Awakenings — Oliver Sacks

The story of a disease that plunged its victims into a prison of viscous time and the drug that catapulted them out of it GuardianHailed 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