacks research led to the 1973 book “Awakenings,” which in turn led to the Oscar-nominated movie of the same name starring Robin Williams and Robert de Niro.