The sleeping sickness was first observed some hundred years ago on the West Coast of Africa and, since then, in an area of the African continent extending from Senegal to the Congo. Negroes are almost the only sufferers, although a few whites have been affected by this disease which, at times, extends to large numbers of the population.
According to various medical observers, the sleeping sickness usually appears among slaves doing arduous, exhausting work.
It is the individuals who stand lowest in intelligence who are most severely affected. In communities where the mental development has been retarded, imitation easily spreads the contagion and this is probably the reason why entire villages are decimated by that curious malady.
Whether the sleeping sickness is in certain cases induced by the bite of a fly or appears without obvious physical cause is immaterial.[1] Paranoia induced by syphilis is in no way different from ordinary paranoia.
Hence we are justified in linking together certain aspects of the African sleeping sickness and the lethargic ailment which affects the white races in Europe and America.
Both have the appearance of normal sleep, the only striking difference, barring certain physical syndromes, being the unusual length of the sleeping period or its onset at unusual and unexpected times.
In white subjects, narcolepsy is seldom fatal but has been known to last for years.
The most famous case on record is probably that of Karoline Ollson reported in a Salpétrière publication for 1912.
Karoline Ollson was born in 1861 in a small town of Sweden. At the age of 14, at the onset of her menstruation, she once came home complaining of toothache, went to bed and remained bedridden till 1908. For thirty-two years she slept all day and all night, waking up now and then for a few minutes, taking dim notice of happenings in her environment and speaking a few words. Two glasses of milk a day seemed to be sufficient to sustain her. She was kept for a fortnight in a hospital from which she was discharged when her ailment was diagnosed as “hysteria.”
When her mother died in 1905 she woke up and wept as long as the corpse remained in the house. Then she became quiet again and resumed her slumbers. In April, 1908, when her menstruation stopped, she woke up, left her bed and has led a normal life since.