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Please do not suffer in silence.

1924. London. During the nightly rounds at a hospital ward, things felt unusually quiet.

In bed after bed lay patients locked in uncanny slumber.

One young woman, normally vivacious and 20 years of age, now barely stirred. Her eyes, when they opened at all,

were blank and unseeing. Middle-aged man sat propped against pillows, frozen in a statue-like

pose with one arm mid-gesture, as if turned a stone. Across the room, another patient suddenly

let out a delirious murmur, then just as quickly

lapsed back into silence.

The only real sound was the ticking clock and the faint breaths of the afflicted.

Doctors whispered of sleepy sickness, an illness that gripped its victims in unrelenting

lethargy or strange waking trances.

Families kept vigil by bedsides, watching their loved ones hover between life and becoming

living ghost.

It was a scene at once medical and otherworldly, an early glimpse into a medical mystery unfolding

across the world.

This is the story of encephalitis lethargica.

In the winter of 1916 going into 1917, as World War I raged, physicians in Europe began

noticing bizarre cases of brain illness.

...