In the winter of 1916, an epidemic of lethargic encephalitis breaks out, first described by K. von Economo in Vienna. Many patients die. Thousands plunge into a state of strange and definitive lethargy. Many decades later, Sachs encounters these incurable patients in an asylum in New York.

In 1967, G. Kotsias is the first to test a miraculous drug in America. Its results are spectacular: these patients wake up, begin to talk again, walk, and rediscover the joy of life. However, they are overwhelmed by hallucinations, delirium, and obsessions, and their personality shatters into a nightmarish multitude of "sub-egos." Should the dosage of the drug be reduced? Should it be stopped? These are the dilemmas that Sachs faces.

The first part of the book is an extremely moving account of the fate of these patients. It raises certain reflections that are developed in the second part: Health and Illness - which is no longer treated as a foreign body that one "catches," but as a state of being that follows its own logic.

Awakenings was successfully adapted into a film by Penny Marshall. In this later edition of the book, a large chapter is dedicated to the making of the film and the monumental work of Robert De Niro (Leonard - the patient) and Robin Williams (Oliver Sachs - the doctor).