BOOK REVIEW: 'Asleep': 'Sleeping Sickness' Pandemic of Almost a Century Ago Could Return, Author Says
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
With the recent and still ongoing H1N1 flu pandemic fresh in our memories, it's instructive -- vital, even, in the literal sense of the word -- to examine other potential pandemics. Science writer Molly Caldwell Crosby ("The American Plague") does just that with her book about the encephalitis lethargica pandemic that appeared almost at the same time as the worldwide Spanish influenza outbreak.
"Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine's Greatest Mysteries" (Berkley Hardcover, a Penguin imprint, 304 pages, illustrations, notes, index) reads like a detective novel -- investigating a medical puzzle that still hasn't been solved and has been largely unexplored until now.
Discovered by an Austrian neurologist named Constantin von Economo, who gave it the scientific name we know it by today, encephalitis lethargica was popularly called "sleeping sickness." The illness spread across the world, leaving millions dead or locked in institutions. Then, in 1927, it would disappear as suddenly as it had arrived -- or so the doctors at first thought.
Set in an evocatively described New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, "Asleep" follows a group of neurologists -- including two women doctors at a time when sexism made them rare -- through hospitals and insane asylums as they try to solve this worldwide epidemic.
The symptoms could include not only unending sleep but dangerous insomnia, facial tics, catatonia, Parkinson's, and even violent insanity. It's painful to read about people who pluck out their eyes and pull their own teeth, as a woman did in one of the case studies presented by Crosby.
Crosby presents a case study of the encephalits lethargica attack on Jane, known as Jessie, the beloved wife of financier Jack P. Morgan, son of J. Pierpont Morgan, who reluctantly went into the family business, J.P. Morgan, when he really wanted to be a doctor.
Crosby writes that she was inspired to write about the pandemic because her grandmother, Virginia Thompson Brownlee, survived sleeping sickness, although it changed her immeasurably. Some neurologists believe there is a connection between the influenza pandemic that appeared in 1918 and killed more people than the World War and encephalitis lethargica.
Another inspiration for Molly Crosby was the famed British born neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks ("Awakenings," "The Island of the Colorblind," An Anthropologist on Mars," "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"), who provides a dust jacket endorsement of the book:
When I first encountered the patients whom I later wrote about in Awakenings -- patients who had all had the epidemic sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica, forty or more years before, I could find no good general account of the epidemic which had devastated their lives and killed thousands, perhaps millions, of others. Molly Crosby has provided a brilliant and deeply moving account of the fearful years between 1915 and 1927, when this mysterious, worldwide pandemic struck, giving us vivid, intensely human portraits of seven individuals caught up in this epidemic, and the physicians who did their best to understand and help them. In the end, Asleep reminds us that this strange, often terrible disease is not extinct, only quiescent. It may well strike again in our lifetimes.
An endorsement like this should convince readers, because I can personally attest from reading several of his books that Dr. Sacks is one of the most readable and informative authors on medical subjects. His "An Anthropologist on Mars" describes the case of Temple Grandin, the subject of a very recent HBO movie starring Claire Danes as Temple Grandin.
About the author: Molly Caldwell Crosby is the author of "The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic That Shaped Our History," as well as many articles for National Geographic magazin, USA Today, Newsweek, Health and other publications. She lives in Memphis, TN with her family.