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“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. “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,” he wrote in the essay’s final paragraph. He did write about Jewish subjects, including a 2015 essay in The New York Times called “Sabbath.” One must drop all presuppositions and dogmas and rules - for there only lead to stalemate or disaster one must cease to regard all patients as replicas, and honor each one with individual reactions and propensities and, in this way, with the patient as ones equal, ones co-explorer, not ones puppet. Sacks was raised an Orthodox Jew but was not observant as an adult. For decades he worked at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine before moving on to Columbia and New York universities. Some of the books were memoirs or dealt with music and the mind.Ī London native, Sacks moved to New York as a young man.

Another noteworthy work was 1986’s “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” about a patient who could not interpret what he saw. “Awakenings,” which was published in 1973, was about a group of patients with encephalitis and was turned into a popular film in 1990 starring the late Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. He gained prominence from his work as a clinical neurologist, as well as from the books he wrote based on his patients’ cases. Sacks died Sunday of cancer at his home in New York City, according to The New York Times. Oliver Sacks, a noted neurologist and the best-selling author of “Awakenings,” has died.

Oliver Sacks, neurologist and ‘Awakenings’ author, dies at 82