'Awakenings' author & neurologist Oliver Sacks dies at 82

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On Sunday, the world lost one of the most brilliant minds of this generation, best selling author and neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, the L.A. Times reports. In February, he revealed that he had multiple metastases in the liver and ocular melanoma in his op-ed piece in the N.Y. Times. Two days ago, he had lost his battle against cancer.

Sacks wrote in February, "I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted."

He added, "It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can."

Sacks' works include "Migraine" (1970), "Awakenings" (1973), "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" (1985), "The Mind's Eye" (2010), "Hallucinations" (2012), and "On the Move: A Life" (2015), among others. However, it was his 1973 release, "Awakenings", which widened popularity, as the book was adapted into a film of the same title and was released in 1990. The film was directed by Penny Marshall and starred Robin Williams as Dr. Malcolm Sayer and Robert De Niro as his patient, Leonard Lowe.

One of his notable works in the field of medicine is his treatment of patients with encephalitis lethargica or "sleepy sickness", an illness that affects a patient's brain, thereby disabling them to move. Sacks discovered that the then-new Parkinson's disease drug L-DOPA had a good effect on these patients.

In his last op-ed for the N.Y. Times published at the end of July, Sacks spoke of his treatment for his liver's metastases, describing that period as not a remission but an "intermission", a time he used to reconnect with family, friends, and patients.

Sacks wrote, "In the country, far from the lights of the city, I saw the entire sky 'powdered with stars' (in Milton’s words); such a sky, I imagined, could be seen only on high, dry plateaus like that of Atacama in Chile (where some of the world’s most powerful telescopes are).

"It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience—and death. I told my friends Kate and Allen, “I would like to see such a sky again when I am dying.'"