Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine's Greatest Mysteries by Molly Caldwell Crosby

nurse threw cold water on him.
    Adam had been suffering for two years from this strange disease, frequently falling into a trance, panting, and salivating like someone possessed. He had been hospitalized several times, had his tonsils removed, been sent to boys’ camp, lived with a physician for a spell, stayed at a farm with a male nurse for a while, and seen numerous doctors. As a last resort, Adam was finally taken to see one of New York’s premier psychoanalysts: Smith Ely Jelliffe.

CHAPTER 9
    Smith Ely Jelliffe
    S mith Ely jelliffe had an idyllic childhood in a city home with a clear view of Manhattan. Like Tilney, he grew up in Brooklyn, and most of his memories are of his family’s brownstone in Park Slope, which, like many houses in the neighborhood, had just been built. In the vacant lots where homes were yet to be constructed, Jelliffe played baseball with his brother, who was only one year younger, and neighborhood kids. Having free roam of the neighborhood, the boys also played “catch one, catch all,” climbed the pear and cherry trees lining the streets to steal fruit, and swiped the noonday milk left for the corner grocery. There were croquet games in Prospect Park, as well as kites, marbles, and tops. Jelliffe was the kind of boy who rushed through all of his studies on Friday so he could leave Saturday and Sunday free for play. As with the other neighborhood children, only nightfall brought him home.
    Jelliffe had few negative remembrances from childhood. Although he could outrun almost anyone, his arms were weak, so he avoided fisticuffs. And, ever the psychoanalyst, he remembered a distinct sadness one Christmas when he awoke to find his stocking empty on the mantel as punishment for hitting his brother on the head with a hammer. “On several occasions in my later life when I have done some mean or unworthy action ... this same mood of deep sadness has come over me.”
    Jelliffe’s father was a renowned schoolteacher, the first to organize a kindergarten program in Brooklyn. His mother was an intelligent and vivacious woman who, even at the age of seventy, visited Egypt to ride a camel and see the pyramids; she also traveled through the Panama Canal the year it opened. And she had a wonderful sense of humor that her son inherited.
    Jelliffe was also a gifted student. His kindergarten teacher showed up at his doorstep in tears one afternoon, only to tell Mrs. Jelliffe that her son had finished the whole year’s work in the first two weeks, and there was nothing left to teach him. Jelliffe attended the public schools in Brooklyn, and at age sixteen he met and fell in love with the girl who was to become his wife.
    Although Jelliffe obtained a certificate to teach school like his father, graduated from the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute, and studied botany at the New York College of Pharmacy, he chose to attend medical school, graduating from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1889. His schooling seems to have been indicative of not only his wide variety of interests, but his difficulty in choosing one path. In medical school, Jelliffe was drawn to several subjects except one: bacteriology. He recalled that every day during his 11:00 A.M. class, he suffered a migraine each time his professor of surgery said the words “healthy laudable pus.” Throughout his career, Jelliffe would find fault with surgery as a cure for disease, believing it to be an “effort to cut ideas out of the body.”
    After graduating from medical school, at the age of twenty-three, Jelliffe traveled to Europe. As passports did not yet use photos, Jelliffe’s provides a detailed description of his appearance at the time: five feet, nine inches, wide forehead, light blue eyes, ordinary nose, small arched lips, square chin, oval face, light brown hair, freckles. Jelliffe spent a year studying in various clinics in Vienna and in Berlin, even visiting Koch’s laboratory and stopping in