Awakenings is the remarkable account of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen in a decades-long sleep, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, “awakening” effect. Dr.

Later, he served as neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital's chronic-care facility in the Bronx, where he worked with a group of survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica epidemic, who had been unable to move on their own for decades.

Learn how Oliver Sacks treated patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica, or “sleeping sickness,” in this video from American Masters' Oliver Sacks: His Own Life. In 1969, Oliver Sacks began seeing patients who had been unable to move or communicate for many years after they contracted an illness.

Jun 3, 2020 · Now hailed as a medical classic this extraordinary account of a group of 20 patients, survivors of the great sleeping-sickness epidemic which swept the world in the 1920's, and the astonishing explosive "awakening" effect they experienced 40 years later through new drug L-DOPA administered by Dr. Sacks.

Sacks's book Awakenings is a series of extraordinary case reports describing how patients trapped by parkinsonism were re-awakened by levodopa after decades of stupor and inertia. After the first world war, an epidemic of encephalitis lethargica started in …

May 29, 2013 · 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...

Awakenings, a book written by Oliver Sacks in 1973, and later adapted into a film in 1990, tells the remarkable true story of a group of patients who were affected by encephalitis lethargica, also known as sleepy sickness, during the epidemic that occurred between 1917 and 1928.

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...

Oct 5, 1999 · 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.”