Awakenings
Oliver Sacks · 1973
Sacks discovered that patients frozen in catatonic sleep since the 1920s encephalitis lethargica epidemic could be "awakened" by the drug L-DOPA. He wrote about it with the compassion of a physician who understood that these were not cases but souls. It founded a genre: medicine as humanism.
The case against
Twenty case histories in sequence, and the format wears: each patient surfaces, flickers, and relapses on a similar arc. Sacks footnotes compulsively, and successive editions grew new prefaces and appendices until the apparatus rivals the text. The clinical vocabulary runs thick for a general reader. Every awakening here ends in tribulation, which is honest, and a long way down.
Non-Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
