![]() 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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