IN MEMORIAM
Drs. Seymour Diamond, Oliver Sacks, Arthur Elkind, 1991
Dr. Oliver Sacks, the noted neurologist and prolific writer, was also keenly interested in headache medicine. He was born into a family of physicians in London and like many children of his age, was sent to a rural area of England when World War II erupted. His book, Uncle Tungsten, described his experiences at the boarding school but also his fascination with chemistry. He received his medical degree from Queen’ s College, Oxford, and interned in San Francisco during the early 1960s. In 1965, Dr. Sacks moved to New York to begin a fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. His affiliation with that institution ended in 2007, when he began a teaching position at Columbia. In 2012, he became a professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine.
In 1971, Dr. Sacks published his book, Migraine. His book, Awakenings, was published in 1973, and adapted in 1990 for the cinema, in an Academy Award-nominated film of the same name, and starred Robin Williams as the physician and Robert DeNiro as one of his patients with a rare form of encephalitis – encephalitis lethargica. On April 27, 1991, Doctor Sacks received the Professional Support Award from the National Headache Foundation at its fifth annual fundraiser in New York City.
In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times in February of this year, Dr. Sacks announced that he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and was expected to live only a few more months. He continued to write and only a couple of weeks before his death, he submitted an essay,“ Sabbath,” which appeared in New York Times.
Dr. Sacks was a close personal friend of National Headache Foundation Board member, Mark Green, MD and his wife, Leah Green, MD. We are pleased to present Dr. Mark Green’ s moving tribute to Dr. Sacks. HW
28 HeadWise ® | Volume 5, Issue 1 • 2015