Vienna. In the winter of 1916, a mysterious pathology spread whose wide symptomatology - fever, headache, mental confusion, hypersleep, insomnia, catatonia, akinesia

What was later called “Encephalitis lethargica” remains a mystery of modern medicine today.

The pathogen that caused it - probably a virus - was never identified and the infection - after having affected 5 million individuals worldwide and killing over a million in ten years - disappeared completely, never to recur again.

The disease initially manifested itself in an acute form that included the wide range of manifestations mentioned above; in this phase 40% of the patients succumbed.

The acute phase was followed by a chronic phase during which the primary symptoms disappeared and the patients fell into a state of apparent catatonia or more precisely into a condition of so-called "chronic Parkinsonism", where tremors and rigidity - taken to extremes - caused the patient to end up in a state of total akinesia.

Many of these patients turned into real living statues, for days, months, years.

Over 40 years later, in 1966, a young and still unknown Dr. Oliver Sacks gathered a small community of surviving patients at Mount Carmel Hospital in New York and, sensing the link between encephalitis lethargica and an extreme form of Parkinson's disease, he risked administer to patients a new and very expensive drug used to contain the symptoms of Parkinson's: L-DOPA.

It was thanks to this intuition that the "living statues" began to "wake up" and incredibly regain normal functions, returning to a completely normal life.

Unfortunately, the exceptional recovery was not destined to last; the rapid habituation to the drug forced the increase in doses of administration and this led to the appearance of serious side effects which in a short time effectively canceled the beneficial effects of the drug, forcing Dr. Sacks to suspend it.

No longer receiving L-DOPA, the patients quickly relapsed into the primitive state of akinesia and returned to their condition as living statues, this time never to return.

From these incredible events, the film "Awakenings" was made and produced in 1990, and nominated for three Oscars.

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