Happy Birthday Oliver Wolf Sacks!

Luigi Novi

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (Generic)

The James Cook University Library wishes a warm Happy Birthday to Oliver Sacks, the neurology professor, physician and author who turns 82 today.

This best-selling author is best known for his case histories which explore the far reaches of neurological experience in books such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, The Island of the Colorblind and Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

Yes, despite the unusual titles, all of his books are real-life cases that are written in a manner that has led the New York Times to describe Sacks as “the poet laureate of medicine.”

The JCU Library has copies of the majority of his works which can be found here.

We also have the film Awakenings, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, based on Sacks's book of the same name.

To find out more about Oliver Sacks and the topics he wrote about, we invite you to explore our Encyclopædia Britannica database.