Insomnia: a cultural history

Eluned Summers-Bremner, Insomnia: a cultural history, London, Reaktion Books, 2008, pp. 176, £19.95 (hardback 978-1-86189-317-8).

In Insomnia: a cultural history, Eluned Summers-Bremner seeks to explore attitudes toward sleeplessness from ancient times to the present. Because her sources are drawn primarily from literature, the book makes little effort to probe popular beliefs, much less how people across time and space actually grappled with insomnia. Also slighted are the causes of sleeplessness and its consequences upon the cadences of daily life.

Summers-Bremner initially draws upon modem medicine to define insomnia "as the habitual inability to fall asleep or remain asleep when one wishes or needs to do so" (p. 7). So far, so good. But within several pages, we are off on a disjointed, at times perplexing tour that takes us, in the ensuing chapters, from Gilgamesh...