The Art of Lying Down

by Bernd Brunner

  When many people showed up at the same place needing a bed for the night—as often happened, for example, during pilgrimages—every corner of space at an inn was precious. Sometimes the visitors were put up in the hayloft, or if straw was in short supply, indoor spots to sleep were quickly organized with hay. Terrible headaches were common after a night in such a fragrant setting. In Brussels, Albrecht Dürer once saw a bed for fifty people. It was a place for drunks to sleep off their intoxication. In his book Dark Scenes from a Life of Wandering: Notebook of a Craftsman, a certain D. Rocholl provides vivid stories of his nocturnal experiences, apparently in late-nineteenth-century northern Germany. He describes one inn as a “refuge for beggars, traveling entertainers with and without horse and wagon, broom makers, peddlers, umbrella makers, tinkers, Slovaks, Gypsies, rascals, and all traveling homeless and idle folk, male and female alike.” Soon chaos descends:

  Hardly has the straw been more or less arranged before the customers have thrown themselves onto it from all sides, many barefoot with their shoes in one hand and their stock and bundle in the other, and attempt to settle in. The shoes go under the head. Some of the most drunk want to stretch out horizontally, and only a sharp kick to the ribs persuades them to adopt a “longitudinal” posture. Skirts are quickly pulled off to cover their owners’ heads. Everything happens quite quickly; the benches and tables are of course already occupied … The alcohol fumes, the perspiration of fifty to sixty people, the smell of damp clothes, the reeking rags—what a horrendous atmosphere.

  Why did separate sleeping arrangements finally catch on? Around the middle of the nineteenth century, critics began to condemn communal sleeping on hygienic or moral grounds. One frequent argument, here expressed by a French expert, was that overly close quarters brought “the bodily emissions of those involved into conflict.” Such warnings also formed part of efforts to combat tuberculosis and syphilis. The origins of many illnesses remained unclear; even gout and scurvy were long considered communicable. Furthermore, inadequate ventilation could quickly lead to a lack of oxygen. When, in the nineteenth century, the construction of new living space could not keep pace with growth in the industrial centers, shift workers often had to share a bed with a bed lodger. The arrangement did not involve both parties’ sleeping together, but rather taking turns using the bed.

  Trying to sleep in a cold bed in an unheated room can cost even the most tired person a good night’s sleep. In the past, people used hot-water bottles or sacks of warm sand to try to get comfortable. Those lacking such luxuries could make do with a brick that had been placed in the oven. Still, most people never faced the specter of freezing alone in bed. Moreover, preventing such a fate did not necessarily depend on the presence of human bedfellows. Elizabeth Charlotte, Princess Palatine, the wife of the Duke of Orleans, once wrote: “What keeps me truly warm in bed is six small puppies.”

  Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick describes an instance of bed sharing that most people would happily pass up. Warned by the innkeeper that another guest will be sharing his bed, Ishmael, a sailor and the narrator, grows increasingly tense as the roommate fails to materialize. “I don’t know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply.” Visions of everything that could possibly happen during the night pass through his mind. As the thought of the stranger’s bed linens prompts an outbreak of itching, he decides to settle down on a wooden bench but then gives up this idea, blows out the candle, and falls into bed. “Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time.” Finally he hears heavy steps, and the stranger enters the room. “Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with blackish-looking squares.” Just as the terrified Ishmael realizes that this fearful apparition is covered in tattoos, the “wild cannibal” puts out his light and jumps into bed. “I sang out, I could not help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.” At some point poor Ishmael manages to doze off, to awake the next morning—what a miracle!—with the cannibal Queequeg’s arm around him “in the most loving and affectionate manner.” Ishmael remarks: “You had almost thought I had been his wife.”

  Every once in a while, members of Europe’s and North America’s highly individualized cultures, whose etiquette normally calls for avoiding physical contact with strangers, engage in communal sleeping. Under pleasant circumstances, these episodes seem less like breaches of taboo than like relics handed down from the past, awash in the romanticism of youthful camping trips and even somehow appealing. Alpine huts, with their closely packed mattresses for skiers or hikers, come to mind. Conversations fueled by beer or mulled wine can last far into the night there. In certain train compartments, sometimes at the conductor’s signal, the seats are folded out to create a sleeping area that fills the entire space. Places like these bring together people who otherwise have nothing to do with one another and who continue on their different ways once the encounter is over. According to her memoirs, railroad sleeping cars were also a favorite field of operation for the French writer Catherine Millet, one of the most famous present-day pioneers of female promiscuity.

  The question of whether children should sleep in a bed with adults evokes the disturbing practice of gerocomy, a curiosity of medical history that stretches back into antiquity and was publicized in England in John Floyer’s Medicina Gerocomic, or the Galenic Art of Preserving Old Men’s Healths Explain’d (1727). The presence of one or more youthful bodies, the theory goes, could breathe new life into an old, worn-out one. The idea that the child would lose a corresponding amount of vitality does not appear to have been a concern. Of course, the step from such practices to sexual temptation and abuse was a small one. It seems possible, if not likely, that gerocomical “treatments” were just a pretext for sexual acts that people did not discuss directly.

  We’ll never know whether all these welcome or unwelcome encounters actually took place or are just the products of active literary imaginations. But other humans are not the only beings that can disrupt our reclining and sleeping time. The most significant annoyances—bedbugs—are especially active in summer and betray their presence with their nauseatingly sweet smell. Otherwise known as Cimex lectularius, they nest in mattresses, crawl out at night, and bite those sleeping there, leaving traces of their saliva, which causes itching and welts. At least there’s one small comfort: they don’t transmit disease.

  Mechanized Reclining

  The revolutions in how people lived during the nineteenth century were so fundamental and extensive that they affected nearly everything, including how we lie down. On the one hand, opportunities for workers to recline were limited to strictly defined times and places, subjecting relaxation to a rigid system of discipline. On the other hand, tireless efforts were devoted to using new technology to optimize the act of lying down and precisely track the postures of those performing it.

  Torture or medicine? James K. Casey’s “Dormant Balance”

  The key question was how to relieve the back without having to lie completely flat. This search for practical hybrid forms of sitting and lying was motivated by an epidemic of back pain, as well as by the desire to help bedridden individuals whose backs suffered from constantly lying down. Doctors experimented enthusiastically with mechanical devices in the hope of curing back problems. In 1828, one James K. Casey of New York was granted a patent for a frame that could smoothly lower a patient from a vertical to a horizontal position without any effort on his or her part. Casey called his invention the Dormant Balance, and he promised that if the patient was willing to undergo this procedure two to three times per day, it could cure a crooked back. Those who wanted to spend more time horizontally were advised to use a soft mattress or other support. If we believe the illustratio
ns that accompanied Casey’s patent application, patients could relax and even read throughout this treatment.

  The predecessors to flexible reclining furniture were “bed machines” with mattresses divided into separate sections for the back, thighs, and lower legs. Originally, they were joined with cumbersome wooden hinges, but by the late nineteenth century models with metal hinges had appeared. The same design principle was applied to adjustable seats in trains, hair salons, and dental practices, as well as operating tables. The designer’s biggest challenge was enabling a smooth transition from sitting to lying down and back again. A surgical chair, for example, needed to accommodate all possible positions between sitting upright and lying flat. In one 1889 model, the surface consists of seven components: a support for the head and feet, two movable armrests, and the main area itself, divided into four parts. Advertising for a metal lounge chair claimed that it was capable of seventy different positions. A mechanized reclining chair made an appearance in 1893 at the Chicago world’s fair, where its manufacturer, the Marks Adjustable Folding Chair Co., enthusiastically announced, “It combines in one a handsome Parlor, Library, Smoking and Reclining chair, a perfect Lounge and a full-length Bed, and is altogether the Best Chair in the ‘Wide, Wide World.’ ” Thanks to such imaginative designs, chairs not only provided padded places to sit but also made a kind of halfhorizontal floating possible. A new understanding of the idiosyncrasies of sitting, lying down, and every stage in between was fueled in large part by anatomical knowledge of the hundreds of muscles involved.

  A descendant of these mechanical marvels is the La-Z-Boy recliner. An old-fashioned-looking easy chair that can rotate and lean back, it has maintained its popularity for generations. Like nothing before them, these versatile lounging devices show just how much furniture belongs to us “like our skin,” as the writer Hajo Eickhoff once wrote. “They form our boundary. They assume the functions of extended arms and legs, with which they complete us, and in so doing they develop typical human characteristics that we believe originate in their own being.”

  In addition to new technologies and materials, the nineteenth century brought a new way of seeing that triggered new forms and furniture. Movement—whether of humans, birds, or other animals—had fascinated scientists and scholars since antiquity, but never before had the laws of movement been pursued with such obsession. Eadweard J. Muybridge (1830–1904) is best known for positioning cameras at intervals and using them to photograph athletes and horses in motion. During an 1887 experiment in California, he turned his lens on clothed and nude human subjects engaged in lying down in bed or getting up again. Measured against the technical standards of the day, Muybridge’s stop-motion photos represented a perceptual revolution; for the first time it was possible to see an everyday movement normally hidden from view and break it down into its separate steps.

  Multifunctional furniture patented in the United States offered the middle class comfort without overloading people’s typically small houses with heavy conventional pieces. A single item could serve as a chair, sofa, bed, and even cabinet. Beds were available that their owners could pivot horizontally and vertically, flip up, or even fold together entirely—a range of metamorphoses to offer the best possible position for any situation and the best use of limited space. One late manifestation of this trend, steel-frame sofas that turn into beds, is still common.

  Sleeping in motion: sleeping car of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company from 1847

  Does this pillow really help? Portable patented “pillow” for railroad travel

  Using space optimally was an urgent issue when it came to sleeping cars on trains, and these modes of transportation proved to be a fruitful area for adjustable reclining. To develop their creations, engineers and designers drew on existing approaches in ship’s cabins. Early versions left a lot to be desired in terms of comfort: occupants of the top berth were so close to the ceiling that they couldn’t sit up, while those below were practically on the floor, where they could observe the feet of passersby up close. The legendary George M. Pullman obtained a patent for a smokers’ sleeping car for gentlemen and a nonsmokers’ counterpart for ladies. In the original version, bed compartments were hung from the ceiling, but other solutions soon appeared. Pullman’s competitor Theodore T. Woodruff came up with a seating bank with a backrest that could be lowered to create two cots. Sleeping cars were exported from the United States to Europe, the original home of the railroad, in 1875. Soon “boudoir trains” were traveling between cities like Vienna and Munich. One inventive soul even developed a small portable box that travelers could easily convert into a support for the head and upper body. It doesn’t seem to have caught on.

  Steamed from below: recumbent sauna

  Horizontal Healing

  Toward the end of the nineteenth century, rest therapy became a popular way to treat those with weak nerves (today’s buzzword: neurasthenia), hysteria, and general physical fatigue. “To provide the nervous system with the rest desirable for its recovery, we must eliminate to the greatest extent possible all sensory stimulation, efforts of the will, and arduous thought processes,” wrote Leopold Löwenfeld (1847–1924), a psychologist who practiced in New York before returning to Munich, where his treatments included hypnosis. With many patients, he combined rest with the Mitchell-Playfair milk cure, a treatment named for the American Silas Weir Mitchell, who had developed it, and the English doctor William S. Playfair, who promoted it. In the most serious cases, patients had to spend six to eight weeks in bed. At the beginning of the rest period, even sitting up was prohibited, and patients were fed large amounts of milk or, later, soup or malt extract, along with a glass of champagne or red wine.

  Thomas Mann soon immortalized sanatoriums and the rest cure society that took shape there by chronicling Hans Castorp’s adventures in The Magic Mountain. Castorp lies on an “excellent chair” on his balcony, where he can make “a proper bundle, a sort of mummy” out of himself and look forward to many satisfying hours. On the magic mountain, the horizontal condition of lying down becomes a form of being itself: “We have to lie—nothing but lie … Settembrini says we live horizontally—he calls us horizontallers; that’s one of his rotten jokes.” In his Studies in Hysteria, Sigmund Freud describes how after initial reluctance, he grew accustomed to “combining cathartic psychotherapy with a rest-cure which can, if need be, be extended into a complete treatment of feeding-up on Weir Mitchell lines.” After all, he reasons, “This gives me the advantage of being able on the one hand to avoid the very disturbing introduction of new physical impressions during a psychotherapy, and on the other hand to remove the boredom of a rest-cure, in which the patients not infrequently fall into the habit of harmful day-dreaming.”

  Horizontal healing: rest cure according to Friedrich E. Bilz

  A form of rest cure in which patients retreat for a period into natural caves or abandoned mines continues to enjoy adherents today. The microclimate in underground shafts offers very damp, nearly dust-free air that may also be enriched with salt or radon. Spending time in such an environment can be helpful for people with asthma or other respiratory problems. And sanatoriums that provide rest cures to combat the suddenly ubiquitous problem of burnout are experiencing a boom.

  To calm the nerves of sufferers, doctors once not only applied electricity directly to their bodies but sometimes set entire beds into motion. Interestingly, the vibrating or shaking bed (the second term is surely more apt) designed by Max Herz around 1900 was meant to mimic the rocking of a moving train, which had been shown to help relieve sleep disorders, general nervousness, and hearing difficulties caused by sclerosis of the middle ear. A flexible wooden board attached to a heavy base, with the help of an adjustable centrifuge device, could “be caused to vibrate like the taut string of a violin.” The approach here draws on the tradition of the fauteuil trépidant, or vibration chair, that the noted neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) successfully used to treat patients with Parkinson’s disea
se.

  Never took off: mechanical massage therapy

  Another variation was a seat designed to pound on the patient’s back, intended for use in cases of chronic bronchitis (because it triggered an intense urge to cough) as well as in “rheumatic and infectious muscular processes.” Hands-on treatments like these were classified under the heading “Mechanotherapy.”

  Floating, Rocking, Swinging

  The sensation of rocking and swinging seems to make us happy. Children cannot get enough of it. And once the cradle came to be, it served as the first bed for generations of humankind. Regardless of how it was set in motion—with curved rockers, a semicircular base, or a hanging mechanism—a cradle’s movement was similar to what the child experienced both in the womb and when carried by its mother and suggested closeness and comfort. A folk belief held that beech-wood was most suited for making cradles because it could drive away evil spirits. Some old cradles also sported pentagrams or the letters IHS, the symbol of Christ, for added protection. In times of high infant mortality, such precautions surely seemed wise.

  If we believe Tacitus, the ancient Germanic peoples sometimes hoisted their elderly into large cradles hung from trees in order to rock them into the great beyond. No precise description of these remarkable beds exists, but perhaps they resembled the familiar hammock. Cradles for adults are hard to find today, but those looking to relive the sensations of childhood and perhaps even the time before birth can turn to rocking chairs and porch swings.

  Caribbean hammock

  During his first visit to the islands known today as the Bahamas, Christopher Columbus encountered hammocks that floated above the ground in the huts of the inhabitants. Because they were easy to fold up and transport yet offered protection from rats and snakes, they quickly became standard equipment for Spanish sailors and, later, soldiers. After that, it was only natural that they would catch on throughout the world. But a hammock is not nearly as comfortable as a reclining chair, and it limits its occupant’s movements far more than sitting in a chair. Also, getting the amount of tension right when you hang it up is not always easy. Lying in a hammock can feel like being tied up, and if you roll over onto your side, you can end up falling out.