moon_custafer | So Naturally, I’m Researching Early 20th-century Epidemics

Because for some reason, I began wondering what’s going on with César in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari? He’s described as a “somnambulist,” but he appears to be a catatonic – Cagliari has to spoon-feed him when he’s not on stage or out committing murders at his master’s bidding. I suppose the idea is that the doctor put him in a trance and has kept him in that state for months or years, but how did he come by his subject in the first place? If César was one of his patients, he must have been brought to him for some medical reason.

Which is why I spent a couple of hours looking up stuff on the sleeping-sickness pandemic. I always associated it with the early ‘twenties, but apparently it began to be show up around 1917, so it predates/coexists with the ‘flu? (which is part of the reason they now doubt a cause-and-effect association, like I’d always heard). The Fading Trail of the Sleepy Wraith includes Caligari in its chapter on literary and film portrayals of Encephalitis Lethargica, but by the time I read that I wasn’t sure it was so simple— even if EL was known to neurologists, I’m not sure it had mainstream coverage by 1919. However, there’d been a outbreak of some similar illness (“the Nona”) in 1890s Italy, which passed into semi-legend in subsequent decades; and () suggests that possibly sparked by this, turn-of-the-century sideshows exhibited “sleeping beauties,” beautiful, ostensibly comatose women, sometime in glass cases. César seems to me to fit into this tradition.

(unfinished because cats demand attention)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2758910/

https://europepmc.org/article/pmc/pmc7121633

Alternately, a 1919 audience might perhaps have read César as a shell-shock victim, though there’s nothing military about the character’s appearance or manner, only, perhaps, his name.