Oliver Sachs MD - Original air date July 1986

	Duration: 3450 seconds Upload Time: 07-05-29 22:49:09 User: haroldchanner :::: Favorites
Description: Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England (both of his parents were physicians) and earned his medical degree at Queen's College, Oxford. In the early 1960s, he moved to the United States and completed an internship in San Francisco and a residency in neurology at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived in New York, where he is clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, adjunct professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine and consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor. In 1966 Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital, a chronic care facility in the Bronx where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. They became the subjects of his second book, Awakenings (1973), which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter ("A Kind of Alaska ") and the Oscar-nominated Hollywood movie, "Awakenings," with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Dr. Sacks is perhaps best known for his 1985 collection of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat , in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's Syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation and Alzheimer's disease. (This book later inspired a dramatic work by Peter Brook, "L'Homme Qui. . . .) As a physician and a writer, Oliver Sacks is concerned above all with the ways in which individuals survive and adapt to different neurological diseases and conditions, and what this experience can tell us about the human brain and mind. His books exploring these themes have been bestsellers around the world and are used widely in universities in courses on neuroscience, writing, ethics, philosophy and sociology. They have served as the inspiration for artists working in forms as varied as poetry, essay, documentary, drama, painting, dance, cinema and fiction. In 1989, Dr. Sacks received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on what he calls the "neuroanthropology" of Tourette's syndrome, a condition marked by involuntary tics and utterances, and how its symptoms can be perceived differently in different cultures. His nine books, which also include Migraine (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. His most recent books are Oaxaca Journal (2002) and Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001). 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 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, and Queen's College. The New York Times has referred to Dr. Sacks as "the poet laureate of medicine," and in 2002 he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University, which recognizes the scientist as poet. Dr. Sacks has been awarded honorary doctorates from Georgetown University, Tufts University, the College of Staten Island, New York Medical College, the Medical College of Pennsylvania, Bard College, Queen's University (Ontario), and the University of Turin Share with friends
Comments
totcalliam ::: Favorites thanks for uploading this. That interviewer is terrible though. 07-05-30 22:02:41 _____________________________________________________
yoohoo614 ::: Favorites I agree with the person who said that the interviewer is terrible! He couldn't shut up! Thank you to the person who shared this! 07-05-31 19:06:22 _____________________________________________________
botchbud ::: Favorites yes the interviewer is externalizing a lot of his running around in the head, but I still think he's a cool/interesting/good guy, not too bad in guiding the interview in interesting directions, and i liked this vid. 07-06-01 17:55:59 _____________________________________________________
971alien ::: Favorites Fantastic. Thank you for the posting. What an interesting and supremely intelligent man. The man who... is definatley one of my all time favourite reads. I feel that if the book was adapted into a children's versionand put in every school, understanding and consideration for neuro conditions would be all the better for it. A difficult gig for the interviewer as he has obviously done some research, but maybe Neurology isn't his forte. Thanks again ;-)) 07-06-05 16:27:08 _____________________________________________________
BeardyRebel ::: Favorites Thank you SO much for posting this interview. I've been doing Oliver Sacks searches on YouTube for ages now in the hope that someone would post something like this. Many thanks again ....it's very much appreciated! 07-06-06 19:14:00 _____________________________________________________
susanappe ::: Favorites Thank you so much for posting this, I've also been looking for some video footage of Oliver sacks for a long time. I love all his books, they are so fascinating. But I am about to kill this interviewer, he is driving me crazy, it's like he is trying to keep from being bored or something. So annoying. 07-06-10 13:21:19 _____________________________________________________
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arcticfox1 ::: Favorites Oliver Sacks looks so happy. Well, I'd be happy if I was as amazing as him. 07-06-11 17:39:29 _____________________________________________________
ncurran1987 ::: Favorites I don't think the interviewer is that bad. He's ok. I mean he's bad in some things like but this one he's ok in. 07-06-21 11:24:18 _____________________________________________________
stiffnee2000 ::: Favorites Sachs seems like an amazingly compassionate and geniusly insightful. What a treat to watch him in this interview. Thank you. 07-06-24 18:23:49 _____________________________________________________
dtmeli ::: Favorites What an amazing human being. 07-07-29 10:59:48 _____________________________________________________