In a blunt, eloquent and devastating Op-Ed essay in The New York Times in February, Dr. Oliver Sacks revealed that cancer in his liver had left him with only months to live. This knowledge, he wrote, had enabled him to see his own life “as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.” He was grateful to “have loved and been loved,” and grateful, too, for “the special intercourse” with the world that writers and readers are privileged to know.

“Above all,” he added, “I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

That love of the world and Dr. Sacks’s wisdom about human beings — and the mysterious connections between the brain, the mind and the imagination — have animated his writing over the years, from “Migraine,” published four and a half decades ago, through “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” and more recent works like “Uncle Tungsten,” “Hallucinations” and “On the Move,” his deeply moving new memoir.

A professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine and a longtime practicing physician, Dr. Sacks writes not only with a doctor’s understanding of medicine and science but also with a Chekhovian sympathy for his patients and a metaphysical appreciation of their emotional quandaries. His case studies have given us a palpable understanding of what it can be like to have conditions like Tourette’s syndrome, temporal lobe epilepsy, color blindness or memory loss, and some of them have the strangeness and resonance of tales by Borges or Calvino.