Although it seems like we have a deep understanding of it now, obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) was a slow starter in the medical education field. Probably the first description of its presence was of Fat Boy Joe in Charles Dickens’s first novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (first published in 1837) in which he wrote” … and on the box sat a fat and red-faced boy, in a state of somnolency,” and “Joe – damn that boy, he’s gone to sleep again.” A literature search of the world’s fiction did not reveal any further descriptions of a person with typical OSA signs, symptoms, or side effects until 50 years later when, in 1889, Dr. William Hill described a child, “who breathes through his mouth instead of his nose, snores, is restless at night, and suffers from headaches at school.”
