Book Review

摘要

‘Eat often to beat tiredness. Perk up with exercise. Lose weight to gain energy. Sleep well. Reduce stress to boost energy. Talking therapy beats fatigue. Cut out caffeine. Drink less alcohol. Drink more water for better energy.’ Sounds familiar? These are the some of the ‘self-help tips to fight fatigue’ that the UK National Health Service offers on its website. Feeling constantly exhausted – also known as ‘tired all the time’, or TATT – affects one in every ten people in the UK, according to the Royal College of Psychiatrists. This comes as no surprise: almost everyone has felt exhausted at some point. Work demands, immunological diseases, constant technological communication and even our political climate mean stress levels are running high in our era, resulting in physical and mental exhaustion. But is this specific to our period? Can we say that, given our technological age and work-centred lifestyles, ours is the most exhausted generation in history? In , Anna Katharina Schaffner, Reader in Comparative Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Kent, argues that this is not the case: people in the past have experienced exhaustion just as much as us, although their explanations for it might have been different.