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Illness In The Awakenings

951 Words4 Pages

The movie “Awakenings” is a thrilling movie about love and overcoming an unknown illness. Anticipation, anxiety, and happiness are all possible emotions you’ll feel while watching this moving movie, similar to the emotions you feel while watching “A Walk to Remember” a movie that covers a little girl who overcomes a life-threatening illness. The movie “Awakenings” is based on the memoir written by Dr. Oliver Sacks in 1973, with his name and other successors/acquaintances in the memoir changed.
The movie is set in the Bronx of 1969, where researcher Dr. Malcolm Sayer applies at
Bainbridge chronic hospital hoping to be a researcher but ends up getting hired as a neurologist to work with the chronic patients of the hospital. The day Dr. Sayer starts, he notices the hospitals long corridors and activity wards with the windows barred up, filled with statue-like patients confined to wheelchairs. It takes a while for Dr. Sayer to get acquainted with the patients since none of them are responsive and no one actually …show more content…

Sayer starts by looking at illnesses with similar symptoms, and treatments that have been used to cure the related illnesses. While at a conference, Dr. Sayer stumbled across a drug called L-Dopa. Since L-Dopa helps with the symptoms of Parkinson’s, Dr. Sayer ponders whether it could help his patients with what they’re experiencing. After talking his superiors into purchasing the drug for one patient, he started Leonard Lowe on the treatment. Dr. Sayer notices results the night of, with Leonard waking up and actually being ‘awake’.
After noticing the results of the L-Dopa drug, they purchased it for all of the patients experiencing lethargica. These encephalitis lethargica patients get to experience life like they never were asleep, dancing and playing card games in the activity ward. The hospital also lets the patients go on a field trip to a botanical garden and go dancing in a jazz club, getting to see how society has changed since they were

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