The Sleeping Beauties

<p><b>Shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize.</b><br><br><b>'A study of diseases that we sometimes say are 'all in the mind', and an explanation of how unfair that characterisation is.' &ndash; Tom Whipple, <i>The Times</i> Books of the Year</b><br><br><b>'To compare any book to a Oliver Sacks is unfair, but this one lives up to it . . . I finished it feeling thrillingly unsettled, and wishing there was more.' &ndash; James McConnachie, <i>Sunday Times</i></b><br><br>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.<br><br>These 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 &ndash; more crucially &ndash; to treat them. What unites them is that they are all examples of a particular type of psychosomatic illness: medical disorders that are influenced as much by the idiosyncratic aspects of individual cultures as they are by human biology.<br><br>Inspired by a poignant encounter with the sleeping refugee children of Sweden, Wellcome Prize-winning neurologist Suzanne O&rsquo;Sullivan travels the world to visit other communities who have also been subject to outbreaks of so-called &lsquo;mystery&rsquo; illnesses.<br><br>From a derelict post-Soviet mining town in Kazakhstan, to the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua via an oil town in Texas, to the heart of the Maria Mountains in Colombia, O&rsquo;Sullivan hears remarkable stories from a fascinating array of people, and attempts to unravel their complex meaning while asking the question: who gets to define what is and what isn&rsquo;t an illness?<br><br><b>Reminiscent of the work of Oliver Sacks, Stephen Grosz and Henry Marsh, <i>The Sleeping Beauties</i> is a moving and unforgettable scientific investigation with a very human face.</b></p>