The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness

"This is a bit like a detective story. O’Sullvan is a neurologist, who specialises in epilepsy. Some of the patients she would see have these strange seizures, that’s how she got into it, I suppose. In the book, she goes around the world to explore these examples of young women who have gone, suddenly, into comas, and cannot be raised. Or they’ve developed epilepsy suddenly. She goes to Sweden, upstate New York, Kazakhstan, and then characterises them all. It’s a good clinical account of our most unusual situations—which aren’t as uncommon as you might think. But how do we define them? She calls them ‘functional neurological disorders’, which seems a better definition than, say, ‘hysteria’. Often these things are written off, but the conditions can be very serious, very genuine and very debilitating. And then she gives, I suppose, a sociopolitical reading—some of the young women are in immigrant communities in Sweden, and this is the way in which they express themselves. Then there’s how Western medicine is failing them. She’s very big on that. O’Sullivan is saying: these are real conditions, they have to be taken seriously, how can we understand them? And how can we treat people who have them better. So it’s a travelogue detective story that turns out to be an important topic."