Medicine: Awakening

When she was two years old, little Maxine Yarrington of Erie, Pa. skipped around pestering her mother with endless chatter, like any other normal child. One day she grew feverish, complained of a headache, a stiff back. Mrs. Yarrington put her to bed, called Dr. Howard Bassett Emerson. For a while little Maxine cried and mumbled, but gradually her voice trailed off, and burrowing into the warm quilts, she fell asleep.

Once or twice during the next few weeks she raised her lids, but her eyes were blank. Frantically Mrs. Yarrington shook her, called to her, but Maxine slept on. She had Encephalitis Lethargica, probably caused by a filtrable virus, a type of sleeping sickness for which medicine knows no sure cure.

For four years little Maxine lay quietly in bed, while her mother cleaned, bathed, and turned her, fed her through a stomach tube. She grew slowly, like a plant in the dark; her rosy face turned white and blank. One day last week, six-year-old Maxine at last awoke. During her long sleep, she had lost her ability to talk, walk, or command her muscles in any way. She recognized no one, instinctively gulped her food like a newborn infant.

“Her brain,” said Dr. Emerson, “is scarred at its base. [It] lags as if there were no brain at all. Its functions have ceased. She will always be practically dead mentally.”