76 | SCIENCE ILLUSTRATEDTHEIR FACES WERE SMOOTHbecause they hadnot spent years smiling or frowning.sometimes jumping high up in the
air with a distorted facial expression.
Neither doctors, nor parents know
how to calm down the poor boy, or
help him. The only thing doctors can
say is that sometimes the disease
ceases, and some patients have
recovered completely.”HIBERNATING” TEENAGER
On the other side of the Atlantic, in
New York, 16-year-old Rose falls
critically ill in early 1918. One
evening she complains of an
aching arm, and the next day, the
otherwise very balanced and
polite girl totally loses her temper,
hitting and kicking her parents
and her sister, calling them all
sorts of things. Only afterl she is
given a tranquilising pill, does she
calm down and enter into a deep,
death-like sleep.
By the end of February, six
weeks after her fit of rage,
Rose is still sleeping. Her
parents have given up waking
their daughter, who is fed food
and liquid intravenously, as
she is lying in her room like a
living dead. Several doctors
have examined and tested
the girl, but none can do
anything or explain her loss
of consciousness. The
desperate parents decide to
send for a brain and nervous
system specialist.
Frederick Tilney is one of
New York’s most skilled
neurologists, and he is
reputed to perform
miracles. Before his arrival,
Rose’s parents have told him about their
daughter’s symptoms, and according to
Tilney, Rose’s disease sounds very much
like von Economo disease. He has learned
that the disease has developed into an
epidemic in Europe in the wake of the
Spanish flu, and now, he fears that the
disorder has landed in America, ready to
crush human lives on yet another
continent. When the neurologist
approaches the sick bed, his worst fears
are confirmed. In the bed in front of him,
the girl is silent and motionless, her face
resembling a frozen mask, and as Tilneyuses his flashlight to shine light into her glassy eyes,
there is no reaction to be seen. Rose does not react to
sounds or smells either. She is hibernating and impossible
to wake. Quietly, Tilney tells the parents that Rose will
probably never recover. Before leaving the room, he turns
around at takes one final look at the sleeping girl,
discovering that she is crying.
A few days later, Tilney is informed that Rose is dead
and that she never woke up from her sleep. In a way, she
got off lightly, Tilney will soon discover. In the subsequent
period of time, as neurologists encounter still more
patients with encephalitis lethargica, he realises that it
is often not as tragic to die of the disease as to survive it.SURVIVORS TEAR THEIR EYES OUT
Just like Constantin von Economo predicted and feared,
the sleepy sickness develops into a global epidemic, which
spreads during the 1920s, killing approximately one million
people. Before the epidemic comes to an end in 1928, just
as many people are infected, only to recover completely,
and yet another million suffer chronic spillover effects.
Some sink into permanent hibernation, whereas most get
Parkinson’s-like symptoms such as slow, sluggish motions,
shaking, and rigid muscles. Most experience sleeping,
behavioural, and personality disorders as a consequence
of the inflammation of their brain tissue.
In hospitals throughout the world, the staff witnesses
horrifying scenarios, in which some of the survivors go
berserk and hurt themselves during severe psychoses.
Some tear their own eyes or their teeth out, as if they are
in a trance. Others prick themselves with needles or cut
themselves with knives. Sometimes, the cases have
happy endings, however. For more than three months, a
29-year-old woman from New York has been hibernating,
impossible to reach. When her husband hires a violinist to
play by her sick bed, a miracle happens. At the moment
that the sound of Franz Schubert’s Serenade leaves the
instrument, the woman opens her eyes. Shortly after, she
is healthy and back on her feet again.
Unfortunately, miracles are the exception rather than
the rule, and in nursing homes and hospitals throughout
the world, tens of thousands of beds and wheelchairs
have been occupied by living dead for decades; people
who have never woken up from the coma-like state of
hibernation caused by sleepy sickness. Up until the end
of the 1920s, doctors and scientists have published
approximately 9,000 scientific articles about the
horrifying disease, and still, none of them have managed
to discover, how the disease originates or how to cure it.YOUTUBECREATIVE COMMONSWHEN THE PATIENTS WOKE UP
happy they sang, danced, and played music. they were so
The drug, that briefly woke up
sleepy sickness patients from
their trance, is sold under the
name of Stalevo, etc.PATIENTS WOKE UP after 40 years of
immobility, when they got a new drug.RESURRECTION
Like dead people rising
from their graves, sleepy
sickness patients woke up
in a New York hospital in- Watch them here:
youtu.be/QNum0dTYalk
HISTORY EPIDEMICS