Abstract
It is well established that during the eighteenth century learned medical explanations for health and disease gradually moved away from the balance of humours, and increasingly focused on the state of the nerves. George Rousseau, Anne Vila and Christopher Lawrence, for example, have shown us how the Enlightenment culture of sensibility revolved around the nervous system, the assumption being that sensitive nerves were indicative of social refinement and feeling, but also meant susceptibility to certain kinds of disease.1 With its emphasis on weak nerves as the cause of melancholy and related distempers, George Cheyne’s The English Malady: Or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds (1733) perfectly exemplifies this new trend.2 However, despite the attention that has been paid to eighteenth-century doctrines of the nerves, the fact that music played a part in these physiological theories has yet to be fully appreciated.3 This may well be because some of the most famous physicians who wrote on the nerves (such as Cheyne or Robert Whytt, for example), did not identify music as a likely cure for melancholy or other so-called ‘nervous diseases’.4 In brief, when it did arise in medical discourse there were two main roles that music served, and these were ultimately related to each other.5 The first was as a topic that merited consideration in its own right: that is, why and how does music affect people?
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Notes
George S. Rousseau, Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004),
Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998),
Christopher Lawrence, ‘The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin, eds., The Natural Order (London: Sage, 1979), 19–40.
Anita Guerrini, Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Times of George Cheyne (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000).
See, for example, Stanley W. Jackson, ‘Force and Kindred Notions in Eighteenth-Century Neurophysiology and Medical Psychology’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 44 (1970), 397–410
and Theodore M. Brown, ‘From Mechanism to Vitalism in Eighteenth-Century English Physiology’, Journal of the History of Biology 7 (1974), 179–216.
For a preliminary discussion of music and the nervous system in Scottish Enlightenment thought, see Penelope Gouk, ‘Music’s Pathological and Therapeutic Effects on the Body Politic: Doctor John Gregory’s Views’, in Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills, eds., Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 191–207.
Penelope Gouk, ‘Music, Melancholy and Medical Spirits in Early Modern Thought’, in Peregrine Horden, ed., Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity (Guilford: Ashgate, 2000), 173–194.
For the wider philosophical engagement with music, see Maria Semi, Music as a Science of Man: The Characters of Musical Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century England (Guilford, Ashgate: 2012).
For the use of musical models to understand mental functioning in the seventeenth century, see Jamie Croy Kassler, Inner Music: Hobbes, Hooke and North on Internal Character (London: Athlone Press, 1995).
Penelope Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), especially Chapter 7.
See also Penelope Gouk, ‘The Role of Harmonics in the Scientific Revolution’, Thomas Christensen, ed., The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 223–245.
See D.P. Walker, ‘Medical Spirits in Philosophy and Theology from Ficino to Newton’, Arts du spectacle et histoire des ideés, Société des Amis du Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours: Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance, 1984), 287–300;
also Penelope Gouk, ‘Raising Spirits and Restoring Souls: Early Modern Medical Explanations for Music’s Effects’, Veit Erlmann, ed., Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004), 87–105.
For more on Brocklesby, please refer to Chapter 6. For further biographical details, see William S. Curran, ‘Dr Brocklesby of London (1722–1797): An 18th-Century Physician and Reformer’, Journal of the History of Medicine 17.4 (1962), 508–521,
C.S. Breathnach, ‘Richard Brocklesby FRS FRCP (1722–1797): Physician and Friend’, Journal of Medical Biography 6.3 (1998), 125–127,
and Margaret Ann Rorke, ‘Music Therapy in the Age of Enlightenment’, Journal of Music Therapy 38.1 (2001), 66–73.
Joseph Fenn Sleigh’s Tentamen physico-medicum inaugurale, de auditu (Edinburgh, MD, 1753) and Edmund Somer’s Dissertatio physico-medica, inauguralis, de sonis et auditu (Edinburgh, MD, 1783) discuss the anatomy of the ear but do not go on to consider nerve action. All these Edinburgh dissertations on sound, music and hearing were preceded by similar publications in Germany and France, notably Adam Brendel, De curatione morborum per carmina et cantos musicos (Wittenberg, MD, 1706), Michael Ernst Ettmüller, Disputatio effectus musicae in hominem (Leipzig, MD, 1714), J.W. Albrecht, Tractatus physicus de effectibus musices in corpus animatum (Leipzig, M.D. 1734) and Joseph-Louis Roger, Tentamen de vi soni et musices in corpus humanum (Avignon, 1758). For the wider European context, see the excellent study by Jukka Sarjala, Music, Morals and the Body. An Academic Issue in Turku, 1653–1808 (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2001),
and also consult the bibliography in Werner Freidrich Kümmel, Musik und Medizin. Ihre Wechselbeziehungen in Theorie und Praxis von 800 bis 1800 (Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Aber, 1977).
It wasn’t until the end of the eighteenth century that physicians became far more concerned with music’s pathological effects. See James Kennaway, ‘From Sensibility to Pathology: The Origins of the Idea of Nervous Music Around 1800’, Jl. History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 65.3 (2010), 396–426.
E. Ashworth Underwood, Boerhaave’s Men at Leyden and After (Edinburgh, 1977),
Rina Knoeff, Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), Calvinist Chemist and Physician (Amsterdam: Koninnklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2002).
Andrew Cunningham, ‘Medicine to Calm the Mind: Boerhaave’s Medical System, and Why it was Adopted in Edinburgh’, in Andrew Cunningham and Roger French, ed., The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Centuty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 40–66.
Penelope Gouk, ‘Music and Spirit in Early Modern Thought’, in Elena Carrera, ed., Emotions and Health 1200–1700 (Brill, 2013), 221–329.
On sixteenth-century precedents, see Katherine S. Park, ‘The Organic Soul’, in C.B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner, eds., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 464–484.
For Bacon, see Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic, 163–166. On Willis, see Jamie Croy Kassler, ‘Restraining the Passions: Hydropneumatics and Hierarchy in the Philosophy of Thomas Willis’, in Stephen Gaukroger, ed., The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the Seventeenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 147–164.
Penelope Gouk, ‘Some English Theories of Hearing in the Seventeenth Century: Before and After Descartes’, Charles Burnett, Michael Fend and Penelope Gouk, eds., The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (London: The Warburg Institute, 1991), 95–113.
Jamie Croy Kassler, ‘Man — a Musical Instrument: Models of the Brain and Mental Functioning Before the Computer’, History of Science 22 (1984), 59–92,
Jamie Croy Kassler, Inner Music: Hobbes, Hooke and North on Internal Character (London: Athlone Press, 1995).
Marjorie Lorch, ‘“Fools at Musick” — Thomas Willis (1621–1675) on Congenital Amusia’, in F. Clifford Rose, ed., Neurology of Music (London: Imperial College Press, 2010), 151–172.
On Galileo, see H. Floris Cohen, Quantifying Music: The Science of Music at the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), for later English theories, see Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic, and Jamie Croy Kassler, The Beginnings of the Modern Philosophy of Music in England: Francis North’s A Philosophical Essay of Music (1677) with Comments of Isaac Newton, Roger North and in the Philosophical Transactions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
For Jean-Philippe Rameau’s use of Newton’s ideas, see Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
George Cheyne, Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion (London, 1705), 274. See also Neil Ascherson, ‘The Fourth Auditory Ossicle: Fact or Fantasy?’ The Journal of Laryngology and Otology 92.6 (1978), 452–465.
Ibid. On theories of hearing more generally, see Penelope Gouk and Ingrid Sykes, ‘Hearing Science in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and France’, Jl. History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 66.4 (2011), 507–545.
A likely source for Brocklesby’s conception of this internal sense is Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725). In fact taste had long been the subject of debate among French philosophers, not least among them Descartes. See Charles Dill, ‘Music, Beauty, and the Paradox of Rationalism’, Georgia Cowart, ed., French Musical Thought 1600–1800 (Ann Arbor and London: U.M.I. Research Press, 1989), 197–210.
For the links between physiological theory and treatises on the visual and dramatic arts, see Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 60–67.
Brocklesby, Reflections, 74. This image of Plato and Pythagoras nourishing their spirits with music inevitably recalls Ficino’s De Triplici Vita or Three Books on Life where he recommends a form of astrological music as a means of drawing down heavenly spiritus. See D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: The Warburg Institute, 1958), also Gouk, ‘Raising Spirits and Restoring Souls’.
For an introduction to the topic, see Henry E. Sigerist, ‘The Story of Tarantism’, Dorothy M. Schullian and Max Schoen, eds., Music and Medicine (New York: Henry Schuman, 1948), 96–116. Brocklesby appears to have consulted the 1745 edition of Mead’s book. But note that a review of this work, including quotations from the essay on the tarantula, also appears in The Gentleman’s Magazine 15 (1745), 255–260.
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Gouk, P. (2014). Music and the Nervous System in Eighteenth-Century British Medical Thought. In: Kennaway, J. (eds) Music and the Nerves, 1700–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339515_3
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