Revised edition, 1990.

Revised editions, 1976 and 1991. "It recounts the life histories of those who had been victims of the 1920s encephalitis lethargica epidemic.^[2] Sacks chronicles his efforts in the late 1960s to help these patients at the Beth Abraham Hospital (now Beth Abraham Health Services) in the Bronx, New York. The treatment used the then-new drug L-DOPA.

"In 1982, Dr. Sacks wrote:

"I have become much more optimistic than I was when I […] wrote Awakenings, for there has been a significant number of patients who, following the vicissitudes of their first years on L-DOPA, came to do – and still do – extremely well. Such patients have undergone an enduring awakening, and enjoy possibilities of life which had been impossible, unthinkable, before the coming of L-DOPA.^[3]

"The book inspired the 1982 play A Kind of Alaska by Harold Pinter, performed as part of a trilogy of Pinter's plays titled Other Places, and a documentary television episode, the pilot of the British television programme Discovery. It was also made into a 1990 Oscar-nominated film, Awakenings starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams" (Wikipedia)

Describes the case histories of some of Sacks's patients. The title comes from the case study of a man with visual agnosia.^[1]  The book "became the basis of an opera of the same name by Michael Nyman, which premiered in 1986.

"The book comprises twenty-four essays split into four sections, each dealing with a particular aspect of brain function such as deficits and excesses in the first two sections (with particular emphasis on the right hemisphere of the brain) while the third and fourth describe phenomenological manifestations with reference to spontaneous reminiscences, altered perceptions, and extraordinary qualities of mind found in mentally handicapped people."^{[2]" (Wikipedia)}

In a review for The Washington Post, Peter D. Kramer wrote, "In Musicophilia, Sacks turns to the intersection of music and neurology -- music as affliction and music as treatment." Kramer wrote, "Lacking the dynamic that propels Sacks's other work, Musicophilia threatens to disintegrate into a catalogue of disparate phenomena." Kramer went on to say, "What makes Musicophilia cohere is Sacks himself. He is the book's moral argument. Curious, cultured, caring, in his person Sacks justifies the medical profession and, one is tempted to say, the human race." Kramer concluded his review by writing, "Sacks is, in short, the ideal exponent of the view that responsiveness to music is intrinsic to our makeup. He is also the ideal guide to the territory he covers. Musicophilia allows readers to join Sacks where he is most alive, amid melodies and with his patients."^[1]