A Treatise on the Incubus, or Night-Mare, Disturbed Sleep, Terrific Dreams and

Waller, John AugustineProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
107K words
Chapters
11

Tags

English Originals Medicine Historical ReappraisalScience EnlightenmentPsychological InsightHealth ScienceAcademic Study

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.A Treatise on the Incubus, or Night-Mare, Disturbed Sleep, Terrific Dreams andAuthor: Waller, John Augustine,Language: English, Class: BF: Philosophy, Psychology, Religion: Psychology, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Release Date: May 26, 2013

Editor's review

This early nineteenth-century medical treatise is devoted to the phenomena of the nightmare, nocturnal disturbances, disordered sleep, and terrifying dreams. Within the medical context of its time, the author sought to explain these unsettling sleep experiences through clinical observation and physiological speculation, and the book preserves the questions and argumentative methods of early sleep medicine. Its value lies not in offering treatments usable today, but in serving as a historical document that shows how premodern medicine understood and dealt with sleep disorders, and how medical discourse intertwined with popular imagination. It should be read as material for intellectual and medical history, with attention to how the author defines symptoms, classifies causes, and distinguishes the nightmare from other sleep abnormalities. For readers studying the history of ideas about sleep, nineteenth-century medical writing, or the Gothic cultural background, the book offers reference at the level of the original text; general readers may find its terminology archaic and its argumentative style unfamiliar.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the introduction or table of contents first to grasp the author's definition and classification of the nightmare, then move on to the case sections.
  2. Keep a basic work on medical history or sleep research at hand for comparison, to help understand what early terminology refers to.
  3. Record the book's descriptions of symptoms separately from contemporary sleep medicine, so as not to confuse historical views with current conclusions.
  4. If using it for a paper, excerpt the author's classification of causes as textual evidence for analyzing medical discourse.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11

FAQ

Can this book be used to look up modern treatments for sleep disorders? No. It is an early nineteenth-century medical treatise reflecting the causal speculation and clinical observation of its time, not a modern diagnostic or treatment guide. For treatment advice, consult contemporary sleep medicine sources; this book is better read as a primary text in medical and intellectual history.
What level of English is needed to read this book? The book uses the syntax and terminology of nineteenth-century English medical writing, with long sentences and conceptual divisions that differ from today's. Readers with good English reading ability who are willing to look up older terms will find it smoother; a medical history introduction or annotated edition can also be used alongside it.
Is this book suitable as general popular science reading? Not really. Its purpose and format are those of a medical treatise of its time, not popular sleep science for a general audience. General readers interested in the cultural history of the nightmare may read it selectively as historical material, but should not expect practical advice for improving sleep.

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About the author

Waller, John Augustine Author

Waller, John Augustine is an author about whom very little public information is available. He is known only as the author of a single surviving work, A Treatise on the Incubus, or Night-Mare, Disturbed Sleep, Terrific Dreams and. Judging from its title, the book is a treatise on nightmares, sleep disturbances and terrifying dreams, belonging to the early modern tradition of writing devoted specifically to sleep and dream phenomena. Works of this kind often combined medical observation with accounts of curiosities, attending both to the causes of disturbed sleep and to the fearful experience of nightmares, and they are representative of the popular medical and psychosomatic writing of the period. Since his dates, nationality and life history cannot be confirmed, this introduction makes no inferences and limits itself to describing the subject matter and orientation of the work recorded in the library.