They would sit motionless and speechless all day in their chairs, totally lacking energy, impetus, initiative, motive, appetite or desire. These survivors were described by the doctor who first identified encephalitis lethargica as ''extinct volcanoes''. Other patients who suffered an extremely severe somnolent/insomnia attack often failed ever to recover their original vitality and lived out their days, cut off from humanity, in a deeply strange, inaccessible, frozen state (''a kind of Alaska''), oblivious to the passage of time or what had befallen them. A third of those afflicted by encephalitis lethargica died in its acute stages, in advanced states of coma or sleeplessness. The ''sleepy sickness'' pandemic of 1916-17, which persisted into the 1920s, ravaged the lives of nearly 5 million people before it disappeared, as mysteriously and suddenly as it had appeared, in 1927. Its central themes - falling asleep, being turned to stone, being awakened, decades later, to a world no longer one's own - grip the imagination like the best drama, with this difference: the events described by the late Oliver Sacks actually happened. It reverberates to this day.Īmong the great books in this series that address the human condition, Awakenings stands out as a profoundly influential medical classic from the 1970s, whose extraordinary narrative continues to reverberate.Īwakenings has inspired short stories, poems, novels and plays, notably Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska. His choice for No 12 is Awakenings, Oliver Sacks’ moving account of how, as a doctor in the late 1960s, he revived patients who had been neurologically ‘frozen’ by sleeping sickness. Thus he has crafted a definitive selection of essential works of non-fiction, classic titles he believes have had a decisive influence on the shaping of the our imagination - economically, socially, culturally and politically. Photo: Getty Images Author and Observer writer Robert McCrum loves a good list.

Dr oliver sacks l dopa