@Twistandshout - you talk about hospitals being 'in the dark ages', but I trained as a nurse in the '80s, and back then the importance of sleep, and a quiet ward was understood. Lights went off, or were dimmed, and we worked quietly. Obviously you can't do nothing over night - some treatments need to be carried on during the night, emergencies happen, patients get distressed and need help - but we knew that sleep was a vital part of recovery for our patients, and did all we could to promote it.
There were very few visitors allowed on the wards over night - if someone was critically ill, or near to dying, their relatives would be allowed to stay with them, and parents were allowed to stay with children on the Children's ward, but apart from that, there were no visitors - and those that there were, weren't generally noisy - they too seemed to understand the need for quiet so other patients could sleep. And if the senior nurse had found the night nurses on a ward chatting loudly or making unnecessary noise, they'd have got an absolute rocket.
Noisy wards, night time visitors making too much noise, patients with TVs and phones/tablets etc are much more of a modern phenomenon than a dark ages one - in my experience, discipline was much stricter in the past than it is now.
So, in my opinion, as far as sleep and nighttime noise are concerned, we might be better off if our hospitals went back to the dark ages!!