Encephalitis Lethargica

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mri of brain of patient with encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness

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Encephalitis Lethargica

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National Museum of Health and Medicine AFIP

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About this site

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When It Became Real

A Kind of Anchorage A work mediation in progress My title derives from and acknowledges Harold Pinter s A Kind of Alaska Although it shares its title with the name of the capital of that cold state my subject for mediation is of another state completely It is geographically divorced from that region of America It relates more to the Anchorage or Anchorhold of medieval self imposed isolation There is a fundamental difference between the hermit and Anchorite of that distant time Whilst the hermit removed him or herself from the community and went into self imposed exile the Anchorite chose to be incarcerated or isolated within the community These Anchorholds were usually a small cell carbuncled onto a church where the Anchorite was immured His the Anchorite or her the Anchoress role was thenceforth to be that of mediator between the community and what was held to be the divine Pinter s play in turn was inspired by Awakenings by Oliver Sacks Pinter acknowledges this in the introduction quot In the winter of 1916 17 there spread over Europe and subsequently over the rest of the world an extraordinary epidemic illness which presented itself in innumerable forms as delirium mania trances coma sleep insomnia restlessness and states of Parkinsonism It was eventually identified by the great physician Constantin von Economo and named by him encephalitis lethargica or sleeping sickness Over the next ten years almost five million people fell victim to the disease of whom more than a third died Of the survivors some escaped almost unscathed but the majority moved into states of deepening illness The worst affected sank into singular states of quot sleep quot conscious of their surroundings but motionless speechless and without hope or will confined to asylums or other institutions Fifty years later with the development of the remarkable drug L Dopa they erupted into life once more quot In Pinter s play Deborah describes this incarceration Oh dear the flicking of her ch

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Ah My Brother

Author and neurologist Oliver Sacks has published scores of books and articles about the lives of people afflicted with disorders of the mind and brain In the Morning Stories audio podcast called Ah My Brother he tells us something about the man behind those words Also watch the <a href= http streams wgbh org online morn MSVC20071130 mp4 target= blank >video < a> Dr Sacks latest book is <a href= http musicophilia com >Musicophilia Tales of Music and the Brain < a> Morning Stories on the web <a href= http wgbh org morningstories target= blank >wgbh org morningstories < a> TRANSCRIPT OF THE quot AH MY BROTHER quot PODCAST TONY KAHN Hi everybody This is Tony Kahn the producer and director of Morning Stories from WGBH in Boston Today s Morning Storyteller may be familiar to some of you Over the years he s been writing about people who suffer with afflictions of the brain and the mind His name is Oliver Sacks and he was here in Boston on a book tour for his latest collection of essays called Musicophilia I asked him what it was that has drawn him to the kinds of human conditions that frankly most of us would run away from Here s a bit of what he said in today s Morning Story Ah My Brother Music OLIVER SACKS Back in the 1960 s a chronic disease hospital in the Bronx some seventy or eighty people had been unimaginably ill and often abandoned by their families for decades Sometimes forty years forty five years even Many of them motionless and frozen in strange postures all of whom had had the encephalitis lethargica years before A worldwide epidemic at the time No medicine was of any use to them I lived almost next door to the hospital I was in at all hours and in the summer amazing things seemed to be happening They did respond to L dopa and there was a jubilant joyous atmosphere in the ward Proposals of marriages and people were just lyrical with delight at being able to move and talk and think again

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