ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between medical views of sleep and the idea of the efficient husbanding of time as a key facet of developing modernity, with resonance in the Fitbits of the twenty-first century. He also shows how ideas about sleep increasingly reflected the sense that there was a moral and medical duty to be productive and avoid oversleeping. Drawing on literary figures such as Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson as well as physicians such as John Floyer and George Cheyne, Schmidt shows the extent to which exact Newtonian conceptions of time affected eighteenth-century British thinking on the dietetics of sleep. In parallel to Knoeff’s chapter’s comments on the role of the material mechanical model of the barometer, he points to the impact of the model of clocks and clockwork mechanisms in Enlightenment thinking on regimen and of time.
