It has been 700 years since the death of the greatest Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). He entered the canon of world literature as the author of the Divine Comedy. In a kind of homage, researchers from Brazil – Santos, Borges, Souza, and Mota Gomes – decided to answer the question of whether Dante was a narcoleptic.
Of course, since their subject matter is a centuries-old work of literature, it is impossible to make an unambiguous diagnosis. Nevertheless, the researchers went ahead and analyzed Dante’s work through the prism of the information known today about narcolepsy. As stated in the paper, the prevalence of narcolepsy is 45–84 cases per 100,000 people aged 20–40. The disease is characterized by sudden onset of sleep, excessive daytime sleepiness, muscle weakness, sleep paralysis, and hallucinations.
The narrator of Dante’s Divine Comedy falls into an unusually vivid dream or hallucination. Here he begins his journey from hell to heaven. By analyzing the text, Santos et al. found signs such as sleepiness (“so full was I of sleep”), the experience of a brief refreshing sleep (“like a person who by force is wakened, and roundabout I moved my rested eyes”), sudden switching between wakefulness and sleep (“and mentation into dream transmuted”), hallucinations (in which Mary is embracing Jesus) and muscle weakness (when encountering a wolf).
The authors mention other hypotheses that could explain Dante’s work: epilepsy, the use of psychedelics, or just very vivid dreams. However, as the researchers add, given the presence of so many indicators, it is difficult not to associate them with narcolepsy.
The article was published in November 2021 in the journal Studies in Health Sciences.
