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The Anatomy of Sleep; or, the Art of Procuring Sound and Refreshing Slumber at Will

1842; BMJ; Volume: s1-5; Issue: 109 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1136/bmj.s1-5.109.94

0959-8138

Music History and Culture

The Anatomy of Sleep is a notable example of how much can be made out of nothing by a little ingenuity.The aim of the work is to communicate the mode or art of procuring sound and refreshing sleep at will; and this, which is told at the end of the volume, does not take up more than one page and two lines.The remaining 503 pages, or, more properly speaking, the whole volume, with the exception of this page and few lines, is taken up with an olla podrida collection of facts and observations on life and its phenomena, death, sleep, drowsiness, trance, prema- ture interments, hybernation, capability of animal body enduring extremes of heat and cold, dreams, somnambulism, catalepsy, hal- lucination, monomania, fainting, asphyxia, syncope, suffocation, drowning, hanging, mesmerism, systems of organization, mental phenomena, sleeplessness, arterialization, narcotism, &c., in fact every thing which could be made to seem in any, even the most distant way, connected with the phenomena of sleep.No, we are wrong in saying every thing; for, in none of his illustrations of the nature of sleep, does Dr Binns take notice of the connec- tion between the stertor during sleep and the stertor during co- matose states; nowhere does he show the analogy between coma and sleep.Dr Binns's diligence in collecting facts and observa- tions on the above-mentioned subjects has been great, and the consequence has been a most amusing work, better fitted, how- ever, to advance the author's popularity as an amusing writer than his reputation as a man of science.Dr Binns, in fact, can have no pretensions to the character of a philosophic writer, for he has neither advanced our knowledge of what sleep is, nor has he even nerves from ganglia undergo constant alternations of excitement