Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c4f8m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T06:10:20.078Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Nature of Sleep

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 October 2011

Matthew Wolf-Meyer
Matthew Wolf-Meyer*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz
*
mwolfmey@ucsc.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In April of 2004, only a few months into my fieldwork, I was struck by the level and variety of doubt expressed by the physicians at the Midwest Sleep Disorder Center (MSDC). The MSDC is a group of physicians recognized in the field as experts in many areas of sleep medicine, especially parasomnias—such as sleepwalking, sleep-related eating, and REM behavior disorder. Dr. Richards, the clinic's senior researcher and a neurologist by training, began the weekly departmental rounds. Generally, these consisted of case studies presented by the assembled clinicians and fellows, but at times rounds wandered into more philosophical discussions or ribald joking. On this day, Dr. Richards asked Dr. Pym if he had seen any patients of note. Pym was trained as a pediatrician, and his patients, at both the MSDC and the neighboring Children's Hospital, were mostly adolescents and young children. Pym had been in Nicaragua for the previous three weeks as part of a volunteer program to provide medical aid to the rural poor, and so had no cases, but he took the opportunity to make some observations on sleep disorders in Central America. He remarked that most of the places he had been to had about eleven hours of night and thirteen of daylight, and with only intermittent electrical lighting in the evening, most people went to bed at nightfall and arose with the sun. As a result, he postulated, most of the sleep disorders that physicians dealt with in the United States were not found there. He went on to blame electric lighting for many of the sleep problems in the United States—including insomnia and advanced and delayed sleep phase disorders—since it negatively affected biological impulses to sleep. Pym claimed that sleep disorders were “rare” in Nicaragua. He said most children there slept with their parents, who attended to their sleep problems as they happened, and so they did not develop into more acute pathological forms. This led into a broader conversation about light and its effects on human sleep patterns, in which some of the discussion revolved around sleeplessness in intensive care units; apparently, Richards reported, many people never entered REM sleep while in the units due to lighting disruptions, which, he said, might account for “ICU psychosis,” as people hallucinated due to sleepiness. At this point, Dr. Blake, a young pediatrician, remarked in relation to the newness of sleep medicine, “We're all flying by the seats of our pants,” to which Richards said, “We don't know anything.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , October 2011 , pp. 945 - 970
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Armstrong, David. 2002. A New History of Identity: A Sociology of Medical Knowledge. New York: Palgrave.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, David. 1993. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ball, Thomas. 1796. An Inaugural Dissertation on the Causes and Effects of Sleep. Philadelphia: Budd and Bartram.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. 1988. The Semiotic Challenge. Howard, R., trans. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Becker, Gay. 2004. Deadly Inequality in the Health Care “Safety Net”: Uninsured Ethnic Minorities' Struggle to Live with Life-Threatening Illnesses. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 18, 2: 258–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bivins, Roberta. 2007. Alternative Medicine? A History. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Burgess, Anthony. 1982. On Going to Bed. New York: Abbeville Press.Google Scholar
Conover, Samuel Forman. 1791. Inaugural Dissertation on Sleep and Dream: Their Effects on the Faculties of the Mind, and the Causes of Dreams. Philadelphia: T. Lang.Google Scholar
Conrad, Peter. 2007. The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles. 1995 [1990]. Negotiations. Joughin, M., trans. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Dement, William C., and Christopher, Vaughan. 1999. The Promise of Sleep: A Pioneer in Sleep Medicine Explores the Vital Connection Between Health, Happiness, and a Good Night's Sleep. New York: Delacorte Press.Google Scholar
Elias, Norbert. 2000 [1939]. The Civilizing Process. Jephcott, E., trans. Malden: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1988 [1961]. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Howard, R., trans. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1994 [1963]. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Sheridan Smith, A. M., trans. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1995 [1975]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Sheridan, A., trans. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1998 [1982]. Technologies of the Self. In Rabinow, P., ed., Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 1. New York: New Press, 223–52.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 2000 [1978]. Governmentality. In Faubion, J. D., ed. Power. Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 3. New York: New Press, 201–22.Google Scholar
Fuller, R. Buckminster. 1971 [1963]. Nine Chains to the Moon. Garden City: Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Hall, William Whitty. 1861. Sleep. New York: W. W. Hall.Google Scholar
Hannaway, Caroline. 1993. Environment and Miasmata. In Porter, R. and Bynum, W.F., eds. Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine. London: Routledge, vol. 1., 292–308.Google Scholar
Kleitman, Nathaniel. 1963 [1933]. Sleep and Wakefulness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kroll-Smith, Steve. 2000. The Social Production of the ‘Drowsy Person.’ Perspectives on Social Problems 12: 89–109.Google Scholar
Kroll-Smith, Steve. 2003. Popular Media and ‘Excessive Daytime Sleepiness’: A Study of Rhetorical Authority in Medical Sociology. Sociology of Health & Illness 25, 6: 625–43.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ledyard, Isaac. 1782. Accurate and Complete Description of Sleep. New York: Printed for the author.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri. 2002 [1971]. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Rabinovitch, S., trans. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Moore, G. and Elden, S., trans. New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Lewontin, Richard. 1993. Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA. New York: Perennial.Google Scholar
Liddicoat, Laura and Patrick, Harding. 2006. Ambien: Drives Like a Dream?—Case Studies of Zolpidem-Impaired Drivers in Wisconsin. Paper presented at meeting of American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Seattle.Google Scholar
Lock, Margaret. 1993. Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Macnish, Robert. 1824. The Philosophy of Sleep. New York: D. Appleton & Co.Google Scholar
Mahowald, Mark and Carlos, Schenk. 2005. Insights from Studying Human Sleep Disorders. Nature 437:1279–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Martin, Emily. 1994. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture—From the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon.Google Scholar
Mathews, Andrew. 2005. Power/Knowledge, Power/Ignorance: Forest Fires and the State in Mexico. Human Ecology 33, 6: 795–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mauss, Marcel. 1979. The Notion of Body Techniques. In Sociology and Psychology: Essays. London: Routledge, 95–119.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy. 1999. Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Procacci, Giovanna. 1991. Social Economy and the Government of Poverty. In Burchell, G., Gordon, C., and Miller, P., eds. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 151–68.Google Scholar
Rabinbach, Anson. 1990. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Rifkin, Jeremy. 1987. Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Rose, Nikolas. 1990. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Charles. 1987 [1968]. Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenberg, Charles, ed. 2003. Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine and Hygiene. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rybczynski, Witold. 1995. City Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Schenck, Carlos H. 2005. Paradox Lost: Midnight in the Battleground of Sleep and Dreams. Minneapolis: Extreme Nights LLC.Google Scholar
Thompson, Edward Palmer. 1980 [1963]. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Thompson, Edward Palmer. 1993. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York: New Press.Google Scholar
Wright, Lawrence. 2004 [1962]. Warm & Snug: The History of the Bed. Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing.Google Scholar
Zhan, Mei. 2009. Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine in Transnational Frames. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar