First, it investigates the life and times of Audrey Death, a victim of the 1918 sleeping sickness epidemic.
Umbrella, the story of a victim of the sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the first world war, is a 400-page book without paragraphs or breaks or chapter divisions.
In the early 1980s, Dr. Pépin was a young doctor fighting a sleeping sickness epidemic at a hospital in Nioki, in what was formerly the Belgian Congo, then Zaire, and is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
She was immediately installed as favourite to take the prize by bookies, with Will Self's Umbrella, in which a maverick psychiatrist attempts to wake victims of the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the first world war, coming in second.
The town of Omugo in northwest Uganda, a strip of crumbly red clay stores and thatched mud houses that resemble chocolates in straw hats, is at the center of the sleeping sickness epidemic that goes deep into both war-torn Congo and war-torn Sudan.
Umbrella investigates the lives and inner worlds of a World War I munitions worker who falls victim to the 1918 sleeping sickness epidemic, her two brothers one a soldier, one a war office civil servant and the psychiatrist who briefly restores her to lucidity in 1971 with a dose of L-dopa.
Medical historians have documented the cultural disdain for local African customs shown by the colonisers of the early 20th century, for example in the response to the sleeping sickness epidemic that afflicted the Belgian Congo.
The trends and processes contributing to south-eastern Uganda's sleeping sickness epidemic have also been observed in other countries.
The New Yorker, June 2 , 1945P. 40 Trainers are experimenting with penicillin to check the coughing-sickness epidemic among their horses.
