Awakenings

by Sacks, Oliver | Biography & True Stories
Published 20/04/2023 by PAN MACMILLAN (Picador) in the United Kingdom as part of the Picador Collection series
Paperback | 464 pages
197 x 130 x 31mm | 332g

'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 . . .