The New Yorker:

In the nineteen-sixties, the English neurologist treated patients who had encephalitis lethargica and wrote constant updates about their progress, and his own.

By Oliver Sacks

In 1966, the London-born neurologist Oliver Sacks, then in his early thirties, started working at Beth Abraham, a hospital for the chronically ill, in the Bronx. He soon began noticing dozens of patients, scattered among the wards, who were virtually immobile and unable to communicate. Going through their records, he realized that they were all survivors of encephalitis lethargica, also known as sleeping sickness, which had swept the globe after the First World War. This disease could be fatal; those who survived it sometimes developed syndromes that could seem like an extreme form of Parkinson’s. By the sixties, some of Sacks’s patients had been hospitalized for forty years, and the encephalitis epidemic itself had largely been forgotten.

In 1968, the medical community was galvanized by the news that people with Parkinson’s could be helped by a new drug called levodopa, or L-dopa. Sacks wondered whether “dopa,” as he called it, could also help his patients, and he applied to the F.D.A. to use it as an experimental drug. His findings would become the basis of his groundbreaking book “Awakenings,” published in 1973.

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