WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Insomnia cover

Insomnia

Chapter 2: PREFACE.
Open in WeRead

About This Book

A clinical overview of sleep and sleeplessness that explains the physiology of sleep, catalogs causes of insomnia—including symptomatic, intrinsic (psychic, emotional, senile) and toxic origins (tobacco, alcohol, tea, coffee, gout-related)—and outlines typical symptoms and varieties. It assesses hypnotic drugs and their risks and emphasizes causal, individualized treatment, discussing remedies such as bromide therapy and correction of underlying disorders alongside nonpharmacologic measures like physical exercise, sunlight, ventilation, diet, bed management, and other supportive adjuvants to restore healthy sleep patterns.

PREFACE.

The following pages are the first two of the chapters of “Contributions to Practical Medicine,” as they stand in the fourth edition, 1904, of that book. They include my lectures on the causes and treatment of insomnia, in the necessarily colloquial style in which they were uttered. For the convenience of my professional brethren, these chapters now are offered to them in a separate form in this little book. Every word has been revised and many additions have been made, by the fruits of later experience, for the sake of clearness, completeness, and precision; this has been done with hope of usefulness in medical practice, and with the aim of accuracy in diagnosis and success in therapeutics.

31, Temple Row,
Birmingham, 1904.