Pop Matters quizzes the neurologist and author of Awakenings.
From the piece...
6. You’re proud of this accomplishment, but why?
As I was working with my Awakenings patients in the late-‘60s, they encouraged me to tell their stories, and to document them in other ways, too. It was not common in those days to film patients, but I scraped up enough money to buy a super-8 camera, and later a video camera (it was a Sony Portapak, so-called, which must have weighed 20 pounds) to film these patients before and after they began taking L-dopa for their parkinsonism. I worried, and they worried, that what I described in my book would sound outlandish, unbelievable, and we wanted to be able to show what it was really like.
Much of this footage was later incorporated into a British television documentary and reconstructed for the Hollywood film. But I think it is important to document the real patients, in their own words and actions. They felt very much that this film, like the book, was their testament.
7. You want to be remembered for…?
Not as a miracle worker, because I have no miracles. But I hope I will be remembered, by my patients, as a physician who paid attention, who listened, who tried to imagine what their lives were like.
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