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. Years later, Sacks became friendly with the director Peter Weir, who was considering taking on the film adaptation of “Awakenings.
” In the end, Penny Marshall directed the movie, which came out in 1990 and was nominated for three Academy Awards. Robin Williams was cast as the doctor modelled on Sacks, and Robert De Niro as one of his post-enceph.