“The twin-bed seems to have come to stay,” proclaimed the Yorkshire Herald in 1892, “and will no doubt in time succeed the double bed in all rooms occupied by two persons”.

The proclamation may have proved less than accurate, but for almost a century between the 1850s and 1950s, separate beds were seen as a healthier, more modern option for couples than the double, with Victorian doctors warning that sharing a bed would allow the weaker sleeper to drain the vitality of the stronger.

Delving through marriage guidance and medical advice books, furniture catalogues and novels, Lancaster University professor Hilary Hinds found that twin beds were initially adopted in the late 19th century as a health precaution.

In her new book, A Cultural History of Twin Beds, Hinds details how doctors warned of the dire consequences of bed-sharing. In 1861, doctor, minister and health campaigner William Whitty Hall’s book Sleep: Or the Hygiene of the Night, advised that each sleeper “should have a single bed in a large, clean, light room, so as to pass all the hours of sleep in a pure fresh air, and that those who fail in this, will in the end fail in health and strength of limb and brain, and will die while yet their days are not all told”.

In the 1880s, a series of articles by Dr Benjamin Ward Richardson warned of the risks of inhaling a bedfellow’s germs: “I cannot do better than commence what I have to say concerning beds and bedding by protesting against the double bed. The system of having beds in which two persons can sleep is always, to some extent, unhealthy.”

Some doctors believed that sharing a bed would allow the stronger sleeper to rob the vitality of the weaker; one wrote of how a “pale, sickly and thin boy” had been sharing a bed with his grandmother, “a very aged person”. When they were separated at night, “the recovery was rapid”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Part of that constellation of social and cultural configuration comprising modernity’ … twin beds in the modernist Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, London. Photograph: Sydney Newberry/University of East Anglia Library

In 1858, Dr James Copland warned: “But it is not in children only that debility is induced by this mode of abstracting vital power … Young females married to very old men suffer in a similar manner, although seldom to so great an extent … These facts are often well known to the aged themselves, who consider the indulgence favourable to longevity, and thereby often illustrate the selfishness which, in some persons, increases with their years.”

By the 1920s, twin beds were seen as a fashionable, modern choice. “Separate beds for every sleeper are as necessary as are separate dishes for every eater,” wrote Dr Edwin Bowers in his 1919 volume, Sleeping for Health. “They promote comfort, cleanliness, and the natural delicacy that exists among human beings.”

Published by Bloomsbury Collections and funded by the Wellcome Trust, Hinds’s book lays out how, by the 1930s, twin beds were commonplace in middle-class households. But by the 1940s, writes Hinds, “they can occasion an unmistakable curl of the lip” and are “no longer the preserve of the health-conscious forward-thinking middle classes”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Goodnight sweethearts … film poster from 1942. Photograph: Everett Collection/Alamy

Separate beds began to be seen as a sign of a distant or failing marriage in the 1950s. In 1956, birth-control advocate and eugenicist Marie Stopes railed against them: “Many of their inhabitants get devitalised, irritable, sleepless and unhappy, I think, because of them. The twin bed set was an invention of the Devil, jealous of married bliss,” she wrote in her final book, Sleep. By the 1960s, their cachet had gone.

Hinds did not set out to write about beds: she was researching interwar fiction written by women, and kept seeing references to separate beds. “I assumed they signified what they signify now, some kind of marital distance or sexual dysfunction,” she said.

But in a novel from the 1920s, she found a reference to “modern twin beds” that “stopped me in my tracks … I could not believe [they] had been part of that constellation of social and cultural configuration comprising modernity”.

She went back to a household scrapbook of her great-grandmother’s, from the 1880s, which included a newspaper cutting warning against the dangers of habitual bed sharing. “I thought I might write an article … I really didn’t expect to write a book.”

Despite all her research, Hinds said that she has not been tempted into acquiring twin beds. “I find myself moved by what they seem to represent about taking charge of that marital nocturnal environment, doing something different with it, rather than just doing what we’d always done in the past,” she said. “But I am a creature of my historical moment.”