Abstract
This excerpt is taken from the middle of a long chapter about the hysteria diagnosis three centuries before Freud’s. It appeared in a five-handed book — together with Sander Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter and Elaine Showalter — called Hysteria Beyond Freud in which each of us was responsible to ‘frame hysteria’ in a particular epoch, mine bounded by hysteria’s middle-ground during 1650–1820. The title, a ‘strange pathology,’ takes its cue from Thomas Sydenham and recognizes how the chain of nerves, fibers and spirits had paved the way to a new hysteria diagnosis at that transformative moment in the generation of Willis and Sydenham before the Paris doctors altered it yet again while retaining its nervous base.
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Notes
Quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535–1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). See also Isler, Thomas Willis.
Beliefs about the effeminacy of men antedate the Restoration, of course, but the idea acquired altogether different currency then. For some of the reasons see Trumbach, ‘The Birth of the Queen’; J. Turner, ‘The School of Men: Libertine Texts in the Subculture of Restoration London’ (a talk given at UCLA, 1989); for a remarkably detailed case history of male effeminacy of the playwright Richard Cumberland in the eighteenth century,
see K. C. Balderston, ed., Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Thrale 1776–1809, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942; rev. edn, 1951), 2: 436–40.
The term category as I have been using it in this chapter should not suggest philosophical so much as medical category. Disease was then understood almost entirely within the terms of categories and classifications, as the wide taxonomic tendencies of the era had doctors compiling and classifying every disease in terms of its major symptoms, anatomic presentations, organic involvements, and so forth. See D. Knight, Ordering the World: A History of Classifying the World (London: Macmillan, 1980).
Baglivi held a chair of medical theory in the collegio della Sapienza in Rome, having been elected to it by Pope Clement XI. His book De praxi medicina (1699; English trans. 1723) was written with a knowledge of Sydenham’s theories. He believed that hysteria was a mental disease caused by passions of the troubled mind; in this sense, he is less accurate and intuitive than Sydenham but nevertheless important. For Italian hysteria and hypochondria see Oscar Giacchi, L’isterismo e l’ipochondria avvero il malo nervosa … Giudizii fisio-clinici-sociali (Milan, 1875).
Willis’s anatomical ‘explosions’ are discussed by R. G. Frank, ‘Thomas Willis and His Circle: Brain and Mind in Seventeenth-Century Medicine,’ in The Languages of Psyche, ed. Rousseau, 107–147; Sacks, Migraine, 26–27; for Willis’s rhetoric and language see D. Davie, Science and Literature 1700–1740 (London: Sheed & Ward, 1964).
For these shifts in knowledge at large see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970; rev. ed.); Rom Harré, ‘Philosophy and Ideas: Knowledge,’ in Ferment of Knowledge, ed. Rousseau and Porter, 11–55.
The evidence for entrenchment is provided in the remaining portion of this chapter and remains a central theme of this essay, as it does in J. Wright, ‘Hysteria and Mechanical Man,’ Journal History of Ideas 41 (1980): 233–47, and for numbers of medical historians such as A. Luyendijk.
For some of the evidence of the opposite view see P. Hoffmann, La femme dans la pensée des Lumières (Paris: Ophrys, 1977); Hill, Women and Work.
So much has now been written about this relatively small group that one hardly knows where to direct the curious reader; a good place is J. Todd, Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1988),
and for one case history, written in depth, R. Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
A thorough linguistic study of these words (’spleen,’ ‘vapors,’ ‘hysterics’) reconstructed in their local contexts would reveal shades of difference, but there are an equal number of examples of overlap and interchangeability; see also section XIII. For the witch trials, see K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1973);
for the famous 1736 case of the witch of Endor, B. Stock, The Holy and the Demonic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
A good discussion of the scene is found in John Sena, ‘Belinda’s Hysteria: The Medical Context of The Rape of the Lock,’ Eighteenth-Century Life 5, no. 4 (1979): 29–42.
For the post-Popean iconography of Belinda as hysteric see C. Tracy, The Rape Observ’d (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 81, especially D. Guernier’s illustration of Belinda swooning.
For the all-important iatromechanism of the period at large see T. M. Brown, ‘From Mechanism to Vitalism in Eighteenth-Century English Physiology,’ Journal of the History of Biology 7 (1974): 179–216; Rousseau, ‘Nerves, Spirits and Fibres’;
G. Bowles, ‘Physical, Human and Divine Attraction in the Life and Thought of George Cheyne,’ Annals of Science 41 (1974): 473–88;
H. Metzger, Attraction Universelle et Religion Naturelle chez quelques Commentateurs Anglais de Newton (Paris: Nizet, 1938);
for iatromechanism in the work of Dr. Cheyne, see G. S. Rousseau, ‘Medicine and Millenarianism: “Immortal Doctor Cheyne,”’ in Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe, ed. Ingrid Merkel and Allen Debus (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988), 192–230, and for the roles of rhetoric and language in Cheyne’s writings, see Rousseau, ‘Language of the Nerves,’ in Social History of Language, ed. Burke and Porter.
I consider Cheyne’s Essay of the True Nature and Due Method of Treating the Gout (London: G. Strahan, 1722) among his most important works for laying out his theory of iatromechanism and post-Newtonian application.
The Dutch were important in the development of a mechanical theory of hysteria, the great and influential Dr. Boerhaave himself having identified hysteria as the most baffling of all female maladies. Boerhaave’s writings set hysteria on a firm mechanical basis on the continent; for his theory of hysteria and its adoption by his followers, especially Anton de Haen in Holland, Gerard van Swieten in Austria, and Robert Whytt in Scotland, see A. M. Luyendijk, ‘Het hysterie-begrip in de 18de eeuw,’ in Ongeregeld zenuwleven, ed. L. de Goei (Utrecht: NcGv, 1989), 30–41, a volume rich in the bibliography of hysteria and dealing exclusively with the modern history of female uterine maladies. Luyendijk is right to claim that throughout the eighteenth century every aspect of ‘the sick woman’ was sexually charged and sexually liminal;
see A. M. Luyendijk, ‘De Zieke Vrouw in de Achttiende Eeuw,’ Natuurkundige Voordrachten 66 (1988): 129–136.
It undid his psychologizing and cultural determination, neglected his primary point about hysteria as a disease of imitation, and replaced it with a radical anatomizing and mechanizing of the nervous system capable of accounting for rises and falls of hysteria in both genders. Indeed, after Sydenham the theory of imitation virtually went under, finding no place in Cheyne’s system, where the word never appears. It may be more than coincidental that Sydenhamian hysteria as a disease of imitation declines concomitantly with the larger aesthetic and philosophical theory of imitation in the same period; see F. Boyd, Mimesis: The Decline of a Doctrine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973).
For Robinson see A New System of the Spleen (London, 1729), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry; Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy; Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 291–4; T. H. Jobe, ‘Medical Theories of Melancholia in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,’ Clio Medica 19 (1976): 217–31.
G. Cheyne, The English Malady: or, a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds (London: Strahan & Leake, 1733), 184;
see also O. Doughty, ‘The English Malady of the Eighteenth Century,’ Review of English Studies 2 (1926): 257–69;
E. Fischer-Homberger, ‘On the Medical History of the Doctrine of the Imagination,’ Psychological Medicine 4 (1979): 619–28, which discusses the medicalization of the imagination in relation to the hysteric affection, and, most important,
R. Porter, ‘The Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry,’ Medical History 27 (1983): 35–50.
Cheyne, English Malady, 14. Samuel Richardson, the novelist and printer, had printed the book for his friend and claimed that Cheyne chose the title (’English’) because he held the squalor and polluted air responsible for London’s being ‘the greatest, most capacious, close and populous City of the Globe’ — and also called it the ‘English malady’ because hysteria was so called in derision by continental writers (English Malady, 55; C. F. Mullett, ed., The Letters of Doctor George Cheyne to Samuel Richardson 1733–1743 [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1943, 15]).
Curiously, no systematic study has been undertaken despite the large amount of recent feminist scholarship in the field of eighteenth-century studies; it awaits its avid student, for whom the sheer amount of material between 1700 and 1800 will make for a field day of scholarship. Some material for the nineteenth century is found in Y. Ripa, La ronde des folles: Femme folie et enfermement au XIXe siecle (Paris: Aubier, 1986).
Müller, who became a leading anthropologist in Germany, wrote his medical thesis at the University of Paris in 1813 on ‘le spasme et l’affection vaporeuse’; as late as the 1840s some French doctors still considered ‘spleen’ a valid category of the hysteria-hypochondria syndrome; see D, Montallegry, Hypochondrie-spleen ou névroses trisplanchniques. Observations relative à ces maladies et leur traitement radical (Paris, 1841).
For Swift and hysteria see Christopher Fox, ed., Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (New York: AMS Press, 1988), 236–7.
M. DePorte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift, Sterne, and Augustan Ideas of Madness (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library Press, 1974), 125 ff.
For evidence of the linguistic confusion in the primary medical literature, see W. Stukeley, Of the Spleen (London, 1723); J. Midriff, Observations on the Spleen and Vapours; Containing Remarkable Cases of Persons of both Sexes, and all Ranks, from the aspiring Directors to the Humble Bubbler, who have been miserably afflicted with these Melancholy Disorders since the Fall of the South-see, and other publick Stocks; with the proper Method for their Recovery, according to the new and uncommon Circumstances of each Case (London, 1720); J. Raulin, Traité des affections vaporeuses du sexe (Paris, 1758). There is also a wide literature of spleen and vapors, as in Matthew Green, The Spleen, and Other Poems … with a Prefatory Essay by John Aikin, M. D. (London: Cadell, 1796). For comparison of this early eighteenth-century, outbreak of spleen with outbursts in America at the end of the nineteenth century, see T. Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), a study of the ‘neurasthenia plague’ of 1903 that gave rise to hundreds of cures and potions. Midriff wondered if certain types of ‘spleen’ appeared in particular types of wars and not others.
See Purcell, Treatise of Vapours; some discussion of these matters is found in O. Temkin, The Falling Sickness (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
For the extensiveness of this Newtonianism in medical theory, see N. Robinson, MD, A new theory of physick and diseases, founded on the principles of the Newtonian philosophy (London, 1725), with much emphasis on hysteria; in theology and cosmic thought, J. Craig, Theologia … Mathematica (London, 1699); more generally, I. Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984).
James Thomson the poet and author of The Seasons, the most widely read English poem of the eighteenth century, also reflects this pervasiveness; see A. D. McKillop, The Background of Thomson’s Seasons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1942).
For Newtonianism and the popular imagination, M. H. Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946).
Roy Porter has chronicled aspects of this development in Mind-Forged Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London: Penguin, 1987); see also for madness in this period and its relation to current scientific movements: V. Skultans, English Madness: Ideas on Insanity 1580–1890 (London: Routledge, 1979);
M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 120–32. Dr. Charles Perry, a mechanist and contemporary of Cheyne, Robinson, and Purcell, makes perceptive points about madness in relation to hysteria in his treatise On the Causes and Nature of Madness (London, 1723).
G. Cheyne, quoted in L. Feder, Madness in Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 170. Cheyne’s prose abounds with weird syntax, ungrammatical constructions, and neologisms; ‘fantastical’ rather than the simpler word strange is just the sort of word found in his vocabulary.
Blackmore, Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours, 319. It is important to reiterate Sydenham’s consistent use of this nomenclature for males, which fell under his gender collapse of the disease and which was generally adopted by his students and followers into the time of Blackmore and Robinson: men were always ‘hypochondriacal,’ while women remained ‘hysterical,’ and no amount of anatomical similitude between the genders could account for the linguist disparity; for some discussion, see E. Fischer-Homberger, ‘Hypochondriasis of the Eighteenth Century — Neurosis of the Present Century,’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine 46 (1972): 391–401.
Looking ahead, these factors will coalesce later on in the century, in the world of Adair, Heberden and Cullen — Cheyne’s followers. For the medical profession in the eighteenth century ‘in relation to the development of other professions, see Geoffrey S. Holmes, The Professions and Social Change in England 1680–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), and idem, Augustan England: Professions, State and Society, 1680–1730 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982).
For the role of quacks in this milieu see R. Porter, Health for Sale: Quackery in England 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), and ‘Female Quacks in the Consumer Society,’ The History of Nursing Society Journal 3 (1990): 1–25.
I.e., the essentially anti-vitalistic principle that all is brain and body, nothing mind. Twentieth-century science has spelled the death knell of scientific vitalism despite its many vestiges in the biological and neurological realms. For the anti-vitalistic strains and what I am calling the triumph of the neurophysiological approach of contemporary twentieth-century science, see J. D. Spillane, The Doctrine of the Nerves: Chapters in the History of Neurology (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981);
W. Riese, A History of Neurology (New York: MD Publications, 1959);
for the linguistic implications, M. Jeannerod, The Brain Machine: The Development of Neurophysiological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985);
H. A. Whitaker, On the Representation of Language in the Human Brain: Problems in the Neurology of Language (Los Angeles: UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics, 1969).
The animal spirits continued to prove troublesome for experimenters and theorists until the middle of the eighteenth century; for this complicated chapter in the history of science and medicine, see E. Clarke, ‘The Doctrine of the Hollow Nerve in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,’ in Medicine, Science, and Culture: Historical Essays in Honor of Owsei Temkin, ed. L. G. Stevenson and Robert P. Multhauf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 123–41; for its linguistic representations and diverse metaphorical uses, Rousseau, ‘Discovery of the Imagination’; the interchanges between the rhetorical and empirical (or scientific) domains here would make a fascinating study that has not been undertaken on a broad canvas.
For nightmares and hysteria, see A. M. Luyendijk-Elshout, ‘Mechanism contra vitalisme: De school van Herman Boerhaave en de beginselen van het leven,’ T. Gesch. Geneesk. Natuurw. Wisk. Techn. 5 (1982): 16–26; idem, ‘Of Masks and Mills’.
S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), whose use of self-fashioning must be credited.
P. M. Spacks, The Female Imagination (London: Methuen, 1976); idem., Imagining a Self Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1976);
K. O. Lyons, The Invention of the Self (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978);
J. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and literary criticism dealing with the literature of sensibility.
G. S. Rousseau, ‘Nerves, Spirits and Fibres’; for the scientific dimension in the mid-eighteenth century, see Haller’s physiological revolution; for the popular cults, see an anonymous ‘Descant on Sensibility,’ London Magazine (May 1776); for the literary dimension, Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility; and L. I. Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962).
The new role of consumption of every type cannot be minimized in this period: see N. J. McKendrick et al., The Birth of Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa Publications Limited, 1982);
J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990);
for the reaction, M. Caldwell, The Last Crusade: The War on Consumption (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1988); for the medical diagnosis and its economic implications see such contemporary medical works as C. Bennet, Treatise of Consumptions (London, 1720); for drink and its relation to nervous sensibility, compare T. Trotter, An Essay, Medical, Philosophical and Chemical on Drunkenness (London: Longmans, 1804).
See M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 132. My own thought has been influenced as much on the semiotic domain by Tzvetan Todorov in The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other Translated from the French by Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).
It could not have elevated sensibility and the conditions (hysteria) that depended on it, without a prior theory of the ‘sciences of man.’ There are fine studies of this subject, but they usually omit the medical dimension entirely; for the best, see Sergio Moravia, Filosofia e scienze umane nell’eta dei lumi (Florence: Sansoni, 1982). The point needs to be related to the development of the science of man; Moravia saw much but did not make the important connections; he saw narrowly only the new science of man but not its implication for self-fashioning.
See F. J. McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1989).
For his life and works, see Rousseau, ‘Cultural History in a New Key’; Philip Gosse, Dr. Viper: The Querulous Life of Philip Thicknesse (London: Cassell, 1952);
A. Brunschwig, Enlightenment and Romanticism in Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
For Whytt, see R. K. French, Robert Whytt, the Soul, and Medicine (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1969).
For a list of many of these medical dissertations see G. S. Rousseau, ‘Discourses of the Nerve,’ in Literature and Science as Modes of Expression, ed. F. Amrine (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 56–60.
Philippe Hecquet, Le naturalisme des convulsions dans les maladies de l’épidémie convulsionnaire (Soleure, 1733);
Hillel Schwartz, The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1980); idem, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, and that Subtile Effluvium: A Study of the Opposition to the French Prophets in England, 1706–1710 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978).
Edith Sitwell, The English Eccentrics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1933).
Hugh Farmer, An Essay on the Demoniacs of the New Testament (London: G. Robinson, 1775). For Farmer’s interest in miracles, demons, spirits, and hysterics, as well as his medical case history and life, see Michael Dodson, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late Reverend and Learned Hugh Farmer (London: Longman & Rees, 1804). This work differs from physician Richard Mead’s Treatise concerning the Influence of the Sun and the Moon upon Human Bodies, and the Diseases Thereby Produced (London, 1748). In Mead, male hysteria is explained according to external phenomena (for example moon, waves, tides) acting through Hartleyan vibrations and magnetism upon the human Nerves and then the imagination. In this sense Mead, like Farmer, different though their professions were, should both be considered kindred in the mindset of counter-nerve. For counter-nerve see Rousseau, ‘Cultural History in a New Key’, 70–75, and Richard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).
Loneliness was an element of their alienation as securely as any other factors, as has been noticed by John Sitter in his Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982).
For a very limited study in one hospital during the 1780s see G. B. Risse, ‘Hysteria at the Edinburgh Infirmary: The Construction and Treatment of a Disease, 1770–1800,’ Medical History 32 (1988): 1–22. Risse has suggested that the organic diagnosis rather than any remotely psychogenic etiology enhanced the bedside discourse shared between these Edinburgh professors and their pupils. Men were not taken in at Edinburgh, but they were in Paris and Vienna. Highborn and low, female and male: all were treated and eventually admitted without regard to gender.
G. Miller, ed., Letters of Edward Jenner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
This fact surfaces repeatedly in the study of female maladies in Barbara Duden, The Woman beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Those who think ‘hordes’ is excessive to describe the proliferation of hysteria theory should consult the bibliographical evidence; see J. Sena, A Bibliography of Melancholy (London: Nether Press, 1970).
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Rousseau, G.S. (2004). ‘Strange Pathology’: Nerves and the Hysteria Diagnosis in Early Modern Europe (1993). In: Nervous Acts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505155_9
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