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Article: Not a Job for NyQuil: Incurable Fatal Insomnia.(Culture)
- Article from:
- The New York Observer (New York, NY)
- Article date:
- September 11, 2006
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 The New York Observer. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: Lizzy Ratner
Bounteous nature has cooked up countless unpleasant ways for us to meet our maker, from the sudden horror of a ruptured aneurysm to the boxed-in terror of A.L.S. to the odoriferous humiliation of cholera. Death by Ebola virus has always seemed an unreasonably cruel way to go, and only a sadist could have come up with cancer.
But even in comparison with those grim diseases, the strange, tossing-and-turning death suffered by generations of one old Venetian family seems particularly dreadful. For more than 200 years, as many as one out of every two members of this family has succumbed to an illness whose tell-tale symptom might have ...