The occasional genius like Napoleon may perhaps get on habitually with four hours of sleep each night, and the mother watching by the sick-bed of her child may go for weeks in an emergency with but an hour or two of sleep at intervals, infrequent and irregular. But the sensible division made by Alfred the Great into eight hours for sleep, eight hours for work, eight hours for play, will be as far as possible observed by the right-minded and far-seeing everywhere.
INSOMNIA AND ITS CAUSES
Insomnia reduced to simplest terms is nothing but the inability to sleep. While the causes of insomnia may sometimes be exceedingly complex, ordinarily they are evident both to us and those we love the best. Anything, as we all learn by experience, which accelerates the activity of the mind and increases the congestion of the brain is likely to induce insomnia. Worry, fear, grief, prolonged mental effort, any sort of emotional excitement, social dissipation, the intemperate use of coffee, tea, or alcohol are among the most familiar causes of insomnia. Disturbances of digestion, neuralgic pains, arterial disease, eye-strain, and dental lesions are the hidden causes, oftener than we imagine, of protracted wakefulness.
Many of the more obstinate cases of insomnia are due, we know at last through Dr. Upson’s remarkable book,[6] to some dental lesion unsuspected because, as is not uncommon, it is unaccompanied by the ache habitually associated with all the ills to which the teeth are heirs. In my Emmanuel clinic I have had one case of insomnia which, in spite of all an efficient doctor could do for the body and the Emmanuel worker for the mind, persisted until I at last discovered that the sufferer was in immediate need of a dentist, whose threshold, through a morbid fear, he had not crossed in many years.
THE VALUE OF DRUGS
For insomnia there is no specific known to medicine. While the good family doctor may correct digestive disturbances, banish for the time neuralgic pains, modify arterial disease, relieve with the oculist’s assistance eye-strain, and through the dentist remove the cause of dental lesions, sometimes insomnia persists long after the physical cause has disappeared. I have had in my clinic one case of chronic sleeplessness caused by a headache which appeared incurable though the cause of the headache and insomnia alike had vanished years before.