Arguably Oliver Sacks’s most celebrated book, Awakenings has beeoliver n hailed as a classic, even though it was only later, with the publication of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, that his work would achieve best-seller status.

The book tells the story of a group of twenty patients at the Beth Abraham hospital in the Bronx, New York City, who were affected by sleeping sickness – encephalitic lethargica. The condition left millions of people motionless and unable to speak following an epidemic just after World War I.

After the use of the drug L-Dopa, the patients “awaken” from the sickness, and the book is a chronicle of this awakening. It inspired the 1990 film with the same name, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, as well as a play by Harold Pinter.

In an interview with Wired, Sacks spoke of the profound effect that the patients featured in this book had on his life: “The essential thing was that I found myself in a position of care and concern for a whole population of abandoned, forgotten, and – it first seemed – hopeless people. Unlike the movie of Awakenings, where I was portrayed living at some distance away from the hospital, I virtually lived with the patients, spending 16 hours a day with them. I had never been in a situation of such safe intimacy with other human beings."

Published in 1973.