Beaumont Matthew
Department of English Literature, UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
Interface Focus. 2020 Jun 6;10(3):20190074. doi: 10.1098/rsfs.2019.0074. Epub 2020 Apr 17.
This article explores the emergence, in late nineteenth-century Britain and the USA, of the 'insomniac' as a distinct pathological and social archetype. Sleeplessness has of course been a human problem for millennia, but only since the late-Victorian period has there been a specific diagnostic name for the individual who suffers chronically from insufficient sleep. The introductory section of the article, which notes the current panic about sleep problems, offers a brief sketch of the history of sleeplessness, acknowledging the transhistorical nature of this condition but also pointing to the appearance, during the period of the Enlightenment, of the term 'insomnia' itself. The second section makes more specific historical claims about the rise of insomnia in the accelerating conditions of everyday life in urban society at the end of the nineteenth century. It traces the rise of the insomniac as such, especially in the context of medical debates about 'neurasthenia', as someone whose identity is constitutively defined by their inability to sleep. The third section, tightening the focus of the article, goes on to reconstruct the biography of one exemplary late nineteenth-century insomniac, the American dentist Albert Kimball, in order to illustrate the claim that insomnia was one of the pre-eminent symptoms of a certain crisis in industrial and metropolitan modernity as this social condition was lived by individuals at the .
本文探讨了19世纪末英国和美国“失眠者”作为一种独特的病理和社会原型的出现。当然，失眠作为一个人类问题已经存在了数千年，但直到维多利亚时代晚期，才有了针对长期睡眠不足者的特定诊断名称。文章的引言部分提到了当前对睡眠问题的恐慌，简要概述了失眠的历史，承认这种状况具有跨历史的性质，但同时也指出了“失眠症”这个术语在启蒙运动时期的出现。第二部分对19世纪末城市社会日常生活节奏加快的情况下失眠症的兴起提出了更具体的历史论断。它追溯了失眠者的出现，特别是在关于“神经衰弱”的医学辩论背景下，将其视为一个因无法入睡而在本质上被定义了身份的人。第三部分收紧了文章的重点，继续重构一位19世纪晚期典型失眠者——美国牙医阿尔伯特·金博尔的生平，以说明失眠是工业和大都市现代性某种危机的突出症状之一，而这种社会状况正是个人所经历的。
