On the Move, the second instalment in his memoir, pictured a youthful, leather-and-jean-clad Sacks astride a large motorbike, not unlike Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. He got his first motorbike when he was 18.

Feeling “imprisoned and powerless”, he developed a passion for horses, skiing and motorbikes. He was sent away from London to escape wartime bombing and endured bullying at boarding school. In his memoir, Uncle Tungsten, he wrote about his early boyhood, his medical family, and the chemical passions that fostered his love of science. Sacks was an avid chronicler of his own life. They emerge as the very types of our neuroscientific age.” “No mere objects of hasty clinical notes, or articles in professional journals, his ’patients’ are transformed by his interest, sympathetic gaze and ability to convey optimism in tragedy into grand characters who can transcend their conditions.

“For all their lacks and losses, or what the medics call ‘deficits’, Sacks’s subjects have a capacious 19th-century humanity, “ she wrote. The 1990 film version, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, was nominated for three Oscars including best picture. These patients became the subjects of Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter – A Kind of Alaska. He recognised them as survivors of the encephalitis epidemic that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to recover. Many patients had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues.

Sacks came across the patients in 1966 while working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham hospital, a chronic care hospital, in the Bronx. Awakenings was based on his work with patients treated with a drug that woke them up after years in a catatonic state. Sacks was the author of several books about unusual medical conditions, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and The Island of the Colourblind. But my luck has run out – a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver.”

The London-born academic, whose book Awakenings inspired the Oscar-nominated film of the same name, wrote: “A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health.

Dr sacks awakenings