Awakenings

By Oliver Sacks

The classic account of survivors of the sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I—and their return to the world after decades of “sleep.” •  From the distinguished neurologist and the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

“One of the most beautifully composed and moving works of our time." —The Washington Post

Awakenings—which inspired the major motion picture starring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams—is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and the extraordinary transformations which went with their reintroduction to a changed world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: May 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9780307834096

Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London and was educated at the Queen's College, Oxford. He completed his medical training at San Francisco's Mount Zion Hospital and at UCLA before moving to New York, where he soon encountered the patients whom he would write about in his book Awakenings. Dr Sacks spent almost fifty years working as a neurologist and wrote many books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, and Hallucinations, about the strange neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients. The New York Times referred to him as 'the poet laureate of medicine', and over the years he received many awards, including honours from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Royal College of Physicians. In 2008, he was appointed Commander of the British Empire. His memoir, On the Move, was published shortly before his death in August 2015.

Reviews for Awakenings

[homeschoolmimzi · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I like this author a lot, and the premise of the book was interesting, but Sacks being a neurologist infuses his stories w/a bit too many technical terms, and it soon starts to read like a medical record after awhile.

[rainpebble_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Awakenings by Oliver Sacks; (5*); This is fascinating stuff!I am not nor was I ever a medical student nor have I ever worked in the medical field. But I am so thankful that I read this book & must say, even at the beginning of my thoughts & comments, that I highly recommend this work of Sacks. The man has a brilliant mind, very worthy of our appreciation. I could not have read this book, had I not read ALL of the preliminary notes which take the reader well into the book and give one such as myself a very good background before going into the case studies of these special patients.I found the book to be so much better than the movie, which I thought wonderful & which left me speechless!The "sleepy sickness" that masks itself as Parkisonism would be difficult to garner understanding from without those previously mentioned notes. Oliver Sacks is a gifted writer. His prose is often times overly medical but again, please read the notes before beginning the case studies. The beauty of his words in regards to how medicine should be practiced and how the overly technical aspects of medicine are denying the original feeling & healing that is the true basic of the medical practice have made this book a must read for all those going into the medical field. I could go on and on but will just say: Please read this book if you have any interest in an extraordinary disease and the extraordinary processes which both the patients, other doctors, nurses & medical personnel go through long with Dr. Sacks._________________________________________________________________From Wikipedia regarding the "sleepy sickness":"Encephalitis lethargica or von Economo disease is an atypical form of encephalitis. Also known as "sleepy sickness" (distinct from tsetse fly-transmitted sleeping sickness), it was first described in 1917 by the neurologist Constantin von Economo and the pathologist Jean-René Cruchet. The disease attacks the brain, leaving some victims in a statue-like condition, speechless and motionless. Between 1915 and 1926, an epidemic of encephalitis lethargica spread around the world. Nearly five million people were affected, a third of whom died in the acute stages. Many of those who survived never returned to their pre-existing "aliveness". "They would be conscious and aware - yet not fully awake; they would sit motionless and speechless all day in their chairs, totally lacking energy, impetus, initiative, motive, appetite, affect or desire; they registered what went on about them without active attention, and with profound indifference. They neither conveyed nor felt the feeling of life; they were as insubstantial as ghosts, and as passive as zombies." No recurrence of the epidemic has since been reported, though isolated cases continue to occur."

[mrgan-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a bona fide classic, though I find pretty much all of Sacks' later writing to be less defensive, more concise, and more effective.

[william345 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The crux of the book is the work Sacks began in the mid-1960s with dozens of post-encephalitic patients at Bronx's Beth Abraham hospital, then called the Bronx Home for Incurables and disguised here as Mount Carmel. These patients were infected in 1918 by the encephalitis lethargica virus, or sleepy sickness. (Not to be confused with the worldwide influenza pandemic of that same year.) Those who survived were able afterwards to lead normal lives for years and sometimes decades until they were stricken with Parkinson's disease-like symptoms: locked and rigid postures that turned them into living statuary (akinesia), hurrying gait (festination), frozen skewed gaze (oculogyyric crises), and so on. These patients did not have Parkinson's disease proper, but because the encephalitis reduced the neurotransmitter dopamine in the part of their brain known as the substantia nigra they experienced identical, if somewhat more severe symptoms than actual Parkinson's patients. They were to become know as post-encephalitics.

In 1969 L-DOPA's cost came down sufficiently that Dr. Sacks began to prescribe it for his post-encephalitic patients. The results were at once miraculous and disastrous. In a matter of weeks, sometimes overnight, Sacks's patients were "awakened" from what for many had been decades of immobility, incommunicability, and dependence on high levels of nursing care. Suddenly these frozen figures were walking and talking, their personalities, in hiatus for so long, perfectly preserved. Dr. Sacks reviews the cases here of 20 such patients, from their often sudden awakening to the onset and growing severity of side effects. Awakenings is in the final analysis a tragedy. Few of Sacks patients could tolerate the long term effects of L-DOPA. Not a few regretted ever being treated with it. For a handful it provided a vastly improved quality of life. They became social again, needed far less nursing care, but the effects of the drug were highly unstable.

In an appendix added to the 1990 edition, Sacks and a colleague analyze patient responses to L-DOPA using the then emerging discipline of chaos theory. This appears only in the 1990 edition since the discipline did not exist when Sacks and his patients began their trials of the levodopa in '69. Dr. Sacks never met a footnote he didn't love. The book is chockful of them. Those too long to fit alongside the text are included as appendices. Ninety-five percent of them seem to me indispensable. Sacks is a great thinker of immense erudition who possesses a highly readable prose style. The primary text provides straightforward exposition, but when read in conjunction with the footnotes--where much of the real meat of the book resides--it can at times take on an almost fiction-like discursiveness.

Of Sacks's dozen or so books, I've read all but three. Awakenings is his magnum opus, his manifesto and policy declaration. In it he lays out his positions on the then current neurology of the day (Awakenings was first published in 1973) which he lambastes as coldly empirical and lacking a complementary metaphysical component. In America, and no doubt much of the West, these were the last years of the Physician as God. There was little public knowledge of medicine then, unlike today, and the doctor's role in a crisis was usually unquestioned. Today second opinions are sought with regularity, "integrative" approaches to healing more readily embraced, and there is a vast industry based on purveying medical knowledge to the general public. You can see this great change perhaps best in the way pharmaceutical companies now advertise directly to the public in a way they never did during the Awakenings period. Sacks is here an articulate proponent for a more human, less coldly analytical medicine, and his endorsement for such an approach, which includes close interpersonal relationships with patients, is a clarion call. Fascinating, meticulous, and highly recommended.

One appendix is devoted to the many dramatizations of Awakenings on stage and screen. There's Harold Pinter's one-act play "A Kind of Alaska," an original documentary film, and the feature film, which retained Sacks as a consultant. I found his descriptions here of DeNiro preparing for his role as Leonard L. fascinating.

[fearless2012 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I think that Sacks makes alot of his attempts to make this great humanistic piece, instead of dreary impersonal medical/scientific writing, but, well, anything can be billed as humanistic, but that doesn't always make it so. At times it's not even clearly readable, let alone anything else. It's a little difficult to explain, but, well in one of the prefaces he indirectly compares himself to Gibbon, and at times it has more the feel of the "classical" text-- complete with unreadable Latin words-- than this super-personal, Story-of-'69 thing that it sorta gets billed as. This might come across as a little bit out there, but in this impressionistic way, it's like "Grand Budapest Hotel" or one of those Wes Anderson movies where the bizarre is valued for its own sake-- bizarre words, for example-- which seems to draw the (*coughgeeky) intellectual sort like flies to the light.... I can certainly say that his idea of incorporating "humanistic" vibes into the science talk is pretty heavy on the *past masters*, (One Time Ibsen Said, sorta thing), rather than the coming-down-to-earth vibe that is implicitly promised, I think, when we have this humanistic vs. eff-you-I'm-a-scientist (you know what I mean) styles-of-writing conversation.... I'm only rating it as highly as I am for these reasons: it could have been worse, if for example he had (*coughignorantly) set out to rub our noses in our "ignorance" like some scientist types do, then it could have really been unbearable. Second, it tried to be a case-study book, about personal stories, and, despite numbing length and unpleasant encyclopedia-like qualities, it didn't entirely depart from this intention. Third, I only read this for school, (else I would have started with "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat", which might still be great), and it did help some with my paper. So I don't really want to view it as fully flawed, even though it's certainly not part of the higher levels of achievement, I find. (It's certainly not *poetic*, despite his fascination with John Donne.) [Although I've not read this many words of undefinable value since my last book of archaic poetry....] ..... And even during his attempts to be most personal, the text is cluttered, I must say, with the most unnecessary words. ........ I could not call it a "great" book; I cannot approve of the style. ("He studies too much for words of four syllables.") [I understand that there's science and such, but.... he made this big thing about being humanistic, about being *emotional*, and although there's some *competence* to his ~500 pages of doctor's notes, I couldn't say much more for it, beyond this.] {"She appeared to have bilateral nuclear and internuclear ophthalmoplegia, with alternating extrophia." These are, indeed, "hospital notes", not "biography". Incidentally, I think "ophthalmoplegia" really does have *four* syllables, and my nook dictionary has no idea what it means. I could excerpt many such examples, of not so much poetry but meaningless prose, if I were not determined not to.} On the one hand I don't want to be too hard on it, on the other, I don't think that I have.(8/10)

[judy_aa · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was not able to find Awakenings in a traditional print format so this review is based on the audiobook.

Having finished Hallucinations recently, I thought it would be interesting to read Sacks's first book, Awakenings, based on his treatment of post-encephalitis lethargica patients in the late sixties/early seventies. Known as "sleepy sickness", encephalitis lethargica spread around the world between 1915 to the late 1920's. The disease left its victims motionless and speechless, very similar to certain forms of Parkinsonism. Awakenings is a collection of treatment notes for twenty or so patients, covering their treatment prior to, during, and often after, the appearance of the then "wonder" drug, L-dopamine.

The stories are absolutely gut-wrenching, touching on everything from the loss of self to the abasement of patients in long-term care facilities. I have no expertise in neuroscience so I cannot review with that perspective. I found Awakenings profoundly moving and although I do not normally recommend science books in audio format, I think this worked particularly well in this case.

[sean191 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Awakenings - amazing and incredible. The spanish influenza was long before my time as was the attack of "sleepy sickness" that followed closely on its heels. I've heard of the former, but other than knowing the movie inspired by the book exists, I had no idea of the latter. That's the first amazing part. The second amazing part is the stories about those affected by the disease and getting some insight into the incredible mysteries of the human mind. That's not to say the book was without problems. On a moral level, a few patients actually benefited in the long term from treatment. But most ended up worse off. In one case, Sacks (the author of the book and the doctor conducting the experiments/research) actually hid dosage of the treatment drug in a patient's food because the patient didn't want to try the treatment. Repeatedly throughout the book, he makes note of saying he felt treatment might be a bad idea, yet does it anyway. That's troubling to me. Did he have the patients best interests in mind or was he just trying to make a name for himself at the expense of the defenseless? Beyond that, the writing style was dull, so when the anecdotes about the patients started to seem a little repetitive, it bogged down. I only read about half the epilogue because it was diverging into literally a page of footnotes for a page of actual main text and I also couldn't deal with Sacks writing another "thus" to start a sentence. Still, if you're not familiar with a pandemic that killed or crippled tens of thousands of people across the world early last century, it's a fascinating read.

[sgerbic · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reviewed Jan 2005 I loved the movie and have been looking for the book. Found it this xmas season while shopping for presents. The movie is based on events in the book, the story line is a bit stretched. Sacks writes case studioes of 20 patients, detailing their illness before and after L-DOPA. As with his other book "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" he speaks as a doctor not as a novelist, making the reading difficult at times. I know I skipped over hundreds of words I would never be able to pronounce. The stories of these patients and their wasted lives is overwhelmingly sad, to be frozen, dependent on others and in many cases abandoned by family is horrific. I was confused at times to read that many of the patients could speak and understood some of what was happening around them. In the movie this isn't true. The patients upon awakening teach the staff and family that they are real people with frustrations and desires unique to themselves. Almost more sad were the underlying problems at the hospital. Programs cut, visitors discouraged, staff cut back...ect...which leads to horrible consequences. Severe depression and resentment also several deaths due to bedsores. I would like to think my boys would show an interest in this, maybe learning compassion and learning about human spirit and the will to survive. 2-2005

[woollymammoth_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An account of the awakenings of the surviours of the Sleeping sickness epidemic. And utterly fascinating account of an amazing event in medicine.