In the nineteen-sixties, the English neurologist treated patients who had encephalitis lethargica and wrote constant updates about their progress, and his own. 
When the neurologist Oliver Sacks was working at a Bronx hospital for the chronically ill, in the nineteen-sixties, he had dozens of patients who were virtually immobile and unable to communicate. They were survivors of encephalitis lethargica, also known as sleeping sickness, which had proliferated after the First World War. Some had been hospitalized for forty years. In 1968, a new drug called levodopa, or L-dopa, was discovered to treat people with Parkinson’s. Sacks wondered whether “DOPA,” as he called it, could also help his patients, who had similar symptoms. Sacks’s progress experimenting with the drug is documented in his many letters—to his Ma and Pa, to fellow-doctors, and to his friends, including W. H. Auden and the director Peter Weir—highlights of which are excerpted in this week’s issue. “My three patients are doing extraordinarily well on the DOPA,” Sacks wrote to his parents, in April of 1969.9. “One of them, who was virtually unable to talk or move . . . is now chatting and toddling down the corridors.” Sack’s remarkable medical breakthrough would become the basis of his trailblazing book “Awakenings,” published in 1973, and, years later, of the film adaptation, directed by Penny Marshall, starring Robin Williams as Sacks and Robert De Niro as one of his post-encephalitic patients. | .png)
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