They would be conscious and aware - yet not fully awake they would sit motionless and speechless all day in their chairs, totally lacking energy, impetus, initiative, motive, appetite, affect or desire they registered what went on about them without active attention, and with profound indifference. Sacks writes that nearly five million people contracted this “sleeping sickness,” and that a third of those died, many during the great influenza pandemic of 1918, when “the encephalitis assumed its most virulent form.” Among those who survived, some recovered completely some had lingering symptoms, though not enough to prevent them from leading fairly normal lives into old age and others were permanently thrown into a catatonic state: Though Awakenings was published in 1973, its story begins much earlier, in the epidemic of encephalitis lethargica that spread across the world from, roughly, 1916 to 1927, after which the disease disappeared, completely and inexplicably. And humanism - properly understood, properly chastened - forcefully repudiates the tyranny of categories. It is a kind of manifesto for a forgotten humanism.

It is, I believe, an essential book for our moment. These thoughts have been prompted by my revisiting a book I first read several decades ago: the neurologist Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, first published fifty years ago.

Its bureaucratically enforced identity politics is the price we pay simply for living. A doctor’s-office checklist is a spell against dying.

1973 book by oliver sacks