Awakenings
Patients frozen for decades briefly returned by a drug, and what it cost them. Case history written as literature.
One senses in the author a passion to communicate his discoveries with all the power of his intellect, knowledge and deep compassion
Sacks describes the survivors of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the 1920s, men and women who had passed decades in a Bronx hospital, held motionless and silent by a sleeping sickness that left their inner lives intact. He gives them the drug L-DOPA, and they return to speech, movement and appetite; then the response turns unpredictable, and each person meets a different set of difficulties as the new state proves hard to keep. Sacks stays with the whole arc, including the reckonings that follow the first relief.
For a clinician the interest lies in method. Sacks sets out twenty lives at length, letting biography, mood and circumstance sit within the neurology rather than beneath it, and he treats the chart as a place where a person can still be described. The book shows what close attention to the particular can carry, and how much of a patient a diagnosis leaves out.
About the author
Oliver Sacks
Oliver Sacks (1933 to 2015) was a British neurologist and writer who worked for many years in New York. In books such as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, he wrote about patients with unusual neurological conditions, restoring the clinical case history as a humane narrative form. He treated the people in his care as individuals rather than diagnoses, and his writing reached readers well beyond medicine.
Details
- 1973