Although Wittgenstein’s writing is often regarded as being highly complicated, On Certainty has gained attention not just for the sophistication of its ideas but for the beauty of its prose, and especially for its spare, enigmatic composition, consisting almost entirely of unanswered questions. One particularly noteworthy book to which Sacks alludes is the philosophical text On Certainty by Ludwig Wittgenstein (first published in 1969). Sacks was an erudite, well-read man, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat alludes to many masterpieces of Western literature, often as a way of clarifying or expanding upon a complex medical concept. He died of a tumor in August 2015, one of the most respected and beloved science writers of the twentieth century.

In his final book, On the Move, Sacks addressed the subject of his homosexuality, which he’d previously concealed from all but his closest friends. It wasn’t until well into middle age that Sacks realized that he suffered from face blindness, a condition that left him unable to recognize his own face in the mirror. Sacks was known for being a brilliant but often painfully shy man. Since the seventies, Sacks has written books on a large number of medical topics, including Migraine (1970), An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), Hallucinations (2012), and two memoirs- Uncle Tungsten (2001) and On the Move (2015). Sacks’s research on these patients, culminating in his use of the L-Dopa drug to revive them from their comas, formed the basis for his book Awakenings (1973). He worked as a neurologist at a hospital in the Bronx, where he came across a group of patients who had been comatose ever since the 1920s “sleepy-sickness” epidemic.

Afterwards, he interned at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, followed by UCLA. Oliver Sacks was born in England, and received his medical degree from Oxford in 1960.

The man who mistook his wife