XPost: oc.general, ba.politics, alt.politics.radical-left   
   XPost: sbay.education   
   From: frank.lombard@hillaryclinton.com   
      
   Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who studied the intricacies of the   
   brain and wrote eloquently about them in books such as   
   "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," died   
   on Sunday at the age of 82, his personal assistant said.   
      
   The British-born Sacks, who announced in February that he had   
   terminal liver cancer, died at his home in New York City at 1:30   
   a.m. with his partner, the writer Billy Hayes, and his personal   
   assistant, Kate Edgar, at his side, Edgar told Reuters.   
      
   "He definitely wrote to the very end," said Edgar, noting Sacks   
   in his final days never stopped penning a legacy that will be   
   published posthumously and may include "several books."   
      
   NYU School of Medicine, where Sacks taught, said in a statement   
   mourning his death that his "breakthrough work" in the fields of   
   neurology and neuro psychiatry led to important understandings   
   in these fields.   
      
   "Equally important, his prolific, award-winning writing touched   
   the lives of millions around the world," NYU said.   
      
   Sacks was called "a kind of poet laureate of medicine" and "one   
   of the great clinical writers of the 20th century" by the New   
   York Times.   
      
   Using a typewriter or writing in longhand, Sacks authored more   
   than a dozen books, filling them with detailed, years-long case   
   histories of patients who often became his friends. He explained   
   to lay readers how the brain handles everything from autism to   
   savantism, colorblindness to Tourette's syndrome, and how his   
   patients could adapt to their unconventional minds.   
      
   Sacks' view, as expressed in his 1995 book "An Anthropologist on   
   Mars," was that such disorders also came with a potential that   
   could bring out "latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms   
   of life that might never be seen, or even be imaginable."   
      
   "The brain is the most intricate mechanism in the universe," he   
   said in a People magazine interview. "I couldn't imagine   
   spending my life with kidneys."   
      
   Sacks' own psyche was quite complicated.   
      
   At times in his life he struggled with drug abuse and acute   
   shyness and he suffered from prosopagnosia, a disorder that   
   leaves victims unable to recognize faces.   
      
   In 2012 he told a New York magazine interviewer he had been in   
   psychoanalysis for more than 45 years and celibate since the mid-   
   1960s because he was essentially married to his work.   
      
   However, in "On the Move" he wrote of falling in love at age 77   
   with Hayes.   
      
   Sacks, an atheist, was born in London on July 7, 1933, to Jewish   
   physicians. In hopes of keeping him safe from the Nazis' bombing   
   of London during World War Two, his parents sent him away to   
   school and the shy young Sacks turned to science.   
      
   After attending medical school and practicing in Britain, he   
   moved to the United States in the early 1960s where he studied a   
   group of people with encephalitis lethargica. They had been   
   untreated and virtually frozen in catatonic states for decades   
   until Sacks administered an experimental psychoactive drug known   
   as L-dopa.   
      
   The drug had an explosive "awakening" effect on the patients but   
   the experiment trailed into failure as they developed tics,   
   seizures or manic behavior and had trouble adjusting to the   
   contemporary world.   
      
   Sacks wrote about the patients in the 1973 book "Awakenings,"   
   the basis of the 1990 Oscar-nominated movie of the same name,   
   starring Robin Williams as a character based on Sacks and Robert   
   de Niro as one of his patients.   
      
   "This had become a heaven-and-hell experience," Sacks told   
   People magazine of his "Awakenings" case. "But the patients   
   would just have died without having even a glimpse of that life   
   had they not been given L-dopa."   
      
   His best-known work was the 1985 book "The Man Who Mistook His   
   Wife for a Hat," a collection of case studies of people whose   
   brains had misfired, including lost memories, gross perception   
   problems and Tourette's.   
      
   Sacks often considered his own maladies in his books including   
   "Migraines", "The Mind's Eye" about dealing with blindness, and   
   "Hallucinations" which details his experiences with LSD and   
   mescaline.   
      
   His autobiography, "On the Move: A Life," was released in May.   
      
   http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/30/us-people-oliversacks-   
   idUSKCN0QZ0M620150830   
       
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)