Awakenings

Book info: Awakenings (Hardcover, 255 pages – Duckworth, 1973) – Duckworth, 1973. Language: Eng.

Condition: Good

Hailed by The Washington Post as, "One of the most beautifully composed and moving works of our time." Awakenings tells the story of sleeping-sickness epidemic of 1918 which caused hundreds of survivors to slip into a paralysis with similarities to advanced Parkinson's disease. These patients, only occasionally able to communicate or move, were nearly all institutionalized 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; 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.