Insomnia; and Other Disorders of Sleep

AND OTHER
Disorders of Sleep.
BY HENRY M. LYMAN, A.M., M.D., Professor of Physiology, and of Diseases of the Nervous System, in Rush Medical College; Professor of Theory and Practice of Medicine, in the Woman’s Medical College; and Physician to the Presbyterian Hospital, Chicago, Ill.
CHICAGO: W. T. KEENER, 96 WASHINGTON STREET. 1885.
COPYRIGHT, 1885.
R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS, PRINTERS, CHICAGO.

The regularly recurring incidence of natural sleep forms one of the most important subjects for physiological investigation. Were it an event of rare occurrence, it would excite a degree of astonishment and alarm equal to the agitation now experienced by the spectator of an ordinary attack of syncope or of epileptic convulsion. But, so completely does the recurrence of sleep harmonize with all the other facts of life that we are as indifferent to its nature as we are to every other healthy function of the body. It is only when the mind has undertaken a critical observation of the bodily and mental changes which accompany and condition the phenomenon that we begin to comprehend its wonderful character. Ushered in by a waning activity of body and mind that no effort of the will can long resist, nothing could more forcibly suggest the idea of approaching dissolution if, from the very earliest period of unconscious infancy, we had not been accustomed to the dominion of this imperious necessity. The remarkable likeness between the fading of consciousness in sleep and its extinction in death has, in all ages and among all people, arrested the attention of poets and philosophers of every degree.
Soft repose, A living semblance of the grave,
sang old Thomas Miller; and, describing, in Milton’s stately verse, the close of his first day in the garden of Eden, Adam says:
Gentle sleep First found me, and with soft oppression seized My drowsy sense, untroubled, though I thought I then was passing to my former state Insensible, and forthwith to dissolve. How wonderful is death, Death and his brother, Sleep!