Ep. 35: Wake Up

About this episode

This episode explores the mysterious epidemic of sleeping sickness and its impact on patients and medicine.

Sleeping Sickness: The Epidemic That Vanished and the Patients Left Behind It put millions to sleep. Some of them never woke up. Others woke up wrong. Between 1917 and 1928, a mysterious illness swept the globe, leaving its victims in states of suspended animation, rigid and unreachable, trapped somewhere between sleep and death. Doctors called it encephalitis lethargica. The world called it the sleeping sickness. And then, almost as quickly as it appeared, it was gone, leaving behind no clear cause, no confirmed treatment, and thousands of survivors warehoused in institutions for decades, largely forgotten. In this episode, Crystal walks Andrea through one of medicine's most enduring unsolved puzzles: what encephalitis lethargica is, what it did to the people it touched, why it vanished, and what its long shadow tells us about the limits of what medicine thinks it understands.

People in this episode

Host: Crystal

Guest: Andrea

Topics covered

• sleeping sickness
• encephalitis lethargica
• medical mystery
• historical epidemic
• patient experiences
• medical understanding

Keywords

• sleeping sickness
• encephalitis lethargica
• epidemic
• medical history
• patients
• mystery
• treatment
• survivors

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: encephalitis lethargica

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