‘Sleep and stress management in Enlightenment literature and poetry’ argues that the relationship between sleep and stress, as we now call it, was well known in long eighteenth-century Britain. This period was one of changing theories about the nature of the body and mind due to the shift from received wisdom and religious dogma to modern experimental science, although there were some continuities with older ideas about regimen from classical medicine. The stresses known to disrupt sleep were often associated with unhealthy lifestyles and pressures of fashionable people of the upper classes, with the lower orders thought to be less susceptible to broken sleep because of their healthier modes of living (less sedentary, less corrupted by rich food and drink, earlier sleeping times more connected with natural rhythms). This article also argues that information about managing stress and sleep was delivered to a wide public audience, not only in prose self-help manuals, but also in ‘regimen’ poetry written by doctors. Highly popular poems such as Dr Edward Baynard's comical Health, A Poem (1719), and Dr John Armstrong's The Art of Preserving Health: A Poem (1744) gave medical lifestyle advice in an entertaining literary form that sugared the pill of dull lifestyle recommendations and treatments.

Today the idea of reading for health is perhaps most commonly associated with the term bibliotherapy. This seemingly new practice might be considered a significant shift of public and professional medical attitudes when compared with historical interpretations of the impact of reading on individuals' health. Much historiography concerning the reception of popular literature in eighteenth-century print culture has focused on the belief that readers of fiction, most often women, were at risk of corrupting their own minds and bodies through their reading choices. Yet, although popular, this view was not exclusively subscribed to by either medical practitioners or the wider public. This article reveals perspectives that warned against and celebrated the effects of reading on human health during the eighteenth century. Unlike what we see from much contemporary scholarship there is, in fact, a range of evidence which demonstrates that eighteenth-century medical practitioners were already engaging with the concept of reading as a therapeutic activity.

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The act of writing has long been acknowledged as integral to eighteenthcentury medical practice, with medical practitioners relying on their ability to communicate via the written word for professional success. Partly as a result of their literary activities, the achievements of male physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries are frequently well-documented, yet the same cannot be said of women engaging in medical work. This essay argues that eighteenth-century women's medical practice extended into their creative writing, with numerous women writers utilising poetry as a central form of authoritative expression on matters of health. Verse offered opportunities to scrutinise, advise on, and influence medical knowledge and practice. Print and manuscript works by authors Jane Barker (1652-1732), Martha Hodges (fl.1675-1725), and Susanna Blamire (1747-94), serve a variety of functions, including arguing for women's medical education, reimagining the workings of the body, and advocating holistic forms of practice that unite physical and emotional forms of care.