The lasting legacy of Charles Fisher (1908–1988), pioneering sleep laboratory scientist and sleep medicine psychiatrist

Charles Fisher is a pioneering historical figure in sleep laboratory research and sleep medicine who distinguished himself in nine areas: (1) he first documented nocturnal sleep-onset rapid eye movement (REM) sleep periods in narcoleptic patients; (2) he published the first case of polysomnography (PSG) documented acute REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD) that was triggered by sudden withdrawal from a monoamine oxidase inhibitor in 1978, 8 years before the formal identification of RBD; (3) he worked with Roffwarg and Dement on the early delineation of the ontogeny of the human sleep cycle; (4) he first demonstrated that benzodiazepine (diazepam) therapy was effective in controlling night terrors together with suppression of stage 4 non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, and he was also an early investigator of night terrors as phenomena emerging from stage 4 NREM sleep, without dreaming, as had been traditionally assumed; (5) he collaborated with another pioneering sleep medicine physician, William C. Dement on studies focused on REM sleep deprivation and dreaming at Fisher’s Mt. Sinai Hospital sleep laboratory in New York City; (6) he published the first PSG-documented case of sleep-related (psychogenic) dissociative disorder in 1976; (7) he first documented that typical nightmares (“anxiety dreams”) occurred during REM sleep; (8) he conducted some of the earliest research, beginning in 1965, that documented cycles of nocturnal penile tumescence emerging in conjunction with REM sleep cycles; and (9) he conducted similar early studies of female sexual arousal during sleep that occurred predominantly in REM sleep.