Having inspired the major motion picture, Awakenings is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after WWI. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men & women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, awakening effect. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives & the extraordinary transformations which went with their reintroduction to a changed world.
