Sacks was born Oliver Wolf Sacks on July 9, 1933, the youngest of four children born to two North London Jewish physicians, Samuel Sacks and Muriel Elsie Landau, one of the first female surgeons in England.
At the age of six, Sacks and his brother Michael had to flee London to escape the Blitz during World War II. Sacks remained in a boarding school in the Midlands until 1943 under the rule of spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child administration. He was an amateur chemist and in 1951,matriculated at The Queen's College in Oxford. Sacks graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in physiology and biology in 1954. He earned his Master of Arts and later a BM BCh, which qualified him to practice medicine.
When Sacks was ready to reveal his terminal cancer diagnosis to the public, he (perhaps unintentionally) summed up what the world would feel now, after it was his turn to go: "There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate - the genetic and neural fate - of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death."
To read Sacks' obituary, CLICK HERE.
