The Wounded Healer
When diagnosed with incurable cancer and given only months to live, Oliver Sacks responded in his typically idiosyncratic fashion — by inviting filmmaker Ric Burns into his home to shoot a documentary about him. The result, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, is an intimate portrait of a great man, told with the same extraordinary empathy that was his hallmark. Sacks was a scientist and a writer, but, above all, a healer. As an unassuming British neurologist, he made an unlikely public figure — and yet that’s what he became, despite his intentions.
Born in London in 1933, Sacks was the son of two Jewish doctors. His mother, Muriel Elsie Landau, was one of the first female surgeons in England, and her eccentric behaviour included bringing a foetus back from work for her 11-year-old son to
