Sacks - Awakenings

Acclaim forOLIVER SACKSs
Awakenings

Not only a collection of astonishing case histories, Awakenings is also a memoir, a moral essay and a romance. A work of genius.

The Washington Post

Experiences so strange that [it is] difficult to conceive [they] are not limited to travels up the Amazon or to the moon, but can occur within the confines of the human head. This long sleep and sudden awakening to a new strange world, though so alien, {has} an immediate power to grip the imagination. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that through this book we live with the dead, brought back from the past.

Richard Gregory, The Listener

It makes you aware of what a knife-edge we live on.

Doris Lessing

A wise and chastening book. Oliver Sacks must be an extraordinary doctor. Awakenings conveys the wisdom and poignant optimism of the classically tragic view of life.

Newsweek

A remarkable book.

Harold Pinter

Books by OLIVER SACKS

Oaxaca Journal

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

The Island of the Colorblind

An Anthropologist on Mars

Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

A Leg to Stand On

Awakenings

Migraine

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1999

Copyright 1973, 1976, 1982, 1983, 1987, 1990 by Oliver Sacks

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Summit Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, in 1987. This edition first published by HarperPerennial, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, in 1990.

Vintage Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

I am grateful to the following for quotations from copyrighted material: from Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, to Mrs. Katherine Jones, The Hogarth Press Ltd and Basic Books Inc.; from The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, to Laurence Pollinger Ltd and the Estate of the late Mrs. Frieda Lawrence, William Heinemann Ltd and The Viking Press Inc.; from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, to the literary executors of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Basil Blackwell & Mott Ltd and The Macmillan Company, New York; from John Maynard Keynes, Collected Writings, to the Royal Economic Society, Macmillan, London and Basingstoke, Ltd and St. Martins Press Inc.; from T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 19091962, to Faber & Faber Ltd and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sacks, Oliver W.
Awakenings/Oliver Sacks.1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37105-8
1. Postencephalitic Parkinsons disease Case studies. 2. Epidemic encephalitisComplications Case studies. 3. DOPA Therapeutic use Case studies. I. Title.
[RC382.S23 1999]
616.832dc21 99-27880

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

To the memory of W. H. Auden
and A. R. Luria

and now, a preternatural
birth in returning to life
from this sickness

DONNE

My first (and infinite) debt is to the remarkable patients at Mount Carmel Hospital, New York, whose stories I relate in this book, and to whom Awakenings was originally dedicated.

It is difficult now, looking back over a quarter of a century, to recall all of those at Mount Carmel who were concerned with our patients, and who directly or indirectly contributed to Awakenings; but I have warm memories of the nursing staff Ellen Costello, Eleanor Gaynor, Janice Grey, and Melanie Epps; of the medical staff Walter Schwartz, Charles Messeloff, Jack Sobel, and Flora Tabbador; of our speech therapist, and my closest helpmate in the crucial three years when our patients were being awakened, Margie Kohl Inglis; of our EEG technician, who was my collaborator on The Electrical Basis of Awakenings, Chris Carolan; of our pharmacist, Bob Malta, who spent hours encapsulating L-DOPA , surrounded by clouds of dopaminergic dust; and of devoted occupational and physiotherapists. I have to single out our music therapists Kitty Stiles in the early years of our patients awakenings, and Connie Tomaino since with whom I have had the closest relation, for music has been the profoundest non-chemical medication for our patients.

I owe a special debt to my English colleagues at the Highlands Hospital, for enabling me to keep in touch with an extraordinary group of patients, profoundly similar to, yet profoundly different from, ours at Mount Carmel. In particular, I must acknowledge the friendly assistance of Gerald Stern and Donald Calne, who helped awaken these patients in 1969; James Sharkey and Rod-win Jackson, who between them have looked after these patients since 1945; Bernard Thompson, a nurse who was with the patients for many years; and, above all, James Purdon Martin, who had known these (and other) post-encephalitic patients for more than sixty years. He made a special visit to Mount Carmel in 1969, to see our patients in the first flush of their awakenings, and was thereafter something of a father figure and a guide.

Innumerable other colleagues and friends have helped me, or Awakenings, along the way: D. P. dePaola, Roger Duvoisin, Stanley Fahn (and the Basal Ganglia Club), Ilan Golani, Elkhonon Goldberg, Mark Homonoff, William Langston, Andrew Lees, Margery Mark, Jonathan Mueller, H. Narabayashi, Isabelle Rapin, Robert Rodman, Israel Rosenfield, Sheldon Ross, Richard Shaw, Bob Wasserman. Among these I should especially mention Jonathan Miller, who preserved a copy of the 1969 manuscript, when I had destroyed the original, and conveyed this to Colin Haycraft, my first editor-publisher (and who, much later, was to make the remarkable BBC film portrait of Ivan Vaughan, Ivan); Eric Korn, who helped edit the 1976 edition; Lawrence Weschler, who knew many of the post-encephalitic patients at Mount Carmel, and has discussed aspects of Awakenings with me in every way, intensively, for ten years; and Ralph Siegel, who is now working with me on chaos theory and awakenings.

A special place must be reserved for those colleagues who are themselves patients, and who know and can describe the world of the Parkinsonian with an incomparable authority, from the inside. Among these have been Ivan Vaughan, Sidney Dorros, and Cecil Todes (all of whom have written their own accounts of living with Parkinsons); and Ed Weinberger, who has provided powerful insights and images for me in innumerable ways. Many people with Tourettes syndrome have helped me to understand their own condition, a condition with many similarities to that of hyperkinetic encephalitis. Finally, my own postencephalitic patient, Lillian Tighe, whom I have known now for over twenty years: Lillian was central in the documentary film of Awakenings, and was an inspiration during the making of the feature film of it too.