Drugs In The Awakenings

774 Words2 Pages

Awakenings is a film based around the research of Dr. Malcolm Sayer, who is a clinical physician at a mental hospital. The film starts with him being hired on to work at this mental hospital, even though he has little experience working with actual people. Most of his work previously had been research rather than hands on work with humans. Whenever he is introduced to his patients, he is given the patients who are primarily unresponsive, or known as catatonic. He discovers a common link between all of them, that being that they all dealt with a common issue, being encephalitis, which is essentially the swelling of the brain. Dr. Malcolm Sayer then went to a conference that discussed a breakthrough drug called L-Dopa. The medication was designed …show more content…

Does it mean that you have be a physical human taking up space or does it mean that you have to be able to react and interact with your surroundings. Awakenings displays humans who show almost no signs of life, but yet are still living creatures. It makes it hard to define them as a person, because of their lack of ability to support themselves and interact with the world. Even though they are unable to do such things, they were still able to awakened and become interactive. The patients went from their comatose state to completely lively with the use of the L-Dopa drug, which brings up an even more complicated question. Do you have to be fully awake to be qualified as a person? The vegetable like humans were completely incapable of doing anything other than the basic human needs, but then were able to function properly for a short span of time. I would say that, to qualify as a person, you need to be able to function and interact with the world. The patients, while in the vegetable like states, are not fully what I would qualify as a person. However, they would have the potential to be a person, but not if they need another person to think for

Open Document