The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness by Suzanne O’Sullivan
It seems fair to say that grisi siknis was named before doctors worried too much about the niceties of political correctness. This disease mainly afflicts teenage girls on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast. Symptoms vary, but it often begins with a hallucination, a visitation from a terrifying man in a hat — sometimes described as the Devil. Next come the convulsions, the tremors, the superhuman strength that means many from the village have to hold the girl down.
The symptoms are real. The cause, the Miskito people believe, are demons. It is, writes Suzanne O’Sullivan, a “biological disorder induced by something spiritual”.
