Awakenings
by Oliver Sacks, Jonathan Davis · first published 1973
7mentions
3recommended by
7HN commenters
2018–2026first – last mentioned
43% recommend57% neutral
This is the extraordinary account of a group of 20 patients, survivors of the great sleeping-sickness epidemic which swept the world in the 1920s, and the astonishing, explosive "awakening" effect they experienced 40 years later through a new drug L-DOPA administered by Dr Sacks. The stories he tells of these remarkable individuals are moving, often courageous and sometimes tragic. Through them he also explores the most general questions of health, disease, suffering, care and the human condition.
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The book (Awakenings by Oliver Sacks) might be a better resource if you're interested in specifics and don't care for dramatization.
on “Severe brain injury and paralysis temporarily reversed with a sleeping pill” ↗Also, if you want to learn more about Oliver Sacks outside of his weightlifting, check out Awakenings (his book, later made into a movie starring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams, with the latter playing Sacks) or The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He wrote a number of other books that are also interesting…
on “On Oliver Sacks and His Obsession with Weightlifting” ↗…which requires some form of proprioception. Oliver Sacks talks a lot about other senses beyond those covered in school. I can recommend "The man who mistook his wife for a hat", "Hallucinations", and "Awakenings".
on “The Beauty of Crossed Brain Wires” ↗Further, it’s a popular recurring story arc that appears in many popular magazines (Discover, which for some reason I always buy when flying has a regular series) and in many books (eg, ``Awakenings’’ by Oliver Sacks) Whether this particular submission meets the criteria for a HN discussion could be debated, although it does seem to have generated at least some useful comments.
on “Her Various Symptoms Seemed Unrelated, Then One Doctor Put It All Together” ↗I'm reading Awakenings by Oliver Sacks in English and Medmänniskor by Stefan Einhorn in Swedish.
on “Ask HN: What are you reading?” ↗Reading the HN title, I was immediately reminded of the Oliver Sacks book Awakenings[1]. He discovered that the drug L-DOPA could temporarily awaken encephalitis patients from a coma-like state. I wonder if the article's title "Awakening after a sleeping pill" is a reference to that book.…
on “Severe brain injury and paralysis temporarily reversed with a sleeping pill” ↗If it was Oliver Sacks' Awakenings then it is non-fiction, though it did get turned into a movie.
on “Show HN: 40k HN comments mentioning books, extracted using deep learning” ↗