Dr. Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, will hold two lectures among other events during his first campus visit to Cornell as an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large, Sept. 9-20.
Sacks, whose engaging literary voice is an artful blend of hard science and profound human feeling, will participate in a Knight freshman writing seminar in which his book on deafness, Seeing Voices, is required reading. He will discuss monsters in Greek mythology in a classics course and also participate in cognitive neuroscience and clinical neurobiology classes. In addition, Sacks will visit plant science and veterinary college laboratories while on campus.
"What can one say of one of the great writers of our time? Oliver Sacks humanizes illness ... he writes of body and mind, and from every one of his case studies there radiates a feeling of respect for the patient and for the illness," said Roald Hoffmann, Cornell's Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters and professor of chemistry, who is the faculty sponsor for Sacks. "What others consider unmitigated tragedy or dysfunction, Sacks sees -- and makes us see -- as a human being coping with dignity with a biological problem."
·Sunday, Sept. 9, at 2 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre, Cornell Cinema will host a screening of "Awakenings," the Oscar-nominated movie starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. "Awakenings" is a Hollywood rendition of Sacks' extraordinary stories about his original post-encephalitic patients who were "awakened" by the drug L-dopa in the summer of 1969 after decades spent in semiparalysis. These patients were survivors of a worldwide outbreak of "sleeping sickness," an epidemic that lasted from about 1916 to 1927. At the Sept. 9 show, 100 tickets for a Sacks lecture on Thursday, Sept. 13, will be distributed to patrons on a first-come basis; limit two tickets per person.
Other events during Sacks' visit:
Fifty tickets for the Sept. 13 lecture will be available to the general public beginning today, Sept. 6, at the Clinton House box office, 116 N. Cayuga St., (607) 273-4497, with a limit of two per person. Also beginning today, 50 tickets will be made available to Cornell faculty and staff through the A.D. White Professors-at-Large office; contact Gerri Jones at 255-0832 to reserve a ticket. The remainder of the tickets will be distributed today to students with Cornell ID at the service center in the North Campus Community Commons and in Noyes Community Center on West Campus; limit is two tickets per student.
The son of two physicians, Sacks was born in London and received his medical degree at Oxford University. In the 1960s, he moved to the United States, where he completed an internship at the University of California-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 New York University School of Medicine and a consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor and Beth Abraham Hospital.
Sacks began working in 1966 as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham, 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. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings (1973), which inspired a play by Harold Pinter, A Kind of Alaska, and the movie "Awakenings." Sacks gained international acclaim for his 1985 collection of intriguing neurological case histories titled The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In 1989, he 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. He has received numerous awards and prizes, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his seven books have been translated into 22 languages.
The A.D. White Program for Professors-at-Large began in 1965 to bring distinguished scholars to campus for formal and informal exchanges with faculty and students.
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