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This is an ambitious attempt to trace the history of sleep research, from the philosophers and theologians starting in Greco-Roman times, to the present-day research of psychologists, neurophysiologists, and psychoanalysts, including experimentalists in the fields of sleep, dreaming, and related medical disorders.
Kroker begins his book by asking, “Why are thousands of people having their sleep observed in a laboratory tonight?” Are these people ill and therefore “patients,” or are they sleeping in special laboratories observed by medical attendants to diagnose disease, to justify sleep medicine as a specialty, just as bacteriological laboratories cannot exist without the concept of germs and infectious disease? Sleep laboratories and their later offshoot, sleep medicine, did not exist prior to the 1960s, yet today they are as mundane a part of medical practice as the patients who routinely sleep in them. How did sleep and dreaming get detached from the religious and philosophical science paralleling the more modern splitting of the mind-brain and psyche-soma, and how have scientists studied these phenomena over the centuries?
The Sleep of Others and the Transformation of Sleep Research purports to show how philosophical and societal expectations and curiosity have transformed sleep research from the spiritual to an interdisciplinary, laboratory-based, biomedical field and in so doing sleep itself has emerged into what Kroker calls a “scientific object.”
Kroker describes how scientists have vacillated for many years about whether sleep is an intrinsic “normal” phasic biologic function, or whether it is best understood as a neurological inhibition, rhythmically displaying evidence of some as yet unknown fatigue toxin, or perhaps a neurological disturbance due to an over active mid-hind brain sleep centre. He advances the thesis that the direction of sleep research has been driven primarily by the medical illness model and financed by pharmaceutical interests, rather tha