Accounting for sleep loss in early modern England.

How did people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries account for sleep loss? This article answers this question through an in-depth analysis of the life-writings of six early modern women and men that suffered from periodic or persistent episodes of sleep loss. It focuses on the ways in which these health crises were understood to impede the ordinary functions of body and mind, while also revealing how gendered discourses of illness shaped female and male explanations of sleep loss in different ways. The article is the first to identify early modern sleep loss as an acknowledged cause of poor mental health. It also sheds important light on how the distinctive medical culture of the period ca 1500-1700 encouraged ordinary householders to protect the quality of their sleep by moderating their bedtimes, diets, emotions, and by preparing soporific remedies for the home. This evidence shows that restorative sleep was treasured as an unparalleled guardian and barometer of physical, mental and spiritual health.

Deformities of Nature: Sleepwalking and Non-Conscious States of Mind in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain.

This article examines the didactic appropriation of sleepwalking reports in late eighteenth-century Britain in pedagogical treatises, conduct books, and children's literature. It examines how and why reports of sleepwalkers were used to edify young minds and in so doing traces a critical shift in understandings of sleepwalkers, which were transformed from preternatural wonders to deformities of nature that exemplified the dangerous consequences of irrational, unregulated bodies and minds. This new role was predicated on new medical and philosophical understandings of sleepwalking and on the prioritisation of developmental psychology by pedagogues and philosophers.

Deformities of Nature: Sleepwalking and Non-Conscious States of Mind in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain.

A young man of a cholerick constitution lying asleep upon his bed, rose up thence on the sudden, took a sword, opened the doors, and muttering much to himself went into the street, where he quarrelled alone, and fancying that he was in fight with his enemies, he made divers passes, till at length he fell down, and through an unhappy slip of his sword, he gave himself a dangerous wound upon the breast. Hereupon being awaked and affrighted, and dreading lest such his night-walkings might at some time or other create him as great dangers, he sent for me to be his physician, and was accordingly cured.