Oliver sacks and his legacy to vision science and ophthalmology

• Autor(a) principal: Eduardo Melanirocha
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Outros Autores: Luiza Aikawa da Silveira Rocha, Galton Carvalho Vasconcelos, Monica Alves
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/57114
• topic: Ophthalmology; Oftalmologia

A little boy enchanted by chemistry and the periodic table elements, a motorcycle young man who crossed a continental country in so many directions, scuba diver and olympic weightlifter, an obsessive researcher and a dedicated physician. These are some facets of a brilliant human being. Oliver Wolf Sacks was born in London in July 9, 1933, graduated in Medicine at Oxford University, England, specialized in Neurology in California, USA, and worked most of his life in New York City, USA(1). The reason to bring him to an editorial in ABO (Arquivos Brasileiros de Oftalmologia), a journal dedicated to vision and ophthalmology, is because early in his professional career he became a writer, describing neurological patients, with particular and talented reports on ocular conditions, visual symptoms and neuro-ophthalmologic correlations in his writings. Talented clinicians are becoming rare, talented clinicians with writing talent are even more so. Dr. Oliver Sacks must be known by the present and future generations of physicians as a writer that wrote in a way that allowed the reader to know about the disease, but, more importantly, to know how the patient felt and dealt with his condition, through poetic lines of his numerous books and articles.He became a bestselling and awarded author all over the world, with writings that gave voice, face and action to patients with chronic, sometimes uncommon, and severe diseases. He published 14 books and authored or co-authored 58 papers. So far, 14 of his writings became documentaries and three of his tales, including the famous “Awakenings” inspired films.