Ondine's Curse
The tale is the basis for "Ondine's Curse," the historical name for Congenital Central Hypoventilation Syndrome (CCHS), a severe form of sleep apnea. CCHS causes patients to lose autonomic control of breathing, resulting in the need to consciously initiate every breath. If untreated, patients with CCHS will die—like Ondine's unfaithful spouse—if they fall asleep and can therefore no longer consciously breathe.
Read more about this topic: Undine (alchemy)
Famous quotes containing the word curse:
“A noble person confers no such gift as his whole confidence: none so exalts the giver and the receiver; it produces the truest gratitude. Perhaps it is only essential to friendship that some vital trust should have been reposed by the one in the other. I feel addressed and probed even to the remotest parts of my being when one nobly shows, even in trivial things, an implicit faith in me.... A threat or a curse may be forgotten, but this mild trust translates me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)