Oliver Sacks
2015
Neurologist · Science Advocate · Author
Oliver Sacks, brilliant English neurologist and science advocate, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and a dozen other best-sellers, was dubbed the “poet laureate of medicine.” He called himself an “unbeliever” and “an old Jewish atheist.” In his book Musicophilia, he said this:
As I write, in New York in mid-December, the city is full of Christmas trees and menorahs. ... as an old Jewish atheist, that these things mean nothing to me, but Hanukkah songs are evoked in my mind whenever an image of a menorah impinges on my retina, even when I am not consciously aware of it.
In February 2015, on learning his cancer was terminal, he published these words in the New York Times:
I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled. ... it is the fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
An idiosyncratic writer, Sacks peppered his books with compassionate accounts of people coping with neurological disorders, showing how wonderfully the brain generates perception, memory and individuality. He had remarkable connections: poets W.H. Auden and Thom Gunn, cartoonist Al Capp, literary polymath Eric Korn, mathematician Paul Erdõs, scientist Stephen Jay Gould, actor Robin Williams, and more. He seemed to touch everyone.
Among other honors, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2008. A minor planet discovered in 2003 was named “84928 Oliversacks”. And in February 2010, he was named to the Honorary Board of distinguished achievers of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Two weeks before his death, he published a piece in The Times that movingly recalled his Orthodox Jewish upbringing, his rejection of religious faith, and his mother’s harsh reaction when she learned he was gay. He poignantly commented:
And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life—achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.
In fact, his final full day of life was a Sabbath. A front-page obituary in the New York Times described him as a humanist. He was truly that, putting human values above religion, a freethinker in all senses, and a friend, to the whole world.