The Sleeping Beauties

Books

Shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2021 'To compare any book to a Sacks is unfair, but this one lives up to it . . . I finished it feeling thrillingly unsettled, and wishing there was more.' James McConnachie, Sunday Times 'A study of diseases that we sometimes say are 'all in the mind', and an explanation of how unfair that characterisation is.' Tom Whipple, The Times Books of the Year In Sweden, refugee children fall asleep for months and years at a time. In upstate New York, high school students develop contagious seizures. In the US Embassy in Cuba, employees complain of headaches and memory loss after hearing strange noises in the night. These disparate cases are some of the most remarkable diagnostic mysteries of the twenty-first century, as both doctors and scientists have struggled to explain them within the boundaries of medical science and - more crucially - to treat them. What unites them is that they are all examples of a particular type of psychosomatic illness: medical ...