Why do we need sleep, and are we getting enough?
Lost sleep, a phenomenon previously neglected by medical science, is now held responsible for a growing range of ailments.When I trained to be a doctor, some four decades ago, everyone neglected sleep. “On call” duty for hospital interns began at 6. and lasted twenty-four hours; I often kept on working until early evening the next day, after which I would stumble back to my apartment and fall asleep in my clothes. The ethic was not to complain.
In Chapter 4 of “The Pickwick Papers,” which appeared in serial format in April, 1836, Charles Dickens’s readers were introduced to “a fat and red-faced boy, in a state of somnolency,” named Joe. Joe works as an assistant to a carriage driver, and continually falls asleep in the middle of his tasks:“Sleep!” said the old gentleman, “he’s always asleep. Goes on errands fast asleep, and snores as he waits at table.
Meir Kryger, who tells the story of Joe in his book, has been working since the nineteen-seventies on a related condition, sleep apnea, in which a person’s airway closes during sleep, breathing stops, and, starved for air, the person awakens. Apnea can lead to heart attack and stroke from decreased oxygen, and may accelerate cognitive decline in older people. Kryger writes that there are descriptions of sleep apnea that predate Dickens’s Joe.
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