Abstract
Within the humoural system of medicine that dominated English medical theory and practice well into the seventeenth century, sleep was one of six ‘non-natural’ factors that was crucial to preventing illness. Alongside diet, environment, exercise, excretion, and the passions of the mind, sleep helped determine whether or not one’s body was in a healthful equilibrium and could be adjusted in order to promote better physiological functioning. Sleeping, doctors believed, helped restore the body’s moisture, lubricating the brain and aiding digestion, while waking dried the faculties and made the mind sharper. As with all aspects of humoural medicine, physiology and psychology were highly interrelated when it came to matters of sleep, meaning that how much one slept (not to mention at what time of day or in what position) could have significant implications for the health of both body and mind. Despite this emphasis on holism, however, not everyone in sixteenthand seventeenth-century England was entirely comfortable with the role sleep might play in daily life. Although ancient writers such as Hippocrates held that man’s life force did not sleep when the body did, instead maintaining ‘cognizance of all things’, some early modern writers worried that the literal slumber of
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