Hailed as a medical classic, and the subject of a major feature film as well as radio and stage plays and various TV documentaries, Awakenings by Oliver Sacks is the extraordinary account of a group of 20 patients.
Rendered catatonic by the sleeping-sickness epidemic that swept the world just after the First World War, all 20 had spent 40 years in hospital—motionless and speechless; aware of the world around them but exhibiting no interest in it—until Dr Sacks administered the then-new drug L-DOPA, which caused them, temporarily, to awake from their decades-long slumber.
