CHICAGO’S SLEEPING BEAUTY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22712, 26 October 1935, Page 8

CHICAGO’S SLEEPING BEAUTY

OVER THREE YEARS IN DREAMLAND After three years and a-half spent in a dream world, Patricia Maguire, the “Sleeping Beauty” of Chicago, is showing signs that she will soon awake (states a New York message). . She has fought back to partial consciousness from the coma of epidemic encephalitis (sleeping sickness) into which she lapsed in February, 1932, but the stirrings of her mind are only slight. She is still an enigma to science, and the pathetic centre of a mother’s constant *|ler mother, Mrs Peter Miley, told Chicago reporters that Patricia’s eyes are now open for the greater part of each day. She described her daughter’s ability to answer questions calling for numerical replies by holding up her fingers. There is still no assurance, however, of complete recovery for the patient whose sickness has resisted treatment. But Mrs Miley refuses to give up hope “She is better,” she said, “and I can see slow changes. She is not so heavy now, and there are indications that she hears things and tastes, and feels pain. The girl was 26 when she lapsed into her baffling illness. She is now 29. The malady began on January 19, 1932, when she slept past her station m a train. Coma did not set in until the middle of February. Biologists have indicated that because if her apparent control of her mental faculties it is a reasonable conclusion that the brain tissues have not been seriously imnaired. , , Every day Mrs Miley puts down in a little book the happenings in the strange dream world she tries to share with her pretty daughter. . , . One day. she hopes and believes, she will present the book to a Patricia alert and well again—a Patricia released from the dark captivity of her dream world.