Medicine: The Sleepy People

"Why, that sounds just like Mother's trouble!" exclaimed a former Mayo Clinic secretary as she read an article on sleep seizures. Her chance observation led the clinic's doctors to a research gold mine. Her whole family, for four and possibly five generations, has been studded with men and women who kept falling asleep at meals, on the job, on Army guard duty, while playing cards—and, distressingly often, at the wheel.

The secretary's mother, interviewed by Neurologists David D. Daly and Robert E. Yoss. said that she had been "fighting sleep all of my life."...

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