
' 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 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. 'A brilliant & humane book' Observer ' Not only a collection of astonishing case histories Awakenings is also a memoir a moral essay & a romance. It is a work of genius' Washington Post ' It makes you aware of what a knife edge we live on' Doris Lessing