“Experiences so strange that they are difficult to conceive are not limited to travels up the Amazon or to the Moon, but can occur within the confines of the human head…This long sleep and sudden awakening to a strange new world…though so alien, have an immediate power to grip the imagination. “ opens to the reader doors of perception generally passed through only by those at the far borders of human experience.” -The Boston Globe A brilliant and humane book.” -The Observer Sacks writes beautifully and with exceptional subtlety and penetration into both the state of mind of his patients and the nature of illness generally. The revised 1990 edition includes new essays on the making of several dramatic adaptations of Awakenings, including Harold Pinter’s play, “A Kind of Alaska,” and the feature film, “Awakenings,” starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Auden called “a masterpiece,” is a passionate exploration of the most general questions of health, disease, suffering, care, and the human condition. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of these individuals, the stories of their lives, and the extraordinary transformations they underwent with treatment.

Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, “awakening” effect. Frozen in a decades-long sleep, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr.

Migraine was still in the medical canon, but here I took off in all directions–with allegory, philosophy, poetry, you name it.” - Oliver SacksĪwakenings is the remarkable account of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. “Awakenings came from the most intense medical and human involvement I have even know, as I encountered, lived with, these patients in a Bronx hospital, some of whom had been transfixed, motionless, in a sort of trance, for decades.

Dr sacks awakenings