Pre-1950s Medicalisation of Sleep

Abstract

Many social studies emphasize that sleep medicalisation has emerged in the 1950s, with the rise of somnology. In this paper, I argue that the medicalisation of sleep is rather selective and incomplete. Building on the remark of one of the founding fathers of the sociology of sleep, Simon Williams’(2005), that if we revisited the nineteenth-century medical texts, we would notice evidence of early, pre-1950s medicalisation of sleep, I analyzed nineteenth-century public health policies and documents in Romania and found evidence that, during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, sleep was, de facto, medicalised due to the general trend to medicalise the body. I outline two dimensions of this pre-1950s medicalization of sleep: the rationalization and the hygienisation of sleep.

Keywords

• sleep
• medicalisation
• modernity