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Letter: Tired to death

Published 5 May 2010

From Greg Campbell

In your compendium on human endurance, Graham Lawton asserts that there are no records of a person having been killed by intentional sleep deprivation (17 April, p 37).

There may not have been any scientific experiments, but there is a well-documented case from classical history. Perseus, the last king of Macedon, after being captured and imprisoned by the Romans in 166 BC, “offended the barbarians who were his guards, and was prevented from sleeping until he died of it”, according to Diodorus Siculus‘s Bibliotheca Historica.

Southsea, Hampshire, UK

Issue no. 2759 published 8 May 2010

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