We hear a lot these days about an epidemic of sleeplessness sweeping the globe.  This talk will place these concerns in historical perspective, examining worries about loss of sleep in the nineteenth century, and the forms of therapy and treatment adopted.   Drawing on medical periodicals and texts, as well as more popular works, it will track the rise of anxieties around sleeplessness and insomnia, particularly for the ‘brain-worker’, both adult and child.

Professor Sally Shuttleworth is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she was previously Head of the Humanities Division.  She has published widely on the inter-relations of medicine, science and literature.  Her books include The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840-1900 (2010), and Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019), co-author. She is currently working on a book on travel for health, In Quest of a Cure: Literary and Medical Cultures of the Health Resort, to be published by Oxford University Press next year.