Oliver Sacks

Twenty-four case histories from Sacks's neurological practice — patients who have lost the ability to recognise faces, who have Tourette's, who have lost all sense of their own body, who see the world as if it were a painting. Each case is also a meditation on what it means to be a self.

In the late 1960s, Sacks treated a group of patients who had been encephalitic 'sleeping sickness' survivors since the 1920s. He administered the new drug L-DOPA and watched them awaken — often dramatically — after decades of stasis. Then, as the drug's effects became erratic, he watched them struggle.