Article ID: CBB106469327

Insomnia, Medicalization, and Expert Knowledge (2022)

unapi

Historians have clearly articulated the ways in which sleeplessness has long been part of the human condition. As an object of medical expertise and public health intervention, however, insomnia is a much more recent invention, having gained its status as a pathology during the 1870s. But while insomnia has attracted considerable and concerted attention from public health authorities allied with sleep medicine specialists, this phenomenon is not well explained by classical medicalization theory, in part because it is the sleepless sufferers, not the medical experts, who typically have the authority to diagnose insomnia. The dynamics of insomnia’s history are better described as those of a boundary object, around which concepts and practices of biomedicine and psychology coalesce to frame contemporary notions of self-medicalization and self-experiment.

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Authors & Contributors
Daker, Mauricio V.
Pereira, Hugo Silveira
Antonio Semerari
Vicente, Marta V.
Larry Au
Wood, Whitney
Concepts
Psychology
Sleep; rest
Human physiology
Doctor-patient relationships
Biomedicine
Experiments on self
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
18th century
21st century
Early modern
Places
United States
France
Warsaw (Poland)
Washington, D. C. (U.S.)
Puerto Rico
Portugal
Institutions
Harvard University
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