Awakenings
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- Publication Date: 1973
- Written by: Oliver Sacks
- Page count: 386
Awakenings was the second Oliver Sacks book that I read, after The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Not long after I had finished Hat, I was doing some reading about other books that Sacks had written. I found out that Awakenings was not only the book that made him famous, but it also featured more in-depth analyses of the patients involved. While Hat is a great book on its own and has a bit of an oddity factor due to some of the conditions described, Awakenings is more of a somber read to me. This book is a genuine look at people who were living in an unimaginable hell and the doctors who were trying so hard to get them any sort of reprieve.
The book takes a look at patients in the late 1960s who were survivors of the 1920s "sleeping sickness." This was a disease caused fever, lethargy, sleep problems and many other issues, with some of them entering comatose states. After their recovery from the disease, many of these people developed Parkinson's-disease symptoms, with some of them losing the ability to even speak or move. These survivors spent years and years of their lives in the hospital with no real hope of recovery. When a drug was made in the late 1960s that could treat Parkinson's symptoms, Dr. Sacks slowly began to treat some of these patients with it to combat their conditions.
What makes Awakenings so interesting is the fact that Dr. Sacks approached these patients as people first, and not just opportunities for scientific experimentation. Each person covered in the book has their entire history told, from their pre-sickness life to their times during and after treatment. He takes every opportunity to hold deep conversations with them and see how they feel not just physically and mentally, but emotionally as well. Several of the patients were mentally aware of everything going on around them for years, but were simply unable to speak because their condition locked them inside of their bodies, which is unimaginably scary. This human-first approach really makes you care for every person involved. Even if you know nothing about medicine, you will want to keep reading just to see how these people's lives changed during this process.
Another thing I liked in this book is the look you get at the treatment process itself. Some of the patients required small doses of the drug, others large ones. Each person was unique, and it required trial after trial to try to get the dosage right for each one. My favorite parts of the book are when you get to hear the patient describe in their own words how they felt before and after. Being a work of non-fiction though, not everything here is happy. Some patients were on the drug for a matter of years, and while not perfect in the end, were able to walk and live ok lives in the hospital Others were only on it for a matter of months before asking to stop because the movements were too much, and their brain just couldn't take it anymore. It's really sad to read Sacks contemplate the futures of the patients that he couldn't successfully treat, yet he still remained hopeful when it came to the advancement of the drug and its usage. Like Hat, this book really shows off his empathetic side.
Awakenings may be less of a fun read than Hat, but just because it's less fun doesn't mean it's less interesting. Many people tend to think of doctors as cold professionals, but this book shows that there's an entire human side to medicine that we just don't think about often. I've come to think of Oliver Sacks as an extremely interesting man, and I'm really interested in reading what other books of his I can find. The brain is such a mysterious thing, and while no one can fully describe how it works the way it does, I'll trust this charming British doctor to help me make sense of it along the way.