
' The story of a disease that plunged its victims into a prison of viscous time & the drug that catapulted them out of it' Guardian Hailed as a medical classic & the subject of a major feature film as well as radio & stage plays & 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 & 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