Encephalitis lethargica: Last century’s long haulers?: Canadian Medical Association Journal (Humanities | Medicine & Society)
Author: Kenton Kroker
Clinicians began describing chronic postviral conditions such as “post-influenzal hysteria” as early as the 1890s. But their accounts were often vague and plagued by questionable generalizations. It was the massive expansion of public health systems around the time of the 1918 flu pandemic that ultimately helped bring the chronic sequelae of viral diseases to light. When Constantin von Economo (an Austrian neuroanatomist) described a handful of acute cases of Encephalitis lethargica in 1917, he highlighted symptoms of fever, headache, ocular paralysis and extraordinary sleepiness. Many saw the syndrome as related to the same virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic, but causality was never confirmed or rejected. This uncertainty intensified efforts to understand chronic forms of encephalitis, even as the flu pandemic receded during the 1920s.