“Oliver Sacks: His Own Life,” Ric Burns’ majestic documentary, covers all eight decades of the unconventional physician’s life but is rooted in the final months before his death of cancer in 2015 at the age of 82.

The documentary’s chief virtue, after the very considerable pleasure of getting to spend time in Sacks’s company, is learning how much his personal life rivaled his career in remarkableness.

“His Own Life” is a compassionate, endlessly fascinating testament to that, as well as to the assertion, by one of Sacks’s friends, that the man’s placid acceptance of mortality offered a “master class in dying.” 

Take advantage of this month’s Learning at Home broadcast schedule – great for students engaged in hybrid or distance instruction, and families looking to spend some extra, quality time together!

Neurologist Oliver Sacks devoted his life to treating people with cognitive disorders, often severe ones, and writing eloquently about them in books such as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. But few knew of the difficulties the kindly, erudite doctor and scientist faced in his own life.

A new documentary explores the fascinating and sometimes troubled life of the famed neurologist.

Ric Burns’s “Oliver Sacks: His Own Life” premiered in Telluride in 2019 in advance of a 2020 release by Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber. It takes an intimate look at the legendary British neurologist and storyteller who inspired the 1973 film “Awakenings.”

A new documentary, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, chronicles the late neurologist's efforts to understand perception, memory and consciousness. Sacks spoke to Fresh Air in 2012.