Awakenings

‘The story of a disease that plunged its victims into a prison of viscous time and the drug that catapulted them out of it’ Guardian 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 twenty patients. Rendered catatonic by the sleeping-sickness epidemic that swept the world just after the First World War all twenty had spent forty 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 . . .