encephalitis lethargica

Around the same time, cases of a new brain-attacking disease called encephalitis lethargica started to emerge, affecting up to one million people worldwide.

Blossoming, because the people have been “awakened” from the long-lingering effects of encephalitis lethargica — the “sleeping sickness” — by the miracle drug L-dopa, which Sacks administers to them experimentally.

From the 1920s to the 1960s, they observed an increase in encephalitis lethargica, a brain affliction; Parkinson’s disease; cognitive decline; and psychosis.

Adapted by Steven Zaillian from the Oliver Sacks memoir, the movie was about Sacks’s experimental use of the drug L-Dopa to revive patients with encephalitis lethargica, or “sleeping sickness”.

Labelled as sleepy sickness — or more properly encephalitis lethargica — the disease caused a number of bizarre mental and physical symptoms and frequently left people in a catatonic state, sometimes for decades.