Awakenings - Softcover

Sacks, Oliver

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060973684 ISBN 13: 9780060973681

Publisher: HarperPerennial, 2010

Synopsis

Describes the effects of the drug L-DOPA on twenty patients with encephalitic Parkinsonism

About this title

Review:

It hardly seems fair that so many great doctors are also great writers. Perhaps it's qualities like sensitivity, craft and dedication that keep physicians like Oliver Sacks in hospitals all day and at writing desks all night; if nothing else, these qualities shine in books like Awakenings. This powerful set of case histories rises above its pathological foundation to find new literary territory, a medical-spiritual synthesis equally stimulating for the mind and the soul. It's no wonder Hollywood chose to turn it into a feature film--anyone can see the universal human struggle against bondage and despair in these pages.

The sleeping-sickness epidemic of 1918 caused hundreds of survivors to slip into a bizarre rigid paralysis with similarities to advanced Parkinson's disease. These patients, only occasionally able to communicate or move, were nearly all institutionalised for life, their ranks increasing every now and then with similarly afflicted men and women. Sacks came to work at a long-term care facility shortly before the first exciting results with L-DOPA and Parkinson's in the late 1960s and his patients soon embarked on dramatic, difficult recoveries from up to 50 years of torpor. He documents their spiritual and medical obstacles with great care to portray their individual personalities, long suppressed but finally released. Though many great doctors are also great writers, few can compare with Oliver Sacks for expressing the relation of medicine to the human spirit. --Rob Lightner

Review:

"[Sacks] opens to the reader doors of perception generally passed through only by those at the far borders of human experience".

-- The Boston Globe

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperPerennial
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0060973684
• ISBN 13: 9780060973681
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448