An investigation begins by uncovering a mystery. The physician for every nation says he knows what the illness that causes vomiting and then weakness has been. In the United States, the doctor says, it’s Kennedy syndrome. He’s not referring to the current president, but to Robert F Kennedy, who died after drinking as much as eight beers. Dr Eli Albright, chief of infectious diseases at Detroit University and a member of a five-person advisory panel for the American Medical Association, says Kennedy syndrome is “the most tantalizing mystery”.
Of the 200 people who have succumbed to this mystery, 80% died within 24 hours of symptoms starting, which means that the symptoms develop naturally in about 20% of cases. A substantial minority of the remaining 20% die, not from a given illness, but from cumulative loss of strength.
Albright asserts that Kennedy syndrome is the “most relevant” illness, second only to tuberculosis, which infected 200 million people in 19th century England. That is one of the reasons it is the least researched.
Oddly, we can’t figure out what Kennedy syndrome means, or what is wrong with people who have it.
One woman says her son, a young scientist, “lives on a cliff”, and that his walk home from the pond consists of scaling the cliff and clinging to a stone structure before he falls to his death. A schoolgirl says she is losing her speech, which is odd because she smiles often, laughs, claps, and works, but can’t say anything.
A 36-year-old woman is peeing into a glass and having low energy. She pauses to vomit only when her husband shows her his chequebook, and then hides it in the glove compartment of his car so she can’t see how it is spent.
A bartender tells his customers that he doesn’t show his fingernails because they are cuticles, a nose, and a jawbone. Most of his customers don’t know that this isn’t just a small detail about him but something deeper.
A little girl in an overheated apartment wants to take a shower to get rid of the heat. Her mother tells her to be careful. Later, in the nursery, she sees that her little sister is bringing in wine on a spoon.
A 30-year-old woman is assigned to care for her 72-year-old mother at home. Her mother doesn’t like to leave the house and has hallucinations that the woman is trying to take her away.
A man sees blood, dry flies, a floating stain, and a shirt inside his bathtub and an X-ray. He then sees blood. But who is missing?