Siding with the dark

Benjamin talks about the series of experiments on dogs. Legendre and Pieron injected the fluid called hypnotoxins into healthy dogs and found that without exception the dogs swiftly fell asleep. Then again, perhaps hypnotoxins belong elsewhere entirely, with the ontological inventions of Perrault, Andersen and Grimm. Another student of sleep swayed by the idea of hypnotoxins was Constantin von Economo, the Romanian-born medical doctor who named the mysterious sleeping sickness that broke out in 1917 and, over the course of the next decade, caused the deaths of some 5 million people across the globe. Von Economo's sickness, encephalitis lethargica, became the subject of Oliver Sacks's Awakenings, a deeply affecting clinical work that grew out of Sacks's treatment, in 1969, of a number of the original surviving patients, plunged into a real-life equivalent of enchanted sleep.