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Author: Sacks, Oliver

True stories

Published on 20 April 2023 by PAN MACMILLAN (Picador) in the United Kingdom as part of ‘the Picador Collection’ series.

Paperback | 464 pages
197 x 130 x 31 | 368g

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