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Editorial
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Neurologists woke up to the concept of medical disorders of sleep during the rich descriptive period of the late 19th century. In his classic account of the narcolepsies, based on a lecture given to the Association of Physicians at Belfast on June 3, 1927, later published in Brain (1928; 51: 63–109) and reprinted in Modern Problems in Neurology (1928), SA Kinnier Wilson (1878–1937) traces his own clinical experience to the examples of that disorder, first described by Jean-Baptiste-Édouard Gélineau (1859–1928. De la narcolepsie, Gazette d'Hôpital de Paris, 1880; 53: 626–628 and 635–637), to his appointment as house physician to Sir William Gowers (1845–1915) at the time Gowers was publishing The borderland of epilepsy (1907). Evidently, Kinnier Wilson saw no more cases until the 1920s. But medicine and sleep have an older history. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) makes 13 references to sleep in his plays (see RR Simpson, Shakespeare and Medicine
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