“I love to discover potential in people who aren’t thought to have any,” he told People magazine in 1986.

His other books included the best-selling “An Anthropologist on Mars” (1995), about autistic savants and other patients who managed to thrive with their disorders; “The Mind’s Eye” (2010), about the ways people compensate for brain injuries; and three books about specific neurological conditions: “Migraine” (1970), “The Island of the Colorblind” (1997) and “Seeing Voices” (1989), a look at language perception among the deaf. He also wrote “Oaxaca Journal,” a 2002 travelogue about a trip to Mexico with the American Fern Society.

Dr. Sacks began his medical career as a researcher but gave up early, conceding that he had neither the temperament nor the eye-hand coordination for it. “I lost samples,” he told an interviewer in 2005. “I broke machines. Finally they said to me: ‘Sacks, you’re a menace. Get out. Go see patients. They matter less.’ ”

Yet even after he left research for clinical practice, he retained his scientific curiosity and his intuition for asking big questions. Years before it became fashionable to study the chemical and neurological foundations of the mind, for example, Dr. Sacks identified the need for such a field in “A Leg to Stand On,” where he termed it “clinical ontology” or “existential neurology.”

Image “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” included the case of Dr. P., whose brain had lost the ability to decipher what his eyes were seeing. Credit... Summit Books

Dr. Sacks linked himself to the Soviet founder of neuropsychology, A. R. Luria, whom he considered a mentor. The two never met, but they maintained a long correspondence, and in 1977, Dr. Sacks wrote Dr. Luria’s obituary for The Times of London.

Dr. Sacks’s accounts of neurological oddities found a wide popular audience and were adapted for Hollywood, the theater, even opera. Robin Williams portrayed a Sacks-like doctor in the 1990 film version of “Awakenings,” and the novelist Richard Powers based a central character on him in his 2006 book, “The Echo Maker.” The 2011 movie “The Music Never Stopped” was adapted from “The Last Hippie,” one of the case studies collected in “An Anthropologist on Mars.” An opera based on “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” with music by Michael Nyman and a libretto by Christopher Rawlence, had its premiere in London in 1986 and was staged at Lincoln Center in New York in 1988.

The Independent of London called Dr. Sacks “the presiding genius of neurological drama.” Reviewers praised his empathy and his graceful prose. Scientists could be dismissive, however, complaining that his clinical tales put too much emphasis on the tales and not enough on the clinical. A London neuroscientist, Ray Dolan, told The Guardian in 2005: “Whether Dr. Sacks has provided any scientific insights into the neurological conditions he has written about in his numerous books is open to question. I have always felt uncomfortable about this side of this work, and especially the tendency for Dr. Sacks to be an ever-present dramatis persona.”

In an otherwise laudatory review of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” in The New York Times Book Review, the neuropsychologist John C. Marshall took issue with what he saw as Dr. Sacks’s faux-naïve presentation (“He would have us believe that an experienced neurologist could fail to have read anything about many of the standard syndromes”), and called his blend of medicine and philosophy “insightful, compassionate, moving and, on occasion, simply infuriating.”More damningly, the disability-rights activist Tom Shakespeare accused Dr. Sacks of exploiting the people he wrote about, calling him “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career.”

Image Dr. Sacks often wrote about the relationship between music and the mind, eventually devoting a whole book, “Musicophilia,” to the subject. Credit... Knopf

A skilled pianist, Dr. Sacks often wrote about the relationship between music and the mind, eventually devoting a whole book, “Musicophilia” (2007), to the subject. Dr. Sacks disagreed with the Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker’s view of music as “auditory cheesecake,” and pointed to its ability to reach dementia patients as evidence that music appreciation is hard-wired into the brain.“I haven’t heard of a human being who isn’t musical, or who doesn’t respond to music one way or another,” he told an audience at Columbia University in 2006. “I think we are an essentially, profoundly musical species. And I don’t know whether — for all I know, language piggybacked on music.”

Referring to Nietzsche’s claim that listening to Bizet had made him a better philosopher, Dr. Sacks said, “I think Mozart makes me a better neurologist.”

Drawn to Science

Oliver Wolf Sacks was born on July 9, 1933, in London, the youngest of four sons of Samuel Sacks and the former Muriel Elsie Landau, who were both doctors. His father, in Dr. Sacks’s words a “moderately Orthodox” Jew, read the Bible daily, and Dr. Sacks often demonstrated a spiritual impulse in his books. But in “Uncle Tungsten,” his 2001 memoir about his childhood love of chemistry, he explained that the inflamed Zionist meetings his parents held before the war helped turn him away from organized religion.

In “Uncle Tungsten,” Dr. Sacks described how growing up in a household of polymaths fostered his interest in science.