William Charles Dement was an American physician and scientist and is widely recognized as one of the founding fathers of sleep medicine. He published over 500 scientific articles, established the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic (the first sleep laboratory in the US) and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, and was one of the founders and editors of the renowned academic journal Sleep. He strived to draw attention to the subject of sleep at a time when it wasn’t taken seriously.
He also wrote one of the first textbooks on sleep and created an undergraduate sleep course. As The Washington Post writes, a passionate and eccentric Dement gave extra credit to students who nodded off in his classes and then loudly declared that sleepiness is deadly dangerous (he was a proponent of healthy sleep, especially for drivers). And according to Stanford, his classrooms had a designated sleep zone.
Dement received about 40 grants from the National Institutes of Health for sleep research and used them to pay half the rent on his apartment because ran experiments in it.
Building on the work of Kleitman and Aserinsky, who discovered REM sleep in 1953, Dement established the link between REM sleep and dreaming. He also developed the polysomnography method, which expanded sleep research. Beyond science, teaching, and working with patients, he dedicated himself to educating society about the importance of sleep. As written on the Stanford website after his death in 2020, he would have continued this battle if he could have.
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