Nearly 200 Years of Sleep Apnea: We ’ve Come a Long Way

In 1836, the first installment of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (also known as The Pickwick Papers), the first novel by English author Charles Dickens, was published. In it he introduces the reader to Joe, the Fat Boy, who is obese, consumes great amounts of food, constantly falls asleep in any situation at any time, is difficult to arouse, and snores. This description so intrigued the medical field that many hypotheses about the symptoms were examined, but it was not until well over a century after the novel was published that physicians started to interrelate these features.
Source: Otolaryngologic clinics of North America - Category: ENT & OMF Authors: Tags: Foreword Source Type: research