ABSTRACT
For sanitarians, doctors and other late nineteenth-century health practitioners, hygiene and modernity were co-extensive with each other. Miasmatic theory, germ theory, vitalism, hydropathy, along with eugenics, the nature cure and phrenology: all provided a framework in which a hygienic regimen, whether founded in scientific advance or in a return to the simple purities of natural living, promised an evolving and avowedly modern route to health. However, this repudiation of the domestic is more a feature of the cultural aesthetic and politics of modernism than of modernity itself. Ironically, despite twin beds being products of a thoroughly Victorian faith in science and progress, the twentieth-century enthusiasm for this mode of sleeping was, at least in part, expressed as an explicitly anti-Victorian commitment to the modern.
