Culture

D o you like horror stories? Do you ever wish for factual proof that the world is completely terrifying? Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries is about a disease known as encephalitis lethargica. It’s not surprising if you haven’t heard of it. It was an epidemic around the 1920s that killed close to a million people, and altered the lives of thousands more. It’s not at all famous.

Probably because that would require talking about it, and talking about it would require thinking about it. People don’t want to do that. Because this disease is terrifying.

It was colloquially known as sleeping sickness because the most famous cases often involved people staying asleep for months before dying, but some who suffered from encephalitis lethargica instead lost the ability to sleep at all, which can kill you and did kill them. The symptoms varied wildly from person to person. People who survived the initial outbreak would often alter dramatically in personality, to the point of seeming like different, and much less pleasant, people. In particular, children who had seemingly recovered would lose all control of their impulses when going through puberty, becoming so dangerously violent that it was considered necessary to isolate them from society.

Since they don’t really know what caused it (the accepted answer is “something something flu something”) they don’t really know why it went away. It could come back as an epidemic, cases do still occur occasionally, and there isn’t a cure. You may now understand why the usual reaction to this disease is to just avoiding thinking about it.

Asleep takes case studies of seven patients and combines them with a focus on the physicians who studied encephalitis lethargica. Probably the most frustrating thing with the book is a result of what makes it so frightening: it’s all true. Crosby has to work with what was recorded and, sadly, people at the time weren’t especially invested in keeping track of those who suffered from this disease. The case histories Crosby presents have a tendency to vague out into question marks once the subjects are no longer receiving medical care. This works as a pretty excellent allegory for how the medical world as a whole treated encephalitis lethargica. Unfortunately for most, this results in a book that is in no way suited to people who like closure or happiness.

However, if you are like me, morbid and attracted to any information you can use for disturbing anecdote fodder at parties, read Asleep. Have nightmares.