Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine's Greatest Mysteries Read Online Free PDF

flourished from its earliest exploration to the twenty-first-century giant it is today.
    Iconic New Yorker E. B. White wrote that New York should have “destroyed itself long ago, from panic or fire or rioting. It should have perished of hunger when food lines failed for a few days. It should have been wiped out by a plague starting in its slums.... ” But it did not. The city adapted to and survived each trial.
    The city, wrote White, is “both changeless and changing.”
    If any one characteristic defined the city of New York, it was the ability to defy boundaries—below ground, above ground, under the water, and into the sky. A modern-day historian wrote that New York was “perhaps the one place in the world where the hand of man shaped the environment as much as the hand of God.”
     
     
     
    A t no time was New York’s progress more obvious than during the first decades of the twentieth century. The five boroughs known today as Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island consolidated in 1898 to become one great municipality: New York City. That fusion implied something remarkable—that New York was redefining itself, not only in terms of politics or demo-graphics, but also in its composition.
    In the years immediately following consolidation, at the turn of the twentieth century, the world changed rapidly as the Victorian Age gave way to the Progressive Era, and New York would undergo a metamorphosis not only in the way it evolved, but in the way the city looked and felt. New York became more than just a place; it became an inspiration. The island city inspired countless artists, writers, architects, and musicians, who flocked there. The Jazz Age was born in New York. In a sense, jazz was an homage to Harlem and the city itself, an eclectic, complex interweaving of cultures. A pulsing sound that could be both chaotic and brilliantly synchronized at the same time. And it was not just musicians who found the rhythms to capture the city, but also artists, photographers, architects, and writers. Their rapture over the city was obvious in the words they chose to describe it: colossal, magnetic, astonishing, feverish, glittering, an imperial city, the Niagara of American life. New York was even described as poetry itself.
    But New York also faced a dilemma most American cities did not—identity. As one historian pointed out, New York City was looking east to Europe more often than west to the rest of the nation. Broadening that divide even more was the fact that 40 percent of the population was from various immigrant, often European, backgrounds. And, as a city gifted in many ways, it was difficult to characterize New York too narrowly—whether by architecture or theater or publishing or finance. As a testament to the multifaceted surface of Manhattan, one guide to the city broke down the “City of Cities” into various sections. At the tip of the island was the “City of Banks,” “City of Fish,” “City of Coffee Dealers,” and “City of Gems,” among others. Moving north, the jigsaw of districts included the “City of Publishers,” “City of Artists,” “City of Theaters,” and “City of Builders.” At the farthest end stood the “City of Hospitals.”
    What’s more, the Progressive Era itself was breaking boundaries in a city that had always pushed forward more quickly than any other American metropolis, and technology was altering the way people lived, faster than it would in any period past or present. The cities that changed with the times would thrive; those that did not would begin to die. It was an urban survival of the fittest.
    And so by 1918, New York City found itself at a tipping point. The world had been caught in the grasp of the Great War—the momentum of progress gathered speed in New York City just as major European cities turned their focus to war. By the end of that war, New York had replaced London as the financial center of the world. It had replaced Boston