Abstract
This essay analyses six case studies of theories of exhaustion-related conditions from the early eighteenth century to the present day. It explores the ways in which George Cheyne, George Beard, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Alain Ehrenberg and Jonathan Crary use medical ideas about exhaustion as a starting point for more wide-ranging cultural critiques related to specific social and technological transformations. In these accounts, physical and psychological symptoms are associated with particular external developments, which are thus not just construed as pathology-generators but also pathologized. The essay challenges some of the persistently repeated claims about exhaustion and its unhappy relationship with modernity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Appignanesi, Lisa. 2008. Mad, Bad And Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present. London: Virago.
Beard, George M. 1881. American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences. A Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia). New York: G. P. Putnam Sons.
———. 1880. A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia): Its Symptoms, Nature, Sequences, Treatment. New York: W. Wood.
Bergengruen, Maximilian, Klaus Müller-Wille and Caroline Pross, eds. 2010. Neurasthenie. Die Krankheit der Moderne und die moderne Literatur. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach.
Brentano, Franz. 1911. Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, vol. 2. Leipzig: Duncker and Humboldt.
Cheyne, George. 1735. The English Malady: or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers, etc, sixth edition. London: G. Strahan and J. Leake.
Clanchy, Kate. 2014. “The Secret Life of Sleep Review: Personalised and Politicised Reflections.” The Guardian, March 26. Accessed April 8, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/26/secret-life-sleep-review-reflections-kat-duff/
Crary, Jonathan. 2013. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London and New York: Verso.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2004. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Ehrenberg, Alain. 2010. The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age. Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Esposito, Roberto. 2011. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. London: Polity Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 2001. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, vol. XIV, 243–58. London: Vintage.
——— 2001a. “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, vol. IX, 177–204. London: Vintage.
Galen. 1997. Selected Works, translated and with an introduction and notes by P. N. Singer. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Gijswijt-Hofstra, Marijke and Roy Porter, eds. 2001. Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First World War. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Goldacre, Ben. 2013. Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients. London: Faber and Faber.
Gosling, F. 1987. Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870–1910. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Grünewald, Stephan. 2013. Die erschöpfte Gesellschaft: Warum Deutschland neu träumen muss. Frankfurt am Main: Campus.
Han, Byung-Chul. 2010. Müdigkeitsgesellschaft. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.
Horwitz, Allan V. and Jerome C. Wakefield. 2007. The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kafka, Franz. 1998. Briefe an Milena. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.
Killen, Andreas. 2006. Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.
Kirsch, Irving. 2010. The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. New York: Basic Books.
Kury, Patrick. 2012. Der Überforderte Mensch: Eine Wissensgeschichte vom Stress zum Burnout. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2012.
Leader, Darian. 2009. The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression. London: Penguin.
Lutz, Tom. 1995. “Neurasthenia and Fatigue Syndromes.” In A History of Clinical Psychiatry: The Origins and History of Psychiatric Disorders, edited by German E. Berrios and Roy Porter, 533–44. London: Athlone.
———. 1991. American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Macmillan, M. B. 1976. “Beard’s Concept of Neurasthenia and Freud’s Concept of the Actual Neuroses.” Journal of the History of Behavioural Science 12 (4): 376–90.
Martynkewicz, Wolfgang. 2013. Das Zeitalter der Erschöpfung: Die Überforderung des Menschen durch die Moderne. Berlin: Aufbau.
Neckel, Sighard and Greta Wagner, eds. 2013. Leistung und Erschöpfung: Burnout in der Wettbewerbsgesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Nordau, Max. 1896. Entartung, vol. 1, third edition. Berlin: Duncker.
Oppenheim, Janet. 1991.“Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Post, Werner. 2011. Acedia – Das Laster der Trägheit: Zur Geschichte der siebten Todsünde. Freiburg and Vienna: Herder.
Rabinbach, Anson. 1992. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Radden, Jennifer, ed. 2000. The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Radkau, Joachim. 1998. Das Zeitalter der Nervosität. Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag.
Roelcke, Volker. 1999. Krankheit und Kulturkritik. Psychiatrische Gesellschaftsdeutungen im bürgerlichen Zeitalter 1790–1914. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus.
Schaffner, Anna Katharina. 2014. “Magic Muesli: German Burnout.” Times Literary Supplement, February 14. Accessed February 17, 2014. http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1374502.ece.
Schaufeli, Wilhelm, Michael P. Leiter and Christina Maslach. 2009. “Burnout: 35 Years of Research and Practice.” Career Development International 14(3): 204–20.
Scull, Andrew. 2012. Hysteria: The Disturbing History. New York: OUP.
Shorter, Edward. 1992. From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era. New York: The Free Press.
Showalter, Elaine. 1987. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980. London: Virago.
Sontag, Susan. 2001. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors. New York: Picador.
von Krafft-Ebing, Richard. 1898. Ueber Gesunde und Kranke Nerven, 4th edition. Tübingen: Verlag der H. Laupp’schen Buchhandlung.
Wenzel, Siegfried. 1967. The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Wessely, Simon. 1995. “Neurasthenia and Fatigue Syndromes.” In A History of Clinical Psychiatry: The Origins and History of Psychiatric Disorders, edited by German E. Berrios and Roy Porter, 509–32. London: Athlone.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Schaffner, A.K. Exhaustion and the Pathologization of Modernity. J Med Humanit 37, 327–341 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-014-9299-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-014-9299-z