Genre:

Essay

Subjects:

Health, Nutrition, Temperance, Physiology, Heat, Putrefaction, Epidemiology, Psychology, Feeling

    Observes that 'exercise, temperance, and cheerfulness are the three points on which we ought more particularly to insist as they are the regulators of health the most proper for that kind of sleep which is attended with the best dreams' (133–34). Proposes the need to consider 'the atmosphere of the place in which we sleep', noting that 'the air, which being received into the lungs is there digested as food is in the stomach, and being reduced to the minutest particles filtres [sic] through the pores to the blood, which it proceeds to vivify'. Draws an analogy between the temperature equilibrium of a heated vessel of boiling water in contact with open air and the health of a living body placed in an atmosphere in which 'the putrescent particles can be expelled from the domain of life'. (134) On the basis of the miasmatic theory of contagion advises sleeping in a well-ventilated room. Describes in humoral language the different states of the brains of different kinds of dreamers.