Despite Woodward's grand metaphysical proclamations about future states of mind, he and his generation of medical men never gave up on the power of modern medicine to cure the most unusual of mental and physical maladies. Sleepwalkers did not constitute a large portion of the patients who passed through his asylum, or through other asylums run by the same principles of the moral treatment, but correcting problematic sleep remained a major concern of early psychiatry. Asylums were, as the great sociologist Erving Goffman put it, "total institutions"―enclosed spaces like ships and prisons (and, one might add, slave plantations)―in which a group of individuals led their lives cut off from society, and which had to be formally administered 24/7. Such spaces, wrote Goffman, break down a general rule of modern society: that individuals "sleep, play, and work in different places." There were individual bedrooms in insane asylums―Goffman's chief example of a total institution―but sleep was hardly private there. Bedroom doors typically had a window facing the corridor, and patients knew they were subject to being watched by the medical staff at all hours. As such, asylums like the one in which Jane Rider found herself served to enforce society's rules, including the one demanding that sleep must be done in an orderly way, straight through the night, in private: those who could not manage this fundamental expectation of civilization had to have their sleep tamed.The above passage is from Benjamin Reiss's Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. Reiss is an English professor rather than a doctor or a social scientist, but don't let that dissuade you. He really pursues the history of sleep in the modern world, from the increased structuring of sleep during the Industrial Revolution―and let's face it, everything got more regimented then―to the endemic loss of sleep in the age of social media. He's also lived and worked on a kibbutz, where young people become accustomed to sleeping with much less privacy.
There's an extensive chapter on Henry David Thoreau. Let me tell you, Thoreau seems to have been quite the scold, and even I might have had trouble getting along with him, despite certain similarities in personality and value. He was also a fascinating and perceptive thinker.
2 comments:
The idea that our natural sleep patterns have been overwhelmed by technology is a subject we've talked about before. I remember Thoreau having said something about the entire country being run like a train schedule. It sounds as if the only real answer is to get rid of electricity altogether, either that or not having to keep to a schedule of going to work every day. I wonder if the author came up with some less daring idea.
I don't know that Reiss ends with recommendations as such, but he does explore toned-down versions of both ideas. In a few decades we could see a world virtually without electricity, or with a lot less of it, only it won't be by choice. In the nearer term, I think there might be less disturbance of sleep due to addiction to electronic devices if there were more to engage with in the non-virtual world.
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