The story begins in 1916, when the Viennese neurologist Constantin von Economo began seeing patients with a previously unknown brain disorder. People afflicted with the disorder would sleep excessively—up to twenty hours per day—scarcely leaving time for other activities. Encephalitis lethargica, as von Economo named the disorder, swept through Europe and North America in the early twentieth century, afflicting as many as one million people. Most patients were left either dead or permanently disabled by the brain damage it caused. By 1928, the disease vanished as suddenly as it had appeared,
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spooky.
