![]() ![]() For many survivors, this was the 1920s, a time that would remain more real to them than any subsequent decade. In the majority of cases, these patients had their thoughts and feelings unchangingly fixed at the point at which their long “sleep” had closed in on them. They would sit motionless and speechless all day in their chairs, totally lacking energy, impetus, initiative, motive, appetite or desire. These survivors were described by the doctor who first identified encephalitis lethargica as “extinct volcanoes”. Other patients who suffered an extremely severe somnolent/insomnia attack often failed ever to recover their original vitality and lived out their days, cut off from humanity, in a deeply strange, inaccessible, frozen state (“a kind of Alaska”), oblivious to the passage of time or what had befallen them. A third of those afflicted by encephalitis lethargica died in its acute stages, in advanced states of coma or sleeplessness. ![]() The “sleepy sickness” pandemic of 1916-17, which persisted into the 1920s, ravaged the lives of nearly 5 million people before it disappeared, as mysteriously and suddenly as it had appeared, in 1927. ![]()
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