Robin Williams portrayed neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) in the 1990 film Awakenings, based on Sacks’s groundbreaking book about reviving long-unresponsive patients. Their connection—one real, one cinematic—brought the world deeper understanding of empathy, resilience, and the healing power of love.

oday, we celebrate Sacks's life, legacy, and luminous mind. Born in London and based in New York, he dedicated his life to exploring the relationship between body and soul, a field he called “neuroanthropology.”

His groundbreaking book Awakenings (1973) chronicled his use of L-Dopa to temporarily revive patients who had been in a “sleeping” state for decades. The story became a 1990 film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.

“No ‘orthodox’ presentation… could have conveyed the historical reality of the experience,” Sacks said, emphasizing his commitment to truth beyond data. He wrote about his patients with love, hope, and fierce attention. “I love to discover potential in people who aren’t thought to have any,” he once said.

He urged his peers to look beyond symptoms and disorders to the full humanity within. “I had always liked to see myself as a naturalist or explorer,” he reflected, giving voice to the often voiceless and reframing disability as depth, not deficit.

Described by The New York Times as “the poet laureate of medicine,” Sacks celebrated the strength of the human spirit and believed in our power to emerge—with love and care—even in the midst of limitation.

“People will make a life on their own terms, whether they are deaf or colorblind or autistic or whatever… and their world will be quite as rich and interesting and full as our world.”

Selling millions of books and receiving thousands of letters, he said with a smile, “I invariably reply to people under 10, over 90, or in prison.”