A life fully lived. Oliver Sacks, the famous neurologist and author who wrote frequently about the ties between the brain and the human condition, died at his home in New York City on Sunday, Aug. 30. He was 82.
The cause of death was cancer, his longtime personal assistant Kate Edgar told the New York Times. In February, the London-born doctor and academic had written an essay for the Times about how an earlier melanoma in his eye had spread to his liver, causing him to be in the late stages of terminal cancer.
“I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying,” he wrote in the touching piece. “The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.”
Over the years, Sacks has authored numerous best-selling books, including 1985’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and 1973’s Awakenings, which was made into a film by the same name in 1990, starring Robin Williams as Sacks and Robert De Niro as one of the patients.
Sacks was known for approaching the science of the brain as a vast unknown to be explored, and in A Leg to Stand On, he wrote, “I had always liked to see myself as a naturalist or explorer. I had explored many strange, neuropsychological lands — the furthest Arctics and Tropics of neurological disorder.”
In addition to being a medical doctor and author, multihyphenate Sacks was also a skilled pianist, a weight-lifting competitor, and a prolific journal-keeper.
He is survived by his partner of eight years, writer Bill Hayes.