Sleep and sleeplessness / Haydn Brown.

  • Brown, Haydn.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sleep and sleeplessness / Haydn Brown. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    but it always requires some amount of break: even the slow vermicular movement of involuntary intestinal muscle is subject to periodic relaxation. There is this clear distinction, then, that while such activities as maintain simple life, some of which are more or less involuntary, automatic, or instinctive, require no periodic prolonged cessa- tion in order to recuperate, those concerned with stern competition or pleasurable acquisition, such as is involved in obtaining food or in engaging in agreeable sport or occupation, must alternate with natural desire and requirement of rest, amounts and times and regularities varying according to such dispositions and temperaments as serve to influence the individual. An animal must en- ergise to get food, as a competitive human must move in order to get beyond another. Even a caged animal will endeavour to escape, and a sedentary clerk will delight in walking or in play- ing some game. But muscular energy is not so necessary as an alternative to rest as rest is to energy: a person may live a life-time bed-ridden ; a patient has been known to remain in bed at a hospital for incurables for over fifty years. Sleep is a suspension of activity of the nervous system. It is just as ordinary and ordained as rain and shine, leaf and fall of leaf—and just as inexplicable, excepting that as a contrast to activity it is similar to most contrasts in creation, insomuch as it is vouchsafed to us for an unseen ruler's purpose. All motives in creation are ex- pressed in contrasts which are usually both in- teresting and beautiful. From physiological experiments of scientists,