Dr. Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, will hold two lectures among other events during his first campus visit to Cornell University as an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large, Sept. 9-20.

Sacks, whose engaging literary voice is an artful blend of hard science and profound human feeling, will participate in a Knight freshman writing seminar in which his book on deafness, Seeing Voices , is required reading. He will discuss monsters in Greek mythology in a classics course and also participate in cognitive neuroscience and clinical neurobiology classes. In addition, Sacks will visit plant science and veterinary college laboratories while on campus.

"What can one say of one of the great writers of our time? Oliver Sacks humanizes illness … he writes of body and mind, and from every one of his case studies there radiates a feeling of respect for the patient and for the illness," said Roald Hoffmann, Cornell's Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters and professor of chemistry, who is the faculty sponsor for Sacks. "What others consider unmitigated tragedy or dysfunction, Sacks sees -- and makes us see -- as a human being coping with dignity with a biological problem."

o Sunday, Sept. 9, at 2 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre, Cornell Cinema will host a screening of Awakenings , the Oscar-nominated movie starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. Awakenings is a Hollywood rendition of Sacks' extraordinary stories about his original post-encephalitic patients who were "awakened" by the drug L-dopa in the summer of 1969 after decades spent in semiparalysis. These patients were survivors of a worldwide outbreak of "sleeping sickness," an epidemic that lasted from about 1916 to 1927. At the Sept. 9 show, 100 tickets for a Sacks lecture on Thursday, Sept. 13, will be distributed to patrons on a first-come, first-served basis; limit two tickets per person. Other events during Sacks' visit:

o Thursday, Sept. 13, at 7:30 p.m. in Statler Auditorium, Sacks will give a lecture, "Neurology and the Soul: The Real 'Awakenings.'" The lecture will include a screening of the original "Awakenings," a 40-minute documentary film made for British television in 1973. Tickets are required. Fifty tickets for the Sept. 13 lecture will be available to the general public beginning Thursday, Sept. 6, at the Clinton House box office, 116 N. Cayuga St., (607) 273-4497, with a limit of two per person.

o Thursday, Sept. 20, at 4:40 p.m. in 200 Baker Hall, Sacks will lead a colloquium, "Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood," sponsored by the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. The colloquium topic is the subject of Sacks' next book, a memoir describing his childhood love of chemistry, to be published in October 2001.

The son of two physicians, Sacks was born in London and received his medical degree at Oxford University. In the early 1960s, he moved to the United States, where he completed an internship at University of California-San Francisco and a residency in neurology at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived in New York, where he is clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, adjunct professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine and a consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor and at Beth Abraham Hospital.

Sacks began working in 1966 as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham, where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings (1973), which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter, A Kind of Alaska , and the Oscar-nominated Hollywood movie, Awakenings . Sacks gained international acclaim for his 1985 collection of intriguing neurological case histories titled The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat . In 1989, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on what he calls the "neuroanthropology" of Tourette's syndrome, a condition marked by involuntary tics and utterances. He has received numerous awards and prizes, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his seven books have been translated into 22 languages.

For more information about Sacks' visit to Cornell, contact Gerri Jones at (607) 255-0832 or e-mail her at gaj1@cornell.edu .