Wolf-Meyer’s strengths lie in his ability to combine patient historical research with a concern for the contemporary, and in his anthropologist’s attentiveness to the structures of everyday life. Perhaps due to his extensive fieldwork on the both sides of the doctor-patient divide, he is able to provide an account of sleep medicine that, while critically-informed, is at the same time refreshingly sympathetic, far-removed both from a top-down approach to the history of medicine that disregards the experiences of patients, and from the often caricaturish approach of much medical history, which presents practitioners as no more than the stooges of a nefarious ‘medical imperialism’. Having discussed the numerous past and present forms of sleep that humans have indulged in, The Slumbering Masses ends with a call for a new bioethical stance based towards variation and difference.

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