Description
Book SynopsisWe tend to think of sleep as a private concern, a night-time retreat from the physical world into the realm of the subconscious. Yet sleep also has a public side; it has been the focal point of religious ritual, philosophic speculation, political debate, psychological research, and more recently, neuroscientific investigation and medical practice.
In this first ever history of sleep research, Kenton Kroker draws on a wide range of material to present the story of how an investigative field – at one time dominated by the study of dreams – slowly morphed into a laboratory-based discipline. The result of this transformation, Kroker argues, has changed the very meaning of sleep from its earlier conception to an issue for public health and biomedical intervention.
Examining a vast historical period of 2500 years, Kroker separates the problems associated with the history of dreaming from those associated with sleep itself and charts sleep-related diseases su
Trade Review
'Anyone wanting to understand the development of the science and medicine of sleep will need to read Kenton Kroker's The Sleep of Others ... An exemplary case study of the development of a new field of medicine, and one that should be of broad interest in the history of medicine.' -- Mathew Thomson Social History of Medicine 'Unique and enlightening ... Kroker shows how sleep has moved from the domain of religion to dogma to being the subject of scientific study.' -- Jim Horne New Scientist 'This book should be of intense interest to those who are interested in gaining insight and reflecting on how our individual specialty fields have evolved.' -- Mark W. Mahowald The New England Journal of Medicine 'A magisterial study which exposes once again the myth that sleep is ever solely or simply a 'private' matter or a non-event.' -- Simon J. Williams Sociology of Health and Illness 'It is a testament to the quality of this book that it can spark such fundamental issues for the history of science/medicine while providing the first authoritative account of the history of human understanding of sleep.' -- Tiago Moreira Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
