d during
the fifteen months, and asked who was president and seemed eager for
news. One curious fact was that he remembered a field of oats which was
just sprouting about the time he fell in the trance. The same field
was now standing in corn knee-high. After his recovery from the trance
he rapidly became worse and died in eighteen months. There is a record
of a man near Rochester, N.Y., who slept for five years, never waking
for more than sixteen hours at a time, and then only at intervals of
six weeks or over. When seized with his trance he weighed 160, but he
dwindled down to 90 pounds. He passed urine once or twice a day, and
had a stool once in from six to twenty days. Even such severe treatment
as counter-irritation proved of no avail. Gunson mentions a man of
forty-four, a healthy farmer, who, after being very wet and not
changing his clothes, contracted a severe cold and entered into a long
and deep sleep lasting for twelve hours at a time, during which it was
impossible to waken him. This attack lasted eight or nine months, but
in 1848 there was a recurrence accompanied by a slight trismus which
lasted over eighteen months, and again in 1860 he was subjected to
periods of sleep lasting over twenty-four hours at a time. Blaudet
describes a young woman of eighteen who slept forty days, and again
after her marriage in her twentieth year she slept for fifty days; it
was necessary to draw a tooth to feed her. Four years later, on Easter
day, 1862, she became insensible for twelve months, with the exception
of the eighth day, when she awoke and ate at the table, but fell asleep
in the chair. Her sleep was so deep that nothing seemed to disturb her;
her pulse was slow, the respirations scarcely perceptible, and there
were apparently no evacuations.

Weir Mitchell collected 18 cases of protracted sleep, the longest
continuing uninterruptedly for six months. Chilton's case lasted
seventeen weeks. Six of the 18 cases passed a large part of each day in
sleep, one case twenty-one hours, and another twenty-three hours. The
patients were below middle life; ten were females, seven males, and one
was a child whose sex was not given. Eight of the 18 recovered easily
and completely, two recovered with loss of intellect, one fell a victim
to apoplexy four months after awakening, one recovered with insomnia as
a sequel, and four died in sleep. One recovered suddenly after six
months' sleep and began to talk, resuming the train o