Encephalitis Lethargica: The Great Unknown Sleeping Sickness of 1916 the Forgotten Pandemic that Lulled Victims to Sleep Before Death
During 1916, at the height of the First World War, it seemed to most observers as if death and dying itself had become the permanent state of humanity. In February of that year French and German armies fought at the fortress city of Verdun in what, to this very day, still remains the largest and most deadly single battle in human history. On July 1, 1916 more British soldiers were killed at the Battle of the Somme in one single hour than had been killed in all of the battles of the 19th century Napoleonic Wars combined. However, the most deadly killer that emerged from the muddy trenches of Belgium and France killed silently; couldn’t be seen or heard by anyone and spread across the entire world within a matter of a few years and continued to kill, perhaps for decades, after the guns of the Western Front had long since fallen silent. Today, thanks in part to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, even people without any interest in history at all know about the 1918 Spanish Flu pande...