School of Nursing Lecture Series

The Lecture Series features notable nurses and health care experts from across the country. Our first speaker, Dr. Oliver Sacks, is the author of "Awakenings" (1973), which later inspired the Oscar-nominated Hollywood movie of the same name.

Dr. Oliver Sacks, physician and author of Awakenings

As a physician and a writer, Oliver Sacks is concerned above all with the link between body and mind, and the ways in which the whole person adapts to different neurological conditions.

Oliver Sacks was born July 9, 1933 in London (both of his parents were physicians), and he obtained his medical degree in 1958 from Oxford University. In the early 1960s, he moved to the United States, where he did an internship at Mount Zion Hospital (UCSF) in San Francisco and then a residency in neurology at UCLA. Since 1965 he has lived in New York, where he is a clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor and Beth Abraham Hospital.

In 1966 Dr. Sacks went to work in a chronic hospital in the Bronx (Beth Abraham Hospital) where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, unable to initiate movement, like human statues - they were survivors of the great epidemic of sleepy sickness that swept the world from 1916-1927. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings (1973), which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter, "A Kind of Alaska," and the 1990 Hollywood movie, "Awakenings," starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

Dr. Sacks is perhaps best known for his best-selling 1985 collection of case histories from the far border-lands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In 1989 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on the Neuroanthropoloogy of Tourette's syndrome, a condition marked by involuntary tics and utterances.

His nine books, which also include Migrane (1970) A Leg To Stand On (1984), Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf (1990), An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), and The Island of The Colorblind (1996), have received numerous awards and have sold several million copies worldwide in 22 languages. In the fall of 2001, Dr. Sacks released his memoir, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, in which he looks back on his childhood in wartime London, revealing his boyhood love of chemistry as the source of his life long scientific curiosity.

He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, as well as various medical journals, and he is an honorary fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Academy of Arts and Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, and Queen's College.