Awakenings is a 1973 book by Oliver Sacks. It recounts the life histories of those who had been victims of the 1920s encephalitis lethargica epidemic. Sacks chronicles his efforts in the late 1960s to help these patients at the Beth Abraham Hospital (now Beth Abraham Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing) in the Bronx, New York. The treatment used the new drug L-DOPA, with the observed effects on the patients' symptoms being generally dramatic but temporary.
In 1982, Sacks wrote:
The 1976 edition of the book is dedicated to the memory of Sacks's close friend the poet W. H. Auden, and bears an extract from Auden's 1969 poem The Art of Healing:
Auden himself called Awakenings a masterpiece.Sacks, O. (1976), Awakenings, Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, back cover blurb In 1974 the book won the Hawthornden Prize.
According to a December 2025 article in the New Yorker, the book was "met with silence or skepticism by other neurologists", and Sacks' findings could not be replicated. Sacks wrote in his private journal that some details of the book were “pure fabrications.” Lawrence Weschler, who was preparing a biography of Sacks, visited the patients described in the book and found "a lot of people shitting in their pants, drooling."
In popular culture The book inspired a play, two films, a ballet and an opera: 1974: the documentary film Awakenings, produced by Duncan Dallas for Yorkshire Television as the first episode and pilot of the British television programme Discovery.Halliwell, Martin Romantic Science and the Experience of Self: Transatlantic Crosscurrents from William James to Oliver Sacks, Routledge, 1999 Footnote 23 The documentary won a Red Ribbon at the 1978 American Film Festival and first prize at the 1978 International Rehabilitation Film Festival. 1982: the play A Kind of Alaska by Harold Pinter, performed as part of a trilogy of Pinter's plays titled Other Places. 1990: the Oscar-nominated film Awakenings, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. 2010: the ballet Awakenings, composed by Tobias Picker for the Rambert Dance Company, and premiered by Rambert in Salford, UK. 2022: the opera Awakenings, also composed by Picker, commissioned by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, with a libretto by Picker's husband Aryeh Lev Stollman, premiered on 11 June 2022.
References
External links Other Places – Listed in "Plays" section of haroldpinter.org. Includes photograph of playbill, production details, and retyped performance review by Alan Jenkins, originally published in The Times Literary Supplement entitled "The Withering of Love", reproduced with permission.