British neurologist and author Oliver Sacks died at 82 on Sunday, months after being diagnosed with terminal eye cancer, The New York Times reports. Sacks was a practicing doctor and a professor of neurology at New York University.
He was also well-known for his best-selling books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars. Awakenings, his autobiographical account of treating patients with encephalitis lethargica, a condition that renders people motionless, was later adapted in an Oscar-winning film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.
In February, Sacks wrote about his ocular melanoma diagnosis and confronting his mortality in a touching Times op-ed:
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I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure. [The New York Times]
He wrote again for the Times earlier in August about "achieving a sense of peace within oneself" as he grew physically weaker.
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