THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF THE PICKWICK CLUB

THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF THE PICKWICK CLUB
Charles Dickens
First published in 1837
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991
801 pages, hardback, $14.95
ISBN 0-19-254501-9

Note by Lynne Lamberg

The recent availability of effective treatment for sleep apnea has upped its recognition. The classic description, however, comes not from a medical text but from Charles Dickens, who gives us "Joe, the fat boy," in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club:

After a "most violent and startling knocking" is heard, Mr. Lowton hurries to the door. "The object that presented itself to the eyes of the astonished clerk was a boy--a wonderfully fat boy--....standing upright on the mat, with his eyes closed as if in sleep. He had never seen such a fat boy, in or out of a traveling caravan; and this, coupled with the utter calmness and repose of his appearance, so very different from what was reasonably to have been expected of the inflicter of such knocks, smote him with wonder.

"What's the matter?" inquired the clerk.

"The extraordinary boy replied not a word; but he nodded once, and seemed, to the clerk's imagination, to snore feebly."

Joe suddenly awakens. When asked why he knocked "like forty hackney-coachmen," Joe replies:

"Because master said, I wasn't to leave off knocking till they opened the door, for fear I should go to sleep."

Joe, we have learned, "goes on errands fast asleep, and snores as he waits at table." He sleeps through cannon fire, and is hard to rouse: "Be good enough to pinch him, sir--in the leg, if you please; nothing else wakes him."

In tribute to Dickens, sleep apnea once was called "the Pickwickian Syndrome."