Awakenings

Awakenings is a 1973 book by Oliver Sacks that recounts the life histories of people who had been victims of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the 1920s. In the late 1960s Sacks chronicled his efforts to help these patients at the Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, New York, where the new drug L-DOPA was used. The observed effects on the patients' symptoms were generally dramatic but temporary.

The 1976 edition is dedicated to the memory of Sacks's close friend, the poet W. H. Auden, who called the book a masterpiece. In 1974 it won the Hawthornden Prize. However, according to a December 2025 article in The New Yorker, the book was met with silence or skepticism from other neurologists, and its findings could not be replicated. Sacks himself wrote in his private journal that some details were "pure fabrications."

The book inspired a play, two films, a ballet and an opera.