Frozen Alive in 1917: The Forgotten Encephalitis Lethargica Epidemic

In hospital wards across Europe and America, patients lay awake with their eyes open, breathing, hearts beating — and yet something essential had switched off. Doctors struggled to describe what they were seeing. These people were not dead. They were not asleep. They were suspended somewhere in between. The cases appeared suddenly during the final years of World War I, quietly threading through a world already overwhelmed by war and influenza. Newspapers barely noticed. Medical journals did, but without urgency. Only later did it become clear that something profoundly strange had moved through humanity almost unseen. The epidemic is not built on folklore. It appears in clinical records, autopsy notes, neurological papers, and long-term patient follow-ups studied by physicians across…