Part Three
The Politics of Mind and Body: Radical Practitioners and Revolutionary Doctors

Seven
States of Mind:
Enlightenment and Natural Philosophy

Simon Schaff er

The voice of the Devil:
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the following Errors:
1. That Man has two real existing principles: Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body; & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
—WILLIAM BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-1793

If it were possible to find a method of becoming master of everything which might happen to a certain number of men, to dispose of everything around them so as to produce on them the desired impression, to make certain of their actions, of their connections, and of all the circumstances of their lives, so that nothing could escape, nor could oppose the desired effect, it cannot be doubted that a method of this kind would be a very powerful and a very useful instrument which governments might apply to various objects of the utmost importance.
—JEREMY BENTHAM, Panopticon; or, The Inspection-House, 1787-1791

THE PRISON OF THE BODY

The relationship between mind and body provides graphic political images of knowledge and power. The slogans composed by Blake and Bentham in the early 1790s are good examples of this imagery. Blake wrote against "the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul." He said that this false notion bred a self-imposed imprisonment of the mind: "man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." Political liberty went hand in hand with spiritual liberty. The destruction of the Bastille was figured as the action of

Abbreviations:

Bowring: John Bowring, ed., The Works of Jeremy Bentham , 11 vols. (Edinburgh, 1838-1848).

Rutt: John T. Rutt, ed., The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley , 25 vols. (London, 1817-1832).

liberating energies in the human mind. So, pastiching Emmanuel Swedenborg's visionary cosmology, Blake proposed a new Code, the "Bible of Hell" directed against old penology and old morality: "Prisons are built with Stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion." Bentham also proposed a new Code to replace old penology and morality, and he also represented this radical reform through an appeal to the relation of bodies and minds. He claimed that in his Panopticon a remakable architectural arrangement of bodies allow the possibility of the "power of mind over mind." In this visionary building, a concentric ring of cells was to be arranged around a central guard tower and a chapel. From the tower, the warden could survey every denizen of the "inspection house" but would always remain invisible to these inmates. The plan was to be fitted to prisons or factories, schools or workhouses—in short, any model polity that demanded the supervisory power of an "invisible eye." The members of such a polity were to be governed through the complete management of their atmosphere and their surroundings. The Panopticon relied on the link between the bodily situation of its inhabitants and their state of mind. The right distribution of light, air, and space prompted the right associations: every inmate would "conceive himself" to be under constant surveillance.^[1]

The Panopticon was an "enlightened" project, concerned with rational order and moral reform, deriving its authority from the natural philosophical understanding of the work of the mind. Spectacularly unsuccessful in reformed Britain, the scheme was initially drafted for the enlightened despotism of Russia and greeted with rapture in Revolutionary France. It has always invited allegorical interpretation. Its author helped himself to the language of a secularized theology: the Panopticon combined "the apparent omnipresence of the inspector (if divines will allow me the expression)" with "the extreme facility of his real presence." He told his Girondin admirer J. P. Brissot that it was "a mill for grinding rogues honest and idle men industrious," and yet confessed in private that it was "a haunted house." For William Hazlitt, the Panopticon was a "glass beehive," a scheme marked by luminous clarity, impractical idealism, and deadly obsession. Edmund Burke was even more scathing: "there's the keeper, the spider in the web." Recent com-

[1] William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 154, 151; Bowring, 4:66, 79, 40. For Blake and Swedenborg, see Mona Wilson, The Life of William Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 56-60; for Blake and the Revolution, see David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, 3d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 175-197.

mentators, no less critical, have found that Bentham's vision provides fruitful evidence of Enlightenment mentality. Bentham has been castigated for the pursuit of crass commercial gain under the mask of disinterested reform, thus damning the motives of future generations of his utilitarian disciples. He has been celebrated as the author of a "symbolic caricature of the characteristic features of disciplinary thinking in his age." Under the inquiring gaze of Michel Foucault, the Panopticon has been transformed into the ideal type of a "microphysics of power," "at once a programme and a utopia," whose disciplinary strategy of surveillance and individuation marked the birth pangs of the human sciences. Precisely because of this exemplary history, the Panopticon and its author's career provide important clues to the concerns of a reforming philosophy of mind and body in the age of reason.^[2]

The concerns of the reforming philosophers connected a model of the right role to be performed by expert intellectuals and a picture of mind and body. The Panopticon was a sign of a reconstructed discipline, both a new way of exercising power and a new form of knowledge. Foucault argued that this discipline was accompanied by the emergence of "the modern soul." Displaced from Christian theology, this soul was at once the site at which power was to be exercised and the object of which knowledge was to be produced. Hence Foucault's characteristically gnomic remark about the relationship between the subject of the enlightened philosophy of mind and the regimes of corporeal discipline these philosophers proposed: "the soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body."^[3] More prosaically, the account of the mind produced by Bentham and his colleagues directly confronted established religion and moral philosophy. Apparently

[2] Bowring, 4:45; Bentham to Brissot, [1791], in Bowring, 10:226; for the "haunted house" see Bowring, 10:250; for Hazlitt, see William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (1825; London: Henry Frowde, 1904), 12-13; for Burke, Bowring, 10:564. For commentary on the Panopticon, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, "The Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham," in Victorian Minds (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1968), 32-81; Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Para: The Pentitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (London: Macmillan, 1978), 113. For Michel Foucault on "panopticism,' see his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 200-209; "The Eye of Power," in Power-Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 146-165· For comments on Foucault's account, see Michelle Perrot, ed., L'impossible prison: Recherches sur le systèrae pénitentiaire au XIXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1980); Martin Jay, "In the Empire of the Gaze: Foucault and the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought," in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. D. Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 175-204.

[3] Foucauh, Discipline and Punish, 29-30.

Pl. 14. Jeremy Bentham, "A General Idea of a Penitentiary Panopticon" (1787).

Pl. 15. Jeremy Bentham, "A General Idea of a Penitentiary Panopticon" (1787).

abstruse exchanges on the immortality of the soul, the possibility of thinking matter, and the character of human motivation carried explicit political resonances. Traditional guardians of moral conduct were to be displaced by philosophers who knew the material sources of passions and interests. Materialist philosophy was allied with a natural philosophical inquiry into the activity of matter and life. It was also allied with reformist projects for the redistribution of authority in the social order.

To provide an example of this network of alliances, a case is taken from the work of some English clerics and lawyers in the 1770s. As Foucault suggested, "these tactics were invented and organised from the starting points of local conditions and particular needs." In this paper, the locale is provided by the work of Joseph Priestley, a dissenting minister at Leeds until 1773 and subsequently the Earl of Shelburne's librarian at Bowood House in Wiltshire until 1780, and of Bentham himself, working in London as a legal writer until he became Shelburne's client in 1781. The connections between these men play an important part in my argument. The "Bowood group," of whom Bentham and Priestley were members, with others such as Richard Price and Samuel Romilly, was later to be identified as a key source of subversive ideas by anti-Jacobins in the 1790s. The enterprise connected with Shelburne, organized under the banner of economic and philosophical reform, provides a convenient site from which to investigate the links between natural philosophy, epistemology, and reforming civil philosophy at this period. While at Bowood, Priestley composed a lengthy series of texts that criticized contemporary philosophies of mind, notably those developed in Scotland by Hume and the Common Sense school, and offered a challenging materialist account of moral philosophy and of mind and body, based on the theories of David Hartley and Priestley's views of proper religion. At the same time, Priestley was actively engaged in political and religious campaigning for civil reform and the emancipation of dissent. Shelburne also provided Priestley with support for his research in pneumatic chemistry, which was inaugurated just before the move to Bowood. Similarly, it was during this period that Bentham began his composition of an ambitious series of texts on political and legal reform and his search for influential backing for these schemes, of which the Panopticon was the most celebrated. The admiration of Benthamite disciples and the hostility of conservative critics have often obscured the process through which these visionary proposals were formed. It will be emphasized that the utopian character of the work mounted by Priestley and Bentham at this period is a significant aspect of their campaigns. Priestley's strong commitment to a millenarian vision of humanity's fu-

ture, and Bentham's extraordinary dreams for that future—and his part in it—are among the more striking aspects of their knowledge of civil society and of natural order. The reformers were visionaries because to change the state they had to change minds.^[4]

This paper is divided into five sections. The first explores an ambiguity in the sense of "enlightenment" as it was used in late-eighteenth-century Britain. During the 1790s, in particular, conservative critics of radicals and reformers argued that the "light" of these philosophers was indistinguishable from the "illumination" of occult mystics and enthusiasts. They pointed out a peculiar feature of the social organization of the reformers, the Masonic club or secretive association of like-minded members of the intelligentsia. The anti-Jacobins then argued that this social form promoted a subversive form of knowledge: the dangerously ambitious account of mind which materialist philosophes used to explain and defend the deeds of the Revolution. The ambiguity of "enlightenment" depended on the ambiguity of reformist philosophy, a knowledge that promised both freedom and discipline. Conservatives interpreted this freedom as anarchy and this discipline as tyranny. Radicals promised a world of free individuals who would pursue the dictates of reasoned self-interest. In contemplating Foucauh's analysis of the Panopticon, Jacques Léonard has pointed out that "utilitarian rationalization and political rationalism go together; one must pause here over masonic philosophy: the mason builds and frees."^[5] The conservative attack on the visions of the reformers suggests a promising line of inquiry into the interests of their philosophy. In particular, it suggests a link between the social forms of patronage and association and the philosophy which the reformers espoused. The second section of the paper documents the local setting of the work of Priestley and Bentham in the 1770s and 1780s, when they were working closely with Shelburne on schemes

[4] For Foucault on the local context, see "The Eye of Power," 159. For Bentham and the Bowood group, see Charles W. Everett, The Education of Jeremy Bentham (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 122-122, Mary P. Mack, Jeremy Bentharn: An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748-1792 (London: Heinemann, 1962), 370-404. For politics and the Bowood group, see Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1928; London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 145-150; John Norris, Shelhurne and Reform (London: Macmillan, 1963), 83-85, 250-253; Derek Jarrett, The Begetters of Revolution: England's Relationship with France, 1759-1789 (London: Longmans, 1973), 130-135; D. O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 142-148; Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 101-l06.

[5] Jacques Léonard, "L'historien et le philosophe," in Perrot, L'impossible prison, 9-28 at 19. Compare Reinhart Koselleck, Krise und Kritik (Munich: Karl Albert, 1959), chap. 2.

for reform in philosophy, religion, and politics. It is suggested that there were important connections between the immediate concerns of this period and the apparently utopian schemes which the reformers proposed. In particular, work on the natural philosophy of the powers of matter, pursued both by Priestley and Bentham in the 1770s, is shown to be an important source for ideas about the progress of society. The link between natural philosophical and social reform lay in a new doctrine of pneumatics, of the behavior of matter and spirit.

In the third section of the paper, this connection is explored in some detail, and it is argued that work in pneumatic chemistry provided powerful resources for an understanding of the way the mind worked and the true doctrine of the soul. Priestley's experimental philosophy and the way he suggested experimenters should work generated a materialist philosophy of mind and a reconstruction of the orthodox model of the soul. The two final sections of this paper examine the consequences of this materialism. Such a philosophy of mind and of soul involved the development of what can be called a "counter-theology," a vision of the future of humanity which relied on a reform of the understanding of human nature. This understanding argued against dualism, removed the division between body and soul, and made mind an object of philosophical inquiry and reform. Mind could become such an object because it was supposed to be material. Philosophical materialism suggested an appropriate role which these intellectuals should follow, that of the medical manager, the expert equipped with an understanding of what Bentham named "mental pathology." So reforming philosophy posed as a therapy. Alongside their account of current social ills, both Priestley and Bentham wrote histories that explained how society and philosophy had developed. These histories simultaneously explained the source of error and suggested ways of correcting it. Social and philosophical error were due to "fictions," corrupt illusions generated by the interests of those in power. The right philosophy of mind and body would discriminate between the real and the fictional by distinguishing between the material and immaterial. Because both writers saw a link between the current social order and the current crisis of philosophy, they supposed that a future of improvement would be marked by a future of rational triumph. The last section of the paper connects this reformed philosophy of mind and this counter-theology with the visionary character of the reformers' project. While philosophical materialism deprived subjects of the illusory hopes of a spiritual world to come, it affirmed a certain future of advance in the social order. The exemplary deaths of Priestley and Bentham dramatized their attitude to this prospect. Reform would

continue under the guidance of expert managers armed with the right account of mind and body and thus the ability to cure the diseases of the body politic. In the nineteenth century, followers of this reforming philosophy developed new disciplines that sought to survey the mental and bodily habits of the subjects of the state. It is concluded that these new disciplines shared much of the utopianism and ambition of the "enlightened" philosophers of the 1770s.^[6]

ENLIGHTENMENT AND ILLUMINATION

Enlightened philosophers grew up in a world of spirits. Priestley recalled that when he was a child in Yorkshire in the 1730s, "it was my misfortune to have the idea of darkness, and the ideas of malignant spirits and apparitions, very closely connected." He also described the "feelings . . . too full of terror" prompted by his strict Calvinist education: "in that state of mind I remember reading the account of the 'man in an iron cage' in the Pilgrim's Progress with the greatest perturbation." Bentham had very similar memories about his upbringing in Essex twenty years later: "this subject of ghosts has been among the torments of my life," he wrote, while Bunyan was again a source of fear: "the devil was everywhere in it and in me too." No doubt this captures a conventional view of "enlightenment": reason destroyed the world of spirits and liberated humanity from superstition. Priestley's "remembrance . . . of what I sometimes felt in that state of ignorance and darkness," he revealed, "gives me a peculiar sense of the value of rational principles of religion." His fears were well known to Bentham, who reminisced about the "sensation more than mental" produced in Priestley by the name of a spirit "too awful to be mentioned." Commenting on his own reading of Pilgrim's Progress, Bentham exclaimed "how much less unhappy I should have been, could I have acknowledged my superstitious fears . . . now that I know the distinction between the imagination and

[6] For materialism and eighteenth-century natural philosophy, see Aram Vartanian, Diderot and Descartes: A Study of Scientific Naturalism in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953); Robert E. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); John Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). For Bentham on "mental pathology," see Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1876), vii; Bowring, 1:304-305. For Bentham on "fictions," see Bowring, 1:235; C. K. Ogden, Bentham's Theory of Fictions (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1932); Ross Harrison, Bentham (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 24-46.

the judgement!"^[7] This image of enlightenment has proved remarkably robust. Historians of natural philosophy have documented the processes whereby spiritual powers hitherto attributed to divine will or immaterial substances were made immanent in matter and subjected to reasoned experimentation. Enthusiasm was tamed: the mad were confined and their claims to inspiration referred either to somatic causes susceptible to medical treatment or to mental disturbance that needed moral therapy. Spirits no longer walked: astrologers were made the butt of the wits and ghost stories a matter of titillation rather than juridical process. It is suggested that these processes touched both the godly and the dissolute. Philip Doddridge, founder of the dissenting academy where Priestley studied, lectured his pupils on the astrologers, who "may as justly be punished as those who keep gaming houses brothels, &c." Yet he warned that some spirits were real: "Seeing there is something in the thought of such agents as these which tends to impress the imagination in a very powerful manner, great care ought to be taken, that children, from the first notice they have of the existence of such beings, be taught to conceive of them as entirely under the control of God." Priestley and many of his allies were taught such views, and carefully revised them to fit the canons of reason.^[8]

Eighteenth-century observers recognized a spreading materialism as a fact of social life. In his study of the Enlightenment's relation with death, John McManners cites an orthodox apologist's rueful lament of 1761: "it seems that it is no longer permissible to speak of the soul except to attack it and to confound it with the instinct of the animals." The long eighteenth-century debates on the powers that could be attributed to mere bodies implied that materialism was only too fashionable: "the very Beaux... Argue themselves into mere Machines," commented a worried enemy of "deism" in 1707. The experimental philosophy that sustained this materialism could be a political weapon: electricity and

[7] For Priestley on ghosts, see Rutt, 1:1-8; 3:50; for Bentham on ghosts, see Bowring, 10:11-21.

[8] For enlightenment, medicine, and enthusiasm, see Roy Porter, "Medicine and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England," Bulletin of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 25 (1979): 27-40; G. S. Rousseau, "Psychology," in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 143-210; Michael MacDonald, "Religion, Social Change and Psychological Healing in England," Studies in Church History 19 (1982): 101-126; Martin Fitzpatrick, "Science and Society in the Enlightenment," Enlightenment and Dissent 4 (1985): 83-106. For Doddridge, see Philip Doddridge, Course of Lectures on the Principal Subjects in Pneumatology, Ethics and Divinity (London, 1763), 552, 541. For the academies, see Nicholas Hans, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 54-62.

pneumatic chemistry demonstrated the range of powers that matter could display. Hence Priestley's notorious remark that "the English hierarchy (if there is anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble even at an air pump, or an electrical machine."^[9] Nor was this merely a matter of fashionable libertinism or pious philosophizing. Priestley, Bentham, and their allies saw immediate material necessity in the propaganda for rational knowledge. In 1772 the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid wrote to Priestley's colleague, Richard Price, praising him for quelling "the present Epidemical Disease of trusting to visionary projects" with the tools of political arithmetic. Reasonable knowledge and the maturity of men of the "middling sort" could reform manners and order even as corrupt a society as the present. What Peter Burke has called "the reformation with the Reformation" mobilized considerable support among the laity. Burke points out the change in the sense of the term "superstition" during this period. A label for powerful and dangerous heresies was transferred to the impotent vagaries of the credulous vulgar. This gave polemical point to the comradely sentiments of the letter from the Derby Philosophical Society which Priestley received soon after the Birmingham mob had destroyed his house and laboratory in 1791: "the sacrilegious hands of the savages at Birmingham" were best combatted with "that philosophy, of which you may be called the father." Erasmus Darwin and his Derby colleagues counseled that "by inducing the world to think and reason," this philosophy "will silently marshall mankind against delusion, and with greater certainty overturn the empire of superstition."^[10]

[9] Louis-Antoine de Caraccioli, La grandeur de l'âme (Paris, 1761), xii, cited in John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 159; John Witty, The First Principles of Modern Deism Confuted (London, 1707), v, cited in Yolton, Thinking Matter, 42; Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (London, 1774), xiv.

[10] For political arithmetic, see Thomas Reid to Richard Price, [?] 1773, Correspondence of Richard Price, ed. W. Bernard Peach and D. O. Thomas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983), 1:154; Peter Buck, "People Who Counted: Political Arithmetic in the Eighteenth Century," Isis 73 (1982): 28-45. For moral reformation, see R. W. Malcomson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), chap. 7; Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1978), 239-242. For Priestley and the Derby Philosophical Society, see Derby Philosophical Society to Priestley, 3 September 1791, in Rutt, 2:152; compare E. Robinson, "New Light on the Priestley Riots," Historical Journal 3 (1960): 73-75; French chemists to Priestley, July 1791, in R. E. Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Joseph Priestley (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966), 257-258: "we have therefore resolved to re-establish your Cabinet, to raise again the Temple which ignorance, barbarity and superstition have dared profane."

The opponents of men such as Priestley and Darwin were swift to see through these assaults on "delusion" and "superstition." In his remarkable survey of the sinister conspiracies of the philosophes and their "illuminated" allies, the Edinburgh natural-philosophy professor John Robison argued in 1796 that a real danger lurked behind this "silent" campaign. In his Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, Robison compared the virtuous religion of Newton's celebrated General Scholium with Laplace's Système du monde. He cited Laplace's attack on "the dangerous maxim that it is sometimes useful to deceive men in order to insure their happiness." What were these "deceits"? "They cannot relate to astrology," Robison suggested, "this was entirely out of date." So Laplace was assaulting the doctrine of the nobility of man and his difference from beasts: materialism bred arrogance among the intellectuals and abasement among their followers.^[11] Robison was one of many anti-Jacobin writers of the 1790s who made these points. "Is superstition the greatest of all possible vices?" Burke asked in 1791. No, for it was "the religion of feeble minds, and they must be tolerated in an intermixture of it, in some trifling or some enthusiastic shape or other." Burke and his admirers held that the disasters of the Revolution demonstrated three key principles of contemporary intellectual life. First, there were identifiable bands of self-styled enlightened philosophers whose sinister associations masked silent plots to subvert established order. Second, these associations promoted a materialist doctrine of mind, bolstered with a false natural philosophy, in which the status of the intellectual reformer was exaggerated and the aspirations of men reduced to the level of beasts. Last, the exaggeration of the powers of reason was no better than a revamped enthusiasm. There was nothing to choose between the radical savants and the enthusiast mob. Nor was there much difference between the wilder shores of philosophical materialism and the old doctrines of spirits, witches, and ghosts. New enlightenment was but old illumination. The enthusiastic visions of the philosophers helped this set of claims: it was not always easy to distinguish the language of the rational dissenters from that of their Methodist enemies. Priestley's Yorkshire bred both. His work on "the scriptures, Ecclesiastical History and the Theory of the Human Mind" was often couched in the metaphor of light and applied directly to

[11] John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, 3d ed. (London, 1798), 229-233. For Robison and the Laplacians, see J. B. Morrell, "Professors Robison and Playfair and the Theophobia Gallica: Natural Philosophy, Religion and Politics in Edinburgh, 1789-1815," Notes and Records of the Royal Society 26 (1971): 43-64.

radical secular change. Thus in his learned dissertation of 1782 on the scriptural foundations of unitarianism, Priestley made use of an obviously visionary language: "happy are those who contribute to diffuse the pure light of this everlasting gospel."^[12]

In his own Everlasting Gospel of 1818 Blake drew a sharp distinction between his vision of spirituality and that of the rational unitarians: "Like dr. Priestly [sic] & Bacon & Newton—Poor Spiritual Knowledge is not worth a button!" But in the 1790s it was easy to see the connections between the proclamations of the empire of reason and the older forms of spiritual knowledge. In France and Britain astrology, mesmerism, alchemy, the Eleusinian mysteries, electrotherapy, and prophecy all became linked to the radical cause. If, as Robert Darnton has suggested, mesmerism marked the end of the Enlightenment in France, mesmerists found it possible to trace respectable natural-philosophical ancestry for their doctrines among the views on active matter developed by eighteenth-century electrical and pneumatic experimenters. But Paris physicians found it more plausible to compare Mesmer with occultists such as Paracelsus, Fludd, Greatrakes, and Bruno. Roy Porter is right to point out that the disciples of animal magnetism proffered materialist stories to explain their successes while the established academicians referred Mesmer's cures to psychosomatic possessions in order to explain them away.^[13] In the 1790s, Britain witnessed a wide range of such radical

[12] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791; London: Dent, 1910), 155; Joseph Priestley, Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (London, 1777), xvi; Rutt, 5:4. For the anti-Jacobin reaction, see M. D. George, "Political Propaganda, 1793-1815: Gillray and Canning," History, n.s., 31 (1946): 66-68 (on the Anti-Jacobin ); Norton Gar-tinkle, "Science and Religion in England, 1790-1800: The Critical Response to the Work of Erasmus Darwin," Journal of the History of Ideas 16 (1955): 276-288; Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, chaps. 4, 6, 10.

[13] Blake, Complete Writings, 752; for mystical sciences and radical politics in Britain, see Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780-1850 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). For mesmerism, see Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); Roy Porter, "Under the Influence: Mesmerism in England," History Today 35 (September 1985): 22-29. Mesmer connects his views with natural philosophy in "Mémoire sur ses découvertes" (1799), in Mesmerism, ed. George J. Bloch (Los Altos, Calif.: Kauffmann, 1980), 118-121. For English mesmerism, see Roger Cooter, "The History of Mesmerism in England," in Mesmer und die Geschichte des Mesmerismus, ed. Heinz Schott (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1985), 152-162. For the psychosomatic explanation of mesmeric cures, see F. Azouvi, "Sens et fonction épistémologique de la critique du magnétisme animal par les Académies," Revue de l'histoire des sciences 29 (1976): 123-142. For Mesmer and Paracelsians, see J. J. Paulet, L'antimagnétisme (Paris, 1784). For the "Eleusinian mysteries," see Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature (London, 1803), 13n. Compare Herbert Loventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism. and Renaissance Science in 18th Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1976).

and mystical activity. Conservatives documented groups such as the "ancient deists" at Hoxton, a center of London dissent, who combined the views of "infidel mystics" with French politics and occult sciences. The activities of the popular prophets such as Joanna Southcott and Richard Brothers were also greeted with a mixture of amusement and alarm. The work of the inspired attracted considerable support in regions such as those where dissent was strong. The events of the 1790s suggested at least three targets for conservative comment: millenarians and prophets who foresaw an imminent change in the civil and moral order; radical physicians who appealed to a materialist knowledge of the mind and the soul in order to change humanity; and rationalist metaphysicians who applied the principles of their philosophy to the reconstruction of the state. Priestley and his allies, such as Theophilus Lindsey and Richard Price, talked in explicitly millenarian terms: "I have little doubt," Priestley announced in 1798, "but that the great prophecies relating to the permanent and happy state of the world, are in the way of fulfilment." These hopes were backed by a specifically materialist account of the capacities of the human mind. As fashionable physicians and radical natural philosophers, both Thomas Beddoes and Erasmus Darwin attracted particular hostility from the conservatives. As Maureen McNeil has shown, Darwin was attacked in the same way as his ally Joseph Priestley for "constantly blending and confounding together the two distinct sciences of matter and mind." Writers in the Anti-Jacobin made fun of these visions. In their satire of 1798 on Darwin's Loves of the Plants, Canning and Frere paraphrased the radicals' view of the progress of humanity. "We have risen from a level with the cabbages of the field to our present comparatively intelligent and dignified state of existence, by the mere exertion of our own energies." The future prospects were ludicrously glorious and based on a risible natural philosophy: the wits claimed that the radicals hoped to raise man "to a rank in which he would be, as it were, all MIND; would enjoy unclouded perspicacity and perpetual vitality; feed on oxygene, and never die, but by his own consent. "^[14]

[14] For the "ancient deists," see William Hamilton Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in This Metropolis (London, 1800), 91; for prophecy, see Harrison, The Second Coming, 57-134; D. M. Valenze, "Prophecy and Popular Literature in Eighteenth-Century England," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 29 (1978): 75-92; Clarke Garrett, "Swedenborg and the Mystical Enlightenment in Late Eighteenth-Century England," Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984): 67-81. For popular dissent, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), chap. 2. For Priestley and prophecy, see Priestley to Lindsey, 1 November 1798, in Rutt, 2:410; Jack Fruchtman, Jr., The Apocalyptic Polities of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 8-45, 81-93. For attacks on Darwin, see Edinburgh Review 2 (1803):449, cited in Maureen McNeil, "The Scientific Muse: The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin," in Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature, ed. Ludmilla Jordanova (London: Free Association Books, 1986), 159-203 at 172; Charles Edmonds, ed., Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1890), 147 (April 1798).

The apostles of reason often seemed to be tools of unreason. Bentham recognized this: in the 1770s he already accepted that "the world is persuaded, not without some colour of reason, that all reformers and system-mongers are mad.... I dreamt t'other night that I was a founder of a sect; of course, a personage of great sanctity and importance: it was called the sect of the Utilitarians." The language of the sects was a powerful tool for the reformers. It became a devastating weakness when attacked in the 1790s. Burke's immediate target, Richard Price, preached that "every degree of illumination which we can communicate must do the greatest good. It helps prepare the minds of men for the recovery of their rights and hasten the overthrow of priestcraft and tyranny." Their opponents identified the social habits of the reformers with their mental constitution. Their covert associations of like-minded intellectuals allegedly fostered the strategy of an insinuation of the false and dangerous beliefs of materialist metaphysics and silly natural philosophy. Thus derangement became dangerous when it seized power. In 1796 Burke picked on the geometricians and chemists whose "dispositions" made them "worse than indifferent about those feelings and habitudes which are the support of the moral world. Ambition is come upon them suddenly; they are intoxicated with it." Sometimes, as in the satires directed against Beddoes's use of gaseous medicines in Bristol in the 1790s and the "pneumatic revelries" of his friends, the "intoxication" became literal. The mental habits of these men were viewed as the cause of their threatening policy. Approaching dangerously, if characteristically, the excessive fury which he condemned, Burke said that "the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than the frailty and passion of man. It is like that of the Principle of Evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil." Accusations of insanity provided much of the language of the polemic on the Reflections on the Revolution in France. Both Burke and Robison, who was well known for his opium habit, might also be shown to be mentally disturbed. Bentham was irate that "the National Assembly of France has been charged with madness for pulling down

establishment," and he condemned Burke's book as the "frantic exclamation" of a "mad man, than whom none perhaps was ever more mischievous."^[15]

Burke was only the most effective of those who argued for the devastating effects of the connection between the associations formed by the reforming philosophers and the political havoc they had wrought. The natural philosophy of the reformers provided fruitful targets for wit: in a famous figure, Burke compared "the spirit of liberty in action" to "the wild gas , the fixed air": "but we ought to suspend our judgement until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface." The most obvious—and most humorous—connection which the anti-Jacobins spotted between this natural philosophy and the politics of the Terror was the endorsement of materialism. Robison commented at some length on Priestley's use of David Hartley's theory of association and aethereal vibrations in the mind. "Dr. Priestley again deduces all intelligence from elastic undulations, and will probably think, that his own great discoveries have been the quiverings of some fiery marsh miasma. " From here it was but a short step to the dangerous lunacies of the intellectuals. Their overestimate of their own mental capacity was accompanied by the bestialization of humanity. "They find themselves possessed of faculties which enable them to speculate and to discover; and they find that the operation of those faculties is quite unlike the things which they contemplate by their means." The consequence was reformist arrogance and corrupted politics: "they feel a satisfaction in this distinction."^[16] An insistence on the material basis of mind seemed to be leading to the creation of a new elite of intellectuals, a new breed of "saints." The resonance with the "Good Old Cause" was deliberate. The admirers of reforms also helped themselves to this hagiographic language. The connections between the English philosophers, such as the Bowood group, and their French colleagues were

[15] For Bentham on the sect of utilitarians, see David Baumgardt, Bentham and the Ethics of Today (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), appendix 1, printing Bentham MSS, University College London, 169.79. For Price, Richard Price, Discourse on the Love of Our Country (London, 1789), 15. For Burke's attack, Edmund Burke, Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), in Burke's Politics, ed. R. Hoffman and P. Levack (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 532-534. For attacks on Beddoes, see Dorothy Stansfield, Thomas Beddoes (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984), chap. 7; T. H. Levere, "Dr. Thomas Beddoes: Science and Medicine in Politics and Society," British Journal for the History of Science 17 (1984): 187-204. For Bentham on Burke and the Revolution, see Bowring, 2:404-405; 4:338·

[16] Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, 6; Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, 429-430.

often figured in these terms. The Girondin leader J. P. Brissot, guillotined in 1793 and later satirized as a vindictive ghost in the Anti-Jacobin, saw Bentham as a modern saint, one of "those rare beings, whom Heaven sometimes sends down upon earth as a consolation for woes, who, in the form of imperfect man, possess a heavenly spirit."^[17]

The attack on the new "saints" was the basis of what amounted to a critique of the new social function of the intellectual. The reformers' associations were held to be the principal site of subversive philosophy and politics. Burke named these associations in the Reflections and then defended his decision to do so: "I intend no controversy with Dr. Price, or Lord Shelburne, or any other of their set," he claimed. But his purpose was to destroy their credentials as disinterested men of knowledge: "I mean to do my best to expose them to the hatred, ridicule and contempt of the whole world; as I always shall expose such calumniators, hypocrites, sowers of sedition and approvers of murder and all its triumphs." This was the sense given to the term "Illuminati." The Masonic conspiracies spread through Europe provided the appropriate model with which to analyze the behavior of the English reformers. "The detestable doctrines of Illuminatism have been preached among us," Robison claimed, and named both Priestley and Price as examples. Robison implied that there was a significant contrast with the proper form of natural philosophy developed in such organizations as the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which he had been Secretary. It was argued that the materialist doctrines of the illuminated philosophers provided a model of the mind which only invited the habit of conspiracy. They had made morality a problem for subtle metaphysics, when it was really a question of public orthodoxy and private sentiment. So their revolution followed from a false natural philosophy. "They have much, but bad, metaphysics; much, but bad, geometry; much, but false, proportionate arithmetic," Burke wrote against the philosophes. Political subversion was the same as natural disorder. When Burke turned his gaze upon the French dissolution of the monasteries, he explicitly compared bad policy with bad cosmology: "to destroy any power growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind, is tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction of the apparently active properties of bodies in the material." When he explained his own horror at the deposition of the king, he pointed to the natural constitution of the mind: "we behold such disasters in the moral, as we should behold a miracle, in the physical, order of things." Any group of intellectuals which

[17] Bowling, 10:192; Edmonds, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, 165-168 (April 1798).

claimed to be able to understand, reform, and manage these mental faculties was at best insanely optimistic about the capacity of metaphysics and, at worse, destructive of those natural sentiments which actually governed proper moral life.^[18]

The anti-Jacobin assault repeatedly contrasted the rational technology of mental management proposed by the radicals with a proper interpretation of the established powers of the mind. The radicals were compared with wily impresarios, or with cunning magicians, or with dissolute gamblers. Burke sought an aesthetics of the state: "to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely." The machinations of the materialists would be incompetent because they could not hope to understand or to force these aesthetic judgments. The Jacobin theater of politics was a world of illusion and crude spectacle. Their philosophical supporters were no better than wizards, making use of "poisonous weeds and wild incantations." It was scarcely surprising that deluded chemists and natural philosophers found such allies congenial. In the 1770s, Burke had contacts with Priestley's natural philosophy, but by the 1790s he viewed this work as a dangerous error. John Robison was a leader of the British resistance to the new-fangled French chemistry, but Priestley was held to be guilty of overconfidence in his mere hypotheses. Newton's aether was wrongly treated by the materialists as having the certainty of Euclid. It was easy to connect materialist natural philosophy with conjuring. The Anti-Jacobin imagined a pneumatic chemist whose "skin, by magical means, has acquired an indefinite power of expansion, as well as that of assimilating to itself all the azote of the air . . . an immense quantity which, in our present unimproved and uneconomical mode of breathing, is quite thrown away."^[19] This was a well-aimed barb, for the

[18] Burke to Philip Francis, 20 February 1790, Letters of Edmund Burke, ed. Harold Laski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), 283-284; Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, 481; Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, 178, 154, 78.

[19] Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, 75, 93; Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, 484; Edmonds, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, 160. For Burke's attack on Jacobin histrionics, see P. H. Melvin, "Burke on Theatricality and Revolution," Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975): 447-468 and the interesting comments in UEA English Studies Group, "Strategies for Representing Revolution," in 1789: Reading Writing Revolution, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex, 1982), 81-109. For Burke and Priestley's pneumatics, see Priestley to Burke, 11 December 1782, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 216; for Robison and French chemistry, see J. R. R. Christie, "Joseph Black and John Robison," in Joseph Black 1728-1799, ed. A. D. C. Simpson (Edinburgh: Royal Scottish Museum, 1982), 47-52. For Jacobin and anti-Jacobin natural philosophy, see W. L. Scott, "Impact of the French Revolution on English Science," in Mélanges Alexandre Koyre, ed. R. Taton, 2 vols. (Paris: Hermann, 1964), 2:475-495.

reformers did base their authority on their understanding of the atmosphere and the economy of powers that circulated through it. The joke turned sour when these conjurers claimed to be able to reconstruct society. Their charms and spells deceived, and did not comprehend, the moral faculties. Burke argued that "on the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons; so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration or attachment." The materialists did not know these passions and so were foolish to rationalize about them: they knew of "nothing that relates to the concerns, the actions, the passions, the interests of men." This attack applied both to the general possibility of a rationalist metaphysics of the moral order and to the intimate details of political reform. Since the state was a "body politic," a failure to understand the "true genius and character" of any natural body would lead to a failure to understand proper politics. Hence the disasters of the new French financial regime: revenue was "the sphere of every active virtue" of "all great qualities of the mind which operate in public." Mechanistic policy made civil philosophy into a branch of gambling. A principal consequence of the Revolutionary settlement had been to hand over control to the few urban intellectuals who would "understand the game." "The many must be the dupes of the few who conduct the machine of these speculations."^[20]

The controversies of the 1790s used the civic humanist language of corruption and virtue and turned it back upon the radical reformers. Burke pointed out that the new intellectual regime privileged the politics of "combination and arrangement (the sole way of procuring and exerting influence)." He argued that "the deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men" would end in "an ignoble oligarchy" form of coteries of roofless men, recognizable only for their self-styled expertise in management and manipulation. The habit of association was a natural consequence of the reformers' intellectual position. Robison listed the "Corresponding - Affiliated - Provincial - Rescript - Convention - Reading Societies" as British manifestations of this habit. Those linked with politically interested patrons, such as Shelburne or the radical Whig lord and natural philosopher Charles Stanhope, and with groups and clubs of inquirers, such as the Bowood group or the

[20] Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, 75, 178, 223, 190. Compare R. W. Kilcup, "Reason and the Basis of Morality in Burke," Journal of the History of Philosophy 17 (1979): 271-284.

Lunar Society, were obvious targets for this critique. The anti-Jacobins found it fitting that the Lunar Society has been destroyed by the Birmingham mob for whom Priestley's friends claimed to act as spokesmen. "Peace to such Reasoners!... Priestley's a Saint," chortled the Anti-Jacobin. The attack upon intellectual associations extended to a critique of the "enlightenment" they sought. This light was derived from the wrong use of the inquiring mind. "We see that it is a natural source of disturbance and revolution," wrote Robison. The paradox that the philosophical societies of virtuous men bred nothing but corruption was matched by the paradox that enlightenment bred disorder. "Illumination turns out to be worse than darkness."^[21]

BOWOOD AND THE REFORMERS' DREAM

Conservatives tried to make enlightenment look like illumination. They saw the social groupings of the reforming intellectuals as the wrong kind of organization for men of knowledge. They also claimed that the true purposes of the reformers were now revealed. Controversies within the radical camp—as for example Priestley's violent attack on the infidelity of Volney's Ruines in 1797—were treated as signs of the incoherence of the Jacobin cause. But philosophers such as Bentham and Priestley had very specific proposals for reform. They presented the work performed since the 1770s as an ideal of the reformers' task. One such ideal was provided by the work in natural and moral philosophy which Priestley pursued with his colleagues at Bowood and elsewhere. The patronage provided by Shelburne for these philosophers was a key resource for their projects. The accounts of this relationship provided by Priestley and Bentham are extremely revealing, because in describing their relationship with their noble master they also described the function which they claimed to discharge. The idealization of this relationship is an important contrast with the harsh realities of late-eighteenth-century patronage and its vicissitudes. There is an interesting tension between the tortuous paths followed by Priestley and Bentham as they sought backing from their potential allies, and the utopian models which they presented of how this support might change society. Hence Bentham's extraordinary presentation of the contrast between himself, "an unseated, unofficed, unconnected, insulated individual," whose "blameless life" had been entirely devoted to the promotion of the Panopticon, and

[21] Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, 190-192; Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, 479, 431; Edmonds, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, 278 (July 1798).

his enemies, such as George III: "Imagine how he hated me.... But for all the paupers in the country, as well as all the prisoners in the country, would have been in my hands." This tension demonstrates two important features of intellectual life at this period: First, the role of medical manager, equipped with the knowledge of pneumatic chemistry and the right principles of the philosophy of mind, provided the appropriate model for reform. Second, a complex network of political and theological aims was centered on this search for patronage and provided the reformers with their interests and goals.^[22]

Bentham presented his contact with Shelburne in extraordinarily messianic terms. By the end of the 1770s, Shelburne was one of the leaders of a discredited and divided opposition to the American war and to North's Tory administration. Bentham was an impoverished legal writer, author of the important Fragment on Government (1776), and at this stage by no means sympathetic to the rebels' cause. His text on the law was a radical critique of the great jurist William Blackstone, whom Bentham had heard lecture on the laws of England at Oxford. Bentham proceeded to the M.A. there in 1767 and spent the intervening years working on his commentaries on Blackstone and on other essays on legal reform, including texts on prison reform and criminal punishment. His friends at Slaughter's Club and the London coffeehouses included chemists and physicians, such as George Fordyce, Jan Ingenhousz, Felice Fontana, and the Austrian F. X. Schwediauer, who were also working closely with Priestley during this period. In spring 1780 Bentham collaborated with Schwediauer on a translation of the Usefulness of Chemistry by the great Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman. Yet his principal labors centered on what he baptized his "Code" and his "Punishments, " of which the Fragment was a highly condensed and preliminary extract. Bentham's remarkable memoir recalled that it was this book which prompted Shelburne to seek him out at Lincoln's Inn. "I felt as men used to feel when Angels used to visit them." In another

[22] For Priestley and Volney, see Joseph Priestley, Observations on the Increase of Infidelity (Philadelphia, 1797) and Brian Rigby, "Volney's Rationalist Apocalypse," in Barker, 1789, 22-37. For Bentham's presentation of himself, see Bowring, 5:160-161 and 10:212, discussed in Himmelfarb, "The Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham," 70-71. For problems of patronage, see Michael Foss, The Age of Patronage: The Arts in England, 1660-1750 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), chap. 7; John Brewer, "Commercialization in Politics," in Neil McKendrick et al., The Birth of a Consumer Society (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 197-262; W. A. Speck, "Politicians, Peers and Publication by Subscription, 1700-1750," in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Isabel Rivers (New York: St. Martin's, 1982), 47-68; for an excellent example of Shelburne's patronage, see Dorothy Stroud, Capability Brown (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 90-92.

reverie, Bentham used explicitly apocalyptic imagery: "There came out to me a good man named Ld. S. and he said unto me, what shall I do to be saved? I yearn to save the nation. I said unto him—take up my book and follow me.... We had not travelled far before we saw a woman named Britannia lying by the waterside all in rags with a sleeping lion at her feet: she looked very pale, and upon inquiring we found she had an issue of blood upon her for many years. She started up fresher farther and more alive than ever; the lion wagged his tail and fawned upon us like a spaniel."^[23]

Bentham's dream about Shelburne, though recollected in tranquillity, transfigured the actual relations with patronage and the proposals for reform which he offered in his juridical work. Connection and influence dominated the political strategies of the 1770s. To understand the role which the reformers made for themselves in this jungle of deference and obligation, it is necessary to describe the political programs they espoused and the model they chose for their campaigns. In a public culture that spoke the language of "candour" and abhorred "interest," patronage was always a fraught relationship. Burke seized upon these resources in his anti-Jacobin polemic against the Bowood group in the 1790s, risking the charge of hypocrisy as he did so. In 1771, Priestley was apparently barred from serving with Cook and Banks on a voyage to the South Seas by "Dr. Blackstone and his friends in the Board of longitude," allegedly on the grounds of his heretical theology and animosity against the government lawyers. Priestley wrote sarcastically that the ministry would support "a high churchman or a known atheist, tho' his reputation for philosophy or virtue should stand very low." The sarcasm implied an accurate assessment of the standards of public patronage. For example: Shelburne was struck by Bentham's apparent disinterest when he approached him in 1780, though Bentham was more prosaic: "Ld. S. puts in members," he told his brother. Another possible supporter Bentham tried was the Empress Catherine of Rus-

[23] For Bentham's life in the 1770s, see Everett, Education of Bentham, 57-70; Mack, Bentham, 335-351. For Blackstone at Oxford, see Bowring, 10:45. For connections at Slaughter's, see Bowring, 10:133 and Bentham to John Lind, [?] 12 June 1776, The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, ed. T. L. S. Sprigge (London: Athlone Press, 1968), 1:328; Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 6 March 1779, ibid. 2:246-247; F. W. Gibbs, Joseph Priestley (London: Nelson, 1965), 94-98. For collaboration with Schwediauer, see Bertel Linder and W. A. Smeaton, "Schwediauer, Bentham and Beddoes: Translators of Bergman and Scheele," Annals of Science 24 (1968): 259-273. For Bentham's reveries about Shelburne, see Mack, Bentham, 370-372; J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, eds., Comments on the Commentaries and the Fragment on Government (London: Athlone Press, 1977), 523-526; Norris, Shelburne and Reform, 141-143.

sia. Catherine had hired several British experts, including Robison, who worked at Kronstadt as mathematics professor between 1772 and 1774. One function that Bentham made his chemist friends serve was to get better contacts with Russia. He persuaded Schwediauer to translate the introduction to the Code, later to appear as An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. During early 1779, Schwediauer and Priestley helped Bentham contact Shelburne through a junior treasury lord, and keen mathematician, Francis Maseres. When Bentham's brother went to St. Petersburg in August, Bentham was to pose as an expert political and technical journalist, submitting information to Shelburne for his consideration. But the crucial meeting was necessarily delayed, because Bentham felt that Shelburne should see the Code before they met, and because "my letters I was afraid had gone rather too far on the side of humility." The role play was crucial: Bentham had to present himself as the right kind of expert in order to set up the appropriate relationship with his new master.^[24]

Priestley provided Bentham with an avenue—he also made his own vocation through his contacts with Bowood. The relation between Priestley's political strategy in the 1770s and his contacts with Shelburne was particularly important here. Priestley was a leader of the group of "rational dissenters" who sought the emancipation of dissent from legal disabilities. Allies included both Price and Theophilus Lindsey. Rational dissent connected the familiar civic humanist critique of the established institutions of civil and ecclesiastical corruption with a program based on the progressive unmasking of "prejudice" and the establishment of true philosophy through putative matters of fact about matter and spirit. Such matters of fact were best exemplified in the research on pneumatic chemistry which Priestley launched in Leeds just before his departure for Wiltshire. The label "rational dissent" was first coined by Priestley and his colleagues in texts such as their 1769 attack on Blackstone, an inspiration for Bentham's Commentaries. Bentham was impressed by the

[24] For Burke and patronage, see Albert Goodwin, "The Political Genesis of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, " Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 50 (1968): 336-364. For Priestley and the South Seas voyage, see Priestley to William Eden, 4 December and 10 December 1771, Priestley to Joseph Banks, 10 December 1771, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 95-98; David Mackay, In the Wake of Cook: Exploration, Science and Empire, 1780-1801 (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 3-27. For Shelburne and Bentham, see Bowring, 10:225; Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 25-26 September 1775, including Priestley to Bentham, 23 August 1775, in Correspondence of Bentham 1:265; Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 16 May 1779, ibid. 2:257-258; Shelburne to Bentham, 27 July 1780, ibid. 2:471; Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 6 August 1780, ibid. 2:480.

"well-applied correction" which the rational dissenters had given to Blackstone's "holy zeal" for the established religion. He also judged Blackstone's publications by the standards demanded from "demonstrators" in experimental natural philosophy. Most importantly, the rational dissenters' campaigns provided the immediate context both for Priestley's initial links with the Earl, and for his subsequent formulation of a combined program of philosophical materialism, pneumatic chemistry, and political reform.^[25]

Rational dissenters initially sought to speak the language of "candour" in their appeals to established power and their relationships with their patrons. Priestley told Price that "all that candour requires is that we never impute to our adversary a bad intention or a design to mislead, and also that we admit his general good understanding, though liable to be misled by unperceived biases and prejudices from the influence of which the wisest and best of men are not exempt." So this language allowed the rational dissenters to describe the way their political strategy should be structured and the way philosophical debate should be conducted. It provided a contrast with the views of the allies of the ministerial interest. An American Tory, writing in 1783 in the Gentleman's Magazine, helped himself to the talk of mind and body to analyze "Lord Shelburne's connection with the Dissenters." He suggested that the dissenters had been "carnalized" by Shelburne, rather than the "Peer spiritualized" by them. "Seeing more fire and spirit in Dr. Priestley's Disquisition on civil liberty," Shelburne had then offered a place at Bowood to the Doctor. In fact, it was to the "wisest and best of men," such as Shelburne, that Priestley and his allies began their appeal from 1769, following the return of John Wilkes at the Middlesex election. Shelburne's support was important in 1772, when the rational dissenters mounted an unsuccessful appeal for the extension of the Toleration Act. The defeat of this so-called Feathers Tavern Petition was immediately interpreted by Priestley and Lindsey in prophetic, if not millenarian, terms, and they used the more eschatological passages in David Hartley's Observations on Man to understand their own troubles: "to me everything looks like the approach of that dismal catastrophe described, I may say

[25] For rational dissent, see J. G. McEvoy and J. E. McGuire, "God and Nature: Priestley's Way of Rational Dissent," Historical Studies in Physical Science 6 (1975): 325-404; Priestley on "those of us who are called Rational Dissenters," in Rutt, 1:349-357; Michael Watts, The Dissenters from the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 464-478. For Bentham on Blackstone, see Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government (1776), ed. F. C. Montague (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931), 102-103n, 117n.

predicted, by Dr. Hartley in the conclusion of his essay and I shall be looking for the downfall of Church and state together." It was during this crisis that Priestley got his place at Shelburne's house and inaugurated his new set of philosophical and chemical researches.^[26]

Priestley's introduction to Shelburne in 1772-1773 won him a salary increased from the £100 he earned as a minister at Leeds to £250 as Shelburne's librarian and traveling companion. It was preceded by anguished debate in London and Leeds. In September 1772, Franklin sent Price and Priestley a "moral and prudential calculus" that encouraged the move to Wiltshire. Franklin, Priestley, and Price were important members of the group of self-styled "Honest Whigs," who moved to the London Coffee House in 1772 and combined natural-philosophical and reformist political interests through this decade. Others included John Pringle, president of the Royal Society and a pneumatic physician who was an enthusiastic admirer of Priestley's chemistry. By 1773, many of Priestley's allies, including Lindsey, had left the established church and joined the rational dissenters at Essex Street Chapel in London, set up as a propaganda center for Shelburne's allies and to foment emancipation. Priestley worked actively for Shelburne's political maneuvers and gained the support of men such as the leading reformist Whig George Savile, a Yorkshire M.P. who was now acting as patron for the great natural philosopher and clergyman John Michell. Micheil and Priestley had already collaborated with Savile in Leeds, both on technical projects and on joint research on the active powers of matter, the materiality of the soul, and the properties of light. During 1773-1774, Priestley led the dissenters to abandon the slogan of "candour," which involved support merely for relief from the Test, and encouraged a move to an analysis of humanity, which the whole of established civil philosophy was called in question. Catholic emancipation and support for the American cause became part of their campaigns. A reconstructed account of human nature and the sources of prejudice and opposition to "rational evidence"

[26] For "candour," see Joseph Priestley, A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity (London, 1778), xxx; R. B. Barlow, Citizenship and Conscience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), 171-220. For the Tory attack, see "An Account of the Origin and Dissolution of Ld. Shelburne's Connection with the Dissenters," Gentleman's Magazine 53 (January 1783): 22-23. For the theory of civil liberty, see Joseph Priestley, Essay on the First Principles of Government (London, 1768), 10; A. H. Lincoln, Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 160. For Priestley and Lindsey on the defeat of the petition, see Priestley to Lindsey, 23 August 1771, in Rutt, 1:146; Fruchtman, Apocalyptic Polities of Price and Priestley, 40.

would allow the dissenters to "cancel the obnoxious name of Christians, and ask for the common rights of humanity."^[27]

Thus the conjuncture in which Priestley moved to Bowood provided him with all the resources he needed. His work in natural philosophy with Michell, Price, Franklin, Pringle, and the members of the Bath Philosophical Society, situated near his new home, provided him with important contacts. Shelburne gave him £40 a year for equipment and materials. The campaign of rational dissent provided him with an epistemology and a new and urgent need for a revised analysis of the mind. His targets included the Common Sense philosophers and the apparently irreligious skeptics in France and Scotland. The close links between Bowood and the philosophes, together with Priestley's journeys to Paris on Shelburne's business, confirmed his views of the important tasks of the true philosophy. This was a watershed in Priestley's philosophical and religious views. "My own sentiments are very different from what they used to be," he wrote in 1778. He dated his unitarian views in religion from the moment he went to Leeds in 1769, and he dated his "philosophical materialism" to the mid-1770s, first made public in the stream of works on matter theory and religion produced in London and Wiltshire. His productivity was extraordinary: he published a long series of works on pneumatic chemistry, a series of metaphysical texts, of which the Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit (1777) was the most important, and a detailed series of polemics, including amicable debates with Richard Price on materialism and determinism. All this work involved a deliberate construction of what Priestley saw as the right role the natural philosopher should serve. Pneumatics, as an account of the activity of matter and the vitality of the airs, and pneumatology, a philosophical account of the mind and the soul, were the principal concerns of this project.^[28]

[27] On the offer of a place at Bowood, see Franklin to Priestley, 19 September 1772 and to Price, 28 September 1772, in Correspondence of Price 1:138-139. For the "Honest Whigs," see V. W. Crane, "The Club of Honest Whigs: Friends of Science and Liberty," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 23(1966): 210-233; for work with Michell and Savile, see Norris, Shelburne and Reform, 100; Gibbs, Joseph Priestley, 91-93; Priestley to Price, 23 November 1771, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 93-94. For the "appeal to humanity," see Barlow, Citizenship and Conscience, 190, 221-271; Priestley (1773) in Rutt, 23:443-450.

[28] For support by Shelburne, see Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 139-141, and for work at Bowood see Priestley to Caleb Rotheram, 31 May 1775, ibid., 146; for the change in his philosophy and theology, see Priestley to Caleb Rotheram, April 1778, in Rutt, 1:315; Joseph Priestley, Letters to Dr Horsley (Birmingham, 1783), iii-iv. For an analysis of Priestley's finances, see M. P. Crosland, "A Practical Perspective on Joseph Priestley as a Natural Philosopher," British Journal for the History of Science 16 (1983): 223-237.

Bentham was well aware of this work: he had already read Priestley's Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768); in August 1767 he also received an abstract of the History of Electricity from his fellow attorney Richard Clark. In later life he used Priestley's edition of Hartley in his own psychological research, and he praised Priestley's attack on the Scottish philosophers. In January 1774 he began a thorough analysis of the publications on pneumatic chemistry and sent his brother copies of successive versions of the Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air. In his "Essence of Priestley," as Bentham called it, he read the full statement of a progressive and historically sensitive account of the course of natural philosophy and the role the natural philosopher should play. The summer after he completed his "Essence," he contacted Priestley directly. The opening of Bentham's Fragment on Government, which he published the following year, spelled out Priestley's vision, paraphrasing the opening of the Experiments and Observations on pneumatics. It must have impressed Shelburne with its bold indication of the work that natural philosophy could perform:

The age we live in is a busy age; in which knowledge is rapidly advancing towards perfection. In the natural world, in particular, every thing teems with discovery and with improvement. The most distant and recondite regions of the earth traversed and explored—the all-vivifying and subtle element of the air so recently analyzed and made known to us—are striking evidences, were all others wanting, of this pleasing truth.^[29]

Just as in the case of his relationship with Shelburne, so here too Bentham provided a dreamlike account of his first encounter with Priestley's work. Much later in his life, it was important for Bentham to display his debt to the utilitarianism of rational dissent and to play down

[29] Bentham, Fragment on Government, 93; for the use of Hartley, see Bentham, Intro duction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 124n; for the praise of Priestley's attack on the Common Sense philosophy, see Alan Sell, "Priestley's Polemic against Reid," Price-Priestley Newsletter 3 (1979): 41-52; Bhikhu Parekh, ed., Bentham's Political Thought (London: Croom Helm, 1973), 152n: "Another says he has a sense . . . that pronounces what is right and wrong. This is the way that . . . the triumvirate of doctors lately slaughtered, not to say butchered, by Dr Priestly [sic] make laws of nature" (1776). For Priestley's attack on Hume, see Rutt, 4:398 and Richard H. Popkin, "Joseph Priestley's Criticisms of David Hume's Philosophy," Journal of tat History of Philosophy 15 (1977): 437-447. For Bentham and Priestley's pneumatics, see Bentham to Richard Clark, 5 August 1767, Correspondence of Bentham 1:119; Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 28 January 1774, July 1775, 20 July 1774, ibid. 1:176, 186, 189; Bentham to Priestley, 1774, ibid. 1:208.

the marked division between his own views of the rights of humanity and those preached at Essex Street. Bentham recalled reading Priestley's remarkable Essay on the First Principles of Government in a coffeehouse in Oxford in 1768. There he read the sentiment that the "great standard" of civil society was "the good and happiness . . . of the majority of the members of any state." "At the sight of it he cried out, as it were in an inward ecstasy like Archimedes on the discovery of the fundamental principles of Hydrostatics, Eureka. "^[30] Despite Bentham's claim that he "purloined" the happiness principle from this book, he was also able to assemble a lengthy litany of key figures for his conception of the doctrines of utilitarianism. He told d'Alembert in spring 1778 that it was Helvetius who had provided him with the important hint. Debates on influence here are inevitably sterile and obviously reflect Bentham's capacity for the ingenious reconstruction of his own vocation. In the Fragment Bentham wrote of the English edition of Beccaria's work on penology, On Crimes and Punishments, which contained the phrase "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." He used just the terms he would later use to describe Shelburne. Bentham claimed that Beccaria was "received by the intelligent as an Angel from heaven would be by the faithful." Links with the philosophes were crucial for Bentham's development, and they were energetically pursued via Romilly and Mirabeau when he reached Bowood in the 1780s.^[31] The "fundamental principles" which Bentham gained from Priestley involved a path to political power and a role model for the reformer, that of the pneumatic chemist and devotee of moral progress through technical change. Bentham shared Priestley's views on the character of the corrupt enemy and the false philosophy they peddled. In his draft preface for the Bergman translation, Bentham recalled his own Oxford career as a picture of the wrong kind of natural philosophy. Even though he heard mechanics lectures from Nathaniel Bliss, "I learnt nothing of the air I breathed in, except that the mischief it was apt to do was owing to the spitefulness

[30] For Bentham's story about reading Priestley's Essay, see draft of 1829, Bentham MSS, University College London, 13.360, printed in Amnon Goldworth, ed., Deontology, Together with A Table of the Springs of Action and the Article on Utilitarianism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 291-292, compared with Bentham, Fragment on Government, 34. For a very useful criticism of this story, see Margaret Canovan, "The un-Benthamite Utilitarianism of Joseph Priestley," Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984): 435-450.

[31] Bentham to d'Alembert, spring 1778, Correspondence of Bentham 2:117; Bentham, Fragment on Government, 105n; Goldworth, Deontology, 52, citing Bentham MSS, University College Library, 158. See Harrison, Bentham, 113-117; Mack, Bentham, 105-110, 417-420; C. Blount, "Bentham, Dumont and Mirabeau," University of Birmingham Historical Journal 3 (1952): 153-167; Jarrett, Begetters of Revolution, 130-132.

of a god who when he was in an ill humour used to get a parcel of overgrown schoolboys to blow it in people's faces." He claimed that the Oxford professors held that chemistry was a science "fit only to make a man an atheist or an apothecary." The proper chemistry was precisely directed at reform of learning and cure of aerial disease. Thomas Beddoes, chemistry lecturer at Oxford from 1787 until his departure under a political cloud in 1793, argued famously that "nothing would so much contribute to the rescue of the art of medicine from its present helpless condition as the discovery of the means of regulating the atmosphere." Beddoes built this medical meteorology into his attack on the Pitt administration. So did his ally Joseph Priestley: hence, for example, his image of the pathology of the established universities. Priestley told Pitt in 1787 that they "resemble pools of stagnant water secured by dams and mounds, and offensive to the neighbourhood." Pneumatics and discovery were the key items in the collective strategy. The projector and the experimenter were the ideal types of the interests for which rational dissenters and utilitarians spoke.^[32]

Bentham's contacts with Priestley, and then with Shelburne, were dominated by these new interests. Priestley had an explicit account of how experimenters should work together. In a preface to one of the volumes Bentham abstracted in spring 1774, Priestley explained that "this rapid progress of knowledge" would mark "an end to all undue and usurped authority in the business of religion as well as science." This gave a political role to the projector and the discoverer. In 1791 Priestley answered Burke with the claim that commerce and true philosophy would help to inaugurate "the social millennium."^[33] Bentham worked strenuously as just such a projector of schemes in the arts and philosophy in the 1770s. He plotted an approach to the Longitude Board with whom Priestley had had such strife, suggested an improved chronometric design, investigated the rewards for discovery, and prop-

[32] For Bentham on his Oxford studies, see Linder and Smeaton, "Schwediauer, Bentham and Beddoes," 268-270, printing Bentham MSS, University College London, 156.5-7; Bentham to Jeremiah Bentham, 10 March 1762, 15 March 1763, 4 April 1763, Correspondence of Bentham 1:60, 67, 70. For Beddoes, see Thomas Beddoes, Observations on the Nature and Cure of Calculus, Sea Scurvy, Catarrh and Fever (Oxford, 1792), cited in Stansfield, Beddoes, 147-149; Trevor H. Levere, "Dr Thomas Beddoes at Oxford: Radical Politics in 1788-1793 and the Fate of the Regius Chair in Chemistry," Ambix 28 (1981): 61-69. For Priestley on the universities, see Rutt, 19:128 (1787).

[33] Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (London, 1774), xiv; Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Birmingham, 1791), 239-243. See Arnold Thackray, "Natural Knowledge in Cultural Context: The Manchester Model," American Historical Review 79 (1974): 672-709.

osed projects for a refrigerator to be used in times of glut, a canal through Nicaragua, and state-sponsored expeditions to the southern ocean to follow those of Cook and Banks. In 1787 Bentham took Adam Smith to task for his criticism of the projecting spirit. The Panopticon was merely the most spectacular of these schemes, energetically touted in Russia from 1785 and published in 1791. The famous manifesto which Bentham prefaced to his scheme precisely captured his account of the function of the reforming projector and the knowledge which the future guardians of the moral order would command: "morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated—instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—economy seated as it were upon a rock."^[34]

Such knowledge depended on a revised account both of morality and of pneumatics. Bentham learned his pneumatics from Priestley, and so learned much of the rules of the experimental life. He addressed Priestley as "the Adopted father" of his chosen sciences. By the end of 1774, Bentham had sent Priestley a long essay on an improved method of making and collecting different airs, together with some important comments on chemical nomenclature. Priestley replied courteously the following month: "if you were to go to work in good earnest you would do something considerable." Many of their subsequent exchanges related to the details of chemical practice. Bentham told Priestley of new techniques for testing the virtue of air, and invented a machine, called the "Athanor," for improving Priestley's standard tests for measuring this virtue. These were highly prized techniques of pneumatic chemistry, shared, too, with other chemists such as Fontana, Schwediauer and Ingenhousz. In the following section, it will be argued that these pneumatic techniques were practical examples of what was proposed as a more general technique of medical meteorology, in which an understanding of health and disease in the atmosphere could be developed into a model of the moral economy. That analysis provides a basis, in the final sections of the paper, for the interpretation of the moral philosophy and philosophy of mind which licensed Bentham's more remarkable claims for the basis of his new science: "the science of jurisprudence," he claimed, was "as strictly and properly a science of experiment

[34] For Bentham's projects, see Mack, Bentham, 137; "Defence of Usury" (1787), in Jeremy Bentham's Economic Writings, ed. W. Stark, 2 vols. (London: Royal Economic Society, 1952), 1:167-187; on the Panopticon, see Bowring, 4:39. For the Panopticon as a project, see L. J. Hume, "Bentham's Panopticon: An Administrative History," Historical Studies 15 (1973): 703-721 and 16 (1974): 36-54.

as any branch of natural philosophy." But this meant the natural philosophy pursued at Bowood in the 1770s.^[35]

FROM PNEUMATICS TO PNEUMATOLOGY

I have argued for the importance of the relationship between Priestley's pneumatic chemistry and Bentham's legal reform. This relationship provided a knowledge which reformers could use; a description of their social function; and an account of the strategies by which reform could be achieved. This knowledge included the understanding of matter and its powers developed in the laboratories of the pneumatic chemists. Such understanding involved a new practice of rather specific policy recommendations for the better management of the social economy and the human body. The atmosphere was taken to be a major site at which principles of health and disease were produced. Under Priestley's aegis, this practice was also used to revise the picture of body. The distinction between mind and body was erased, by changing the definition of the attributes of matter. Since the mind now became just as accessible to material analysis, it also became just as accessible to management. So medical managers, using their knowledge of medical meteorology, could also be moral managers, using their knowledge of the powers of the mind. When medical management turned its attention to the discipline of minds, it produced a new story about the way interests and passions should be governed for the cause of social welfare. A revised account of pneumatology was therefore a necessary companion of the science of pneumatics. Priestley's pneumatics and Bentham's panopticism were both versions of this model of mind and body. As Foucault suggested, Bentham's Panopticon was an exercise in the economy of powers, "a marvellous machine" where the effects of power could be deployed in the setting of a laboratory: "it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments on men." Bentham explicitly considered the claim that the Panopticon made "machines under the similitude of men." It became an experimental machine for experiments upon machines. "O chemists! " Bentham exclaimed, "much have your crucibles shown us of dead matter—but our industry-house is a crucible for men!" If the Panopticon

[35] Bentham to Priestley, November [?] 1774, and Priestley to Bentham, 16 December 1774, Correspondence of Bentham 1;209, 210-216, 225-226. For work on eudiometry, see Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 9 November 1779 and December 1779, ibid. 2:314-315, 344. For Bentham on jurisprudence as a science of experiment, see Harrison, Bentham, 133, citing Bentham MSS, University College London, 70A.22.

was an exercise in political anatomy and the mechanics of power, then Priestley's technology of airs provided a similar repertoire of strategies for the investigation of powers under a regime of observation, classification, and experiment. His pneumatics investigated those powers on which life depended, and modeled an economy in which these powers were distributed. The move from pneumatics to pneumatology was the key tactic in these philosophies of mind and body.^[36]

The preface to Bentham's Fragment provides evidence of his use of Priestley's pneumatics as the mark of progress. In 1767 Priestley contrasted three forms of historiography. The first was "civil history," which had the appeal of human interest but showed the horrors of human depravity: "a man . . . cannot help being shocked with a view of the vices and miseries of mankind." The second was "natural history," which displayed wise natural order but lacked concern with "human sentiments," a necessary condition for the association of mind. Priestley argued that the history of natural philosophy was the best way of capturing human interests, through the processes of association, for the cause of progress: no history "can exhibit instances of so fine a rise and improvement in things, as we see in the progress of the human mind in philosophical investigations." Hartley's principles worked to good effect here: in Priestley's histories of electricity, optics, and pneumatics, the sympathetic reader could recapitulate the course of actual experimental advance. This was a way of showing what was wrong with Blackstone. Bentham identified the Oxford lawyer as an enemy of progress because he stood opposed to the true principles learned from the history of natural philosophy. "Correspondent to discovery and improvement in the natural world, is reformation in the moral." Blackstone resisted such a reformation. Yet the successes of the pneumatic chemists could and should be extended to the moral realm:

If it be of importance and of use to us to know the principles of the element we breathe, surely it is not of much less importance nor of much less use to comprehend the principles, and endeavour at the improvement of those laws, by which alone we breathe it in security.^[37]

The axiom of utility, the analogy between natural improvement and moral reformation, and the aim of the "security" of respiration were all

[36] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202-203; Bowring, 4:63-64.

[37] Joseph Priestley, History and Present State of Electricity, 3d ed. (London, 1775), ii-iv; Bentham, Fragment on Government, 93-94. For Priestley's historiography, see J. G. McEvoy, "Electricity, Knowledge and the Nature of Progress in Priestley's Thought," British Journal for the History of Science 12 (1979): 1-30; J. J. Hoecker, "Joseph Priestley as an Historian and the Idea of Progress," Price-Priestley Newsletter 3 (1979): 29-40.

aspects of the meteorological program which both Bentham and Priestley pursued. In the 1770s Priestley and his colleagues aimed to show how a benevolent aerial economy functioned and to mark the processes that governed this economy. Human beings were an integral part of this system, and their welfare was a consequence of its actions. Priestley's isolation of nitrous air in 1772 and dephlogisticated air in 1775 was part of this strategy. He described a series of processes that vitiated common air, by phlogisticating it. Such processes included "the amazing consumption of air by fires of all kinds, volcanos, &c." together with respiration and putrefaction. The air left above calces or remaining after animal respiration was revealed to be highly phlogisticated by a test comparison with nitrous air. "It is not peculiar to nitrous air to be a test of the fitness of the air for respiration. Any other process by which air is diminished and made noxious answers to the same purpose but the application of them is not so easy or elegant and the effect is not so soon perceived. In fact, it is phlogiston that is the test." Bad air supported neither respiration nor combustion and did not diminish in volume when shaken with nitrous air. This gave the test its key place in his pneumatics. Because Priestley applied an axiom of benevolence, he argued that the aerial economy must act to preserve the virtue of airs. So there must be processes that restored vitiated air and rendered it virtuous and respirable. "It becomes a great object of philosophical inquiry, to ascertain what change is made in the constitution of the air by flame, and to discover what provision there is in nature for remedying the injury which the atmosphere receives by this means." Evidence of restorative processes was produced in the long series of pneumatic trials Priestley made at Bowood between 1774 and 1779 using the "noble apparatus" Shelburne provided him. These processes included atmospheric purification by shaking over water and the beneficient action of green vegetable matter on air under the influence of light. Thus his isolation of dephlogisticated air and his production of evidence for photosynthesis were easily fitted into the scheme of a well-judged economy that balanced vitiation with restoration.^[38]

[38] Joseph Priestley, "Observations on Different Kinds of Air," Philosophical Transactions 62 (1772): 147-252 at 162; Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air and Other Branches of Natural Philosophy, 3 vols. (Birmingham, 1790), 1:359. For Priestley's account of the restoration of the atmosphere, see Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 2d ed. (London, 1776), 2:91-103; J. G. McEvoy, "Joseph Priestley, Aerial Philosopher: Metaphysics and Methodology in Priestley's Chemical Thought, 1772-1781," Ambix 25 (1978): 1-55, 93-116, 153-175, and 26 (1979): 16-38, at 25:96-101, 158-164. For the importance of the nitrous air test, see A. J. Ihde, "Priestley and Lavoisier," in Joseph Priestley: Scientist, Theologian and Metaphysician, ed. L. Kieft and B. R. Willeford (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 62-91; for the "aerial economy," see H. Laboucheix, "Chemistry, Materialism and Theology in the Work of Joseph Priestley," Price-Priestley Newsletter 1 (1977): 31-48.

These researches were closely linked with human welfare through the scheme of medical meteorology—restoration of respirable air and its variation in quality governed the physiological fate of the human and the social frame. The standard of the atmosphere was a mark of its fitness for human existence. This had initially suggested to Priestley that while atmospheric air was no doubt a compound of variously virtuous sections, nevertheless it must now be the best possible air for human respiration. "I had no idea of procuring air purer than the best common air." Yet his work of 1774-1775 did yield such an air, dephlogisticated air. It was only after eighteen months that Priestley managed to position his new "luxury" air as the ultimate in his scale of virtue, and thereby developed a set of techniques which the medical meteorologists, such as Ingenhousz and Fontana, soon baptized "eudiometry," a strategy for matching the virtues of airs to their physiological benevolence. Priestley planned a collection of airs from different sites. In 1777 he asked his friend, the Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton, for "air as it is actually breathed by the different manufacturers in this kingdom." He also sampled the air left in rooms at Shelburne's house after gatherings there. "Eudiometric tours" were common. Beddoes and Price also worked on the "insalubrity" of varying airs. Fontana and his colleagues in Tuscany and Milan used eudiometry for hospital reform and proposed marsh drainage to remove the evils of "bad air." Ingenhousz was an early advocate of seaside holidays for consumptives, identifying ocean air as peculiarly virtuous for the human frame. Priestley himself wrote that the new "pure air" might be "peculiarly salutary to the lungs in certain morbid cases," and that "pure dephlogisticated air might be very useful as a medicine," even if too powerful in common measure: "a moralist may say that the air which nature has provided for us is as good as we deserve."^[39]

[39] Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 2d ed. (London, 1776), 2:40-49, 100-103; Priestley to Matthew Boulton, [?] 1777, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 161-162; on eudiometry, see ibid., 164-166, 174-175, and Joseph Priestley (with Richard Price), "On the Noxious Quality of the Effluvia of Putrid Marshes," Philosophical Transactions 64 (1774): 90-98; Felice Fontana, "Of the Airs Extracted from Different Kinds of Waters," Philosophical Transactions 69 (1779): 432-453; Jan Ingenhousz, "Observations sur la construction et l’usage de l'eudiomètre de M. Fontana," Journal de physique 26 (1785): 339-359; and P. Knoefel, "Famine and Fever in Tuscany: Eighteenth-Century Italian Concern with the Environment," Physis 21 (1979): 7-35 at 20-35; H. Reed, "Jan Ingenhousz: Plant Physiologist," Chronica Botanica 11 (1949): 285-396.

Bentham began work on eudiometry when he contacted Priestley in 1774-1775. He told Priestley that "in using nitrous air as a test of the comparative purity of the atmosphere in different places, it is of importance to be certain of its being utterly free from all previous admixture with Common air." To use such a test in this way was to declare allegiance to the principles of pneumatics. Throughout the 1770s Bentham was concerned with the development of this program: his "Athanor" was one contribution to it, anticipating eudiometers made by Cavendish and Fontana in the 1780s. He talked to Fontana about publications on the improvement of the virtue of airs and better ways of making artificial airs. He also became involved in Priestley's disputes with chemists such as Scheele, who denied that vegetation purified airs.^[40] Natural philosophical understanding of the atmospheric powers was to become ever more closely linked with civil policy. John Pringle was a typical practitioner in this field. His treatises in the 1750s on hospital and jail fevers based themselves on the pneumatics of restored and corrupted airs. As Christopher Lawrence has suggested, Pringle and his reformist colleagues, including Priestley, were instrumental in the construction of a specifically aerial analysis of epidemic fevers, locating their aetiology in noxious components of the atmosphere detectable by pneumatic chemistry. Priestley defended Pringle's doctrine against Scot-fish critics in 1773, while successive volumes of Experiments and Observations on Air during the 1770s carried testimonies by physicians on the medicinal uses of airs and the aerial causation of fever. When Pringle presented Priestley with the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1773, he placed Priestley's pneumatics in the context of the aerial system of fevers, and also linked it with the model of a benevolent economy which Priestley had begun to map: "from these discoveries, we are assured that . . . every individual plant is serviceable to mankind, if not always distinguished by some private virtue, yet making a part of the whole which cleanses and purifies our atmosphere." Storms and tempests would shake "the waters and the air together to bury in the deep those putrid and pestilential effluvia which the vegetables upon the face of the Earth have been insufficient to consume."^[41] The pneumatic system pro-

[40] Bentham to Priestley, November [?] 1774, and Priestley to Bentham, 16 December 1774, Correspondence of Bentham 1:210-216, 225-226. For work on eudiometry, see Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 9 November 1779 and December 1779, ibid. 2:314-315, 344. For Priestley's dispute with Scheele, see Priestley to Kirwan, August 1780, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 182-186.

[41] For Pringle's work on pneumatic medicine, see D. W. Singer, "Sir John Pringle and His Circle," Annals of Science 6 (1948-1950): 127-180, 229-261 at 150-153 and 229-247 for work with Priestley; for the Copley address of 1773, see the reprint in Douglas McKie, "Joseph Priestley and the Copley Medal," Ambix 9 (1961): 1-22. For Priestley's medical interests, see Christopher Lawrence, "Priestley in Tahiti: The Medical Interests of a Dissenting Chemist," in Science, Medicine and Dissent:Joseph Priestley, ed. R. G. W. Anderson and C. Lawrence (London: Wellcome Trust, 1987), 1-10; for Priestley's defense of Pringle, see Priestley, "On the Noxious Quality of the Effluvia of Putrid Marshes," 91; compare Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 2d ed. (London, 1775), vol. 1, appendix, 288-324.

posed by Priestley and Pringle gave an account of the circulation of virtuous power in the world. It was deeply influential on the work of radical physicians in the 1790s, including both Darwin and Beddoes. It also provided an image of the perfectly managed economy in human society, where medical administration and civil hygiene, the "burial of pestilential effluvia," were equally important.^[42]

Hygiene became a key principle of Bentham's vision of civil order. In his mature survey of that order, the Constitutional Code, the "Health Minister" was to discharge a range of eudiometric functions. What he called the "exemplificational-antimalarial function" involved the control of dangerous exhalations; other roles included registration of changes in the air and its relation to health. These were, perhaps, Hippocratic commonplaces: their management and the knowledge that sustained them were not. The utilitarian state was to be compared with the strategy of medical police fostered by the German cameralists. Where authorities such as Justi, Sonnenfels, and Frank argued during the period 1750-1780 for a centralized state bureaucracy invigilating over social and moral conduct in order to control welfare and population growth, Priestley and Bentham proffered an account of philosophical necessity and reasoned self-interest in civil society; the role of the state was as guarantor of that society, not as its despot. The progress of society was safely left in the hands of expert philosophers and medical managers whose legitimacy was derived from their understanding of the natural powers, not from their subservience to the civil powers.^[43] Pneumatics

[42] For pneumatic medicine in the 1790s, see Stansfield, Beddoes, chap. 7; Ludmilla Jordanova, "Earth Science and Environmental Medicine: The Synthesis of the Late Enlightenment, " in Images of the Earth, ed. L. J. Jordanova and Roy Porter (Chalfont St. Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1978), 119-146. For Beddoes, see Thomas Beddoes and James Watt, Considerations on the Medicinal Use of Factitious Airs (Bristol, 1794), vol. 1; for Darwin, see Erasmus Darwin, Temple of Nature, 21n and Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (London, 1796), 1:115.

[43] For the work of the Health Minister, see Bowring, 9:439-445. For medical police and cameralism, see George Rosen, From Medical Police to Social Medicine: Essays on the History of Health Care (New York: Science History Publications, 1974), 120-141, 189-190; Michel Foucault, "The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century," in Gordon, Power-Knowledge, 166-182; Marc Raeff, The Well-ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 119-135. For Bentham and medical reform, see Benjamin Spector, "Jeremy Bentham: His Influence upon Medical Thought and Legislation," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 37 (1963): 25-42.

was an important example of this understanding. The Benthamite reforms of the 1830s testify eloquently to this fact. Edwin Chadwick was Bentham's amanuensis at the time when his master was composing the Constitutional Code. Chadwick's great 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population was a homage to the connections between management and medical meteorology which Bentham had discussed: "bad ventilation or overcrowding, and the consequences on the moral habits" were demonstrably based on "an original cause we have high scientific authority for stating to be easily and economically controllable." As Roger Cooter has suggested, Bentham's loyal disciples among reforming physicians made the atmosphere the key site of medical management: Cooter cites the work of Southwood Smith, a convert from Calvinism to Priestley's unitarianism and the personal physician to Bentham. Southwood Smith's anticontagionism refused to speak of disease-causing miasmas and refused to define the aerial principle that might be pathogenic. In his Treatise on Fever (1830), he argued that disease was spread via air because "poverty in her hut . . . striving with all her might to keep out the pure air and to increase the heat, imitates Nature but too successfully." As a result, "penury and ignorance can create a mortal plague." Cooter argues that at the hands of the Benthamite anticontagionists, the air became the proper concern of expert managers and the way to moralize society. The human and the social body were engrossed by pneumatics.^[44]

Bentham's campaign was to go further: the legislator could wisely extend the accomplishments of the medical manager. In the 1770s he argued that "the art of legislation is but the art of healing practised upon a large scale. It is the common endeavour of both to relieve men from

[44] Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), ed. M. W. Flinn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965), 29-43, 167; Thomas Southwood Smith, Treatise on Fever (London, 1830), 324; Roger Cooter, "Anticontagionism: History's Medical Record," in The Problem of Medical Knowledge: Examining the Social Construction of Medicine, ed. P. Wright and A. Treacher (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982), 87-108. Compare Southwood Smith, Treatise, 349: "Vegetable and animal matter, during the process of putrefaction, give off a principle or give origin to a new compound, which, when applied to the human body, produces the phenomena constituting fever." For Southwood Smith's career, see Mrs. C. L. Lewes, Dr. Southwood Smith: A Retrospect (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1898); F. N. L. Poynter, "Thomas Southwood Smith—the Man," Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 55 (1962): 381-392.

the miseries of life. But the physician relieves them one by one: the legislator by millions at a time." This was just the sense of Southwood Smith's parliamentary evidence in 1840: the Government must relieve the poor of "the sources of poison and disease," for otherwise "the effect is the same as if twenty or thirty thousand of them were annually taken out of their wretched homes and put to death." The accumulation of numbers and the collective origin of social pathology were essential principles of reformist medical management. Bentham insisted that "this is not a fanciful analogy": it was to be taken as a literal account of the managers' work.^[45] Once again, the comparison of the body politic and the body natural was banal, but by using a specific account of how medical management worked, Bentham gave his political reform a peculiar slant. The attention to detail and the production of "docile bodies" were characteristics of this anatomical strategy. The "Code" and the "Punishments" were respectively described by Bentham as the "principles" and the "materia medica" of his political therapeutics. But, most importantly, the references to medical management pointed to the significance of a science of mind, a pneumatology. The reformer stood in urgent need of a science that would locate the "springs of action." This was the principle of utility. Bentham called it a "moral thermometer" in the hands of the expert jurist and natural philosopher. In his texts on Legislation, first drafted in the late 1770s, Bentham argued, with Priestley, that the progress of philosophy was opposed by prejudices, which enlightened understanding of the springs of mental and physical action would remove. The name for the branch of philosophy that investigated and extirpated such obstacles was "mental pathology." "By pathology, I mean the study and the knowledge of the sensations, affections, passions, and of their effects upon happiness." Thus it was a founding axiom of Bentham's reform that the link between aerial physiology, natural philosophy, and materialist epistemology be made more than a figure of speech: "Medicine, commonly so called . . . has for its basis the observations of the axioms of pathology, commonly so-called. Morals is the medicine of the soul. The science of legislation is the practical part of this medicine." Hence, "mental pathology" should provide the axioms for the science of legislation: "God forbid that any disease in the constitution of a state should be without its remedy."^[46]

[45] Mack, Bentham, 264, citing Bentham MSS, University College London, 27.13; Lewes, Southwood Smith, 104.

[46] For "docile bodies," see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135-141. For Bentham on the medical comparison, see Bowring, 1:304-305, 367 and 2:204; Harrison, Bentham, 141, citing Bentham MSS, University College London, 32.6; Mack, Bentham, 264-266. For "mental pathology, " see Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, vii; for the cure of disease in the state, see Bentham, Fragment on Government, 224.

Mental pathology was a foundation of reform. Bentham's successive drafts for his Table of the Springs of Action examined the relationship between this psychology, the philosophy of mind, and the reformer's work. This "Table" was supposed to be the analogue of an "anatomical table," which showed "the seats of physical enjoyment and sufferance and the source of physical action." Bentham proposed the same for psychology. Equipped with such a table and the utility calculus, the wise expert would show that certain actions were in citizens' interests, and the legislator would make these actions depend on these interests. In a manuscript of the 1770s, Bentham figured this relationship in heavenly terms:

Between us two might the philosopher and the lawyer say, there is a great gulph. I have endeavoured to throw a bridge over this gulph: so that on it, as on Jacob's Ladder, if not Angels, man, however, may continually henceforth be seen ascending and descending.... Should I be found so happy as to succeed in bringing these celestial artizans into a more close acquaintance, what a rich and serviceable manufacture may not be hoped for from their united labours.^[47]

The Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, completed by 1780, was Bentham's first sustained analysis of the link between these powers and his juridical and political plans. The study of mental pathology identified the sources of pleasure and pain, sensibility and will. So this reconstruction of pneumatology indicated two functions for the study of mind: understanding and control. Such an inquiry would provide a knowledge of mental powers which the reformer needed. For Bentham, "intellectual powers" were always compared to the appropriate "physical powers," and this was an identity guaranteed by the medical function of the philosophical reformer. The "science of law " was merely a branch of the superior "logic of the will." It would also locate the sources of resistance to reform derived from corruption and interest. The interests that opposed reform were just as susceptible to analysis and management as those on which reform depended.^[48]

[47] Bentham, A Table of the Stings of Action, in Goldworth, Deontology, 71; Mack, Bentham, 130, citing Bentham MSS, University College London, 27; Harrison, Bentham, 270-271. For a discussion of the Table, see Paul McReynolds, "The Motivational Psychology of Jeremy Bentham, part 1," Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 4 (1968): 230-244.

[48] For the "logic of the will," see Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, xiii. Compare Parekh, Bentham's Political Thought, 146-156, which prints Bentham MSS, University College London, 69.70-75.

The doctrine of association, developed in Hartley and edited by Priestley, satisfied these demands. The mind was materialized since matter could think. Mental principles could be translated, or, as Bentham put it, "paraphrased" as their physical correlates. Speech about the pernicious "fictions" in which the law dealt must be turned into talk of material entities. Punishments must be spelled out in physical terms, just as pain and pleasure must be read as corporeal principles. Because it used fictions, the existing condition of the legal establishment was marked by all the evils of the condition of natural philosophy before the recent advances of the pneumatic chemists. Common law was a "fictitious composition which has no known person for its author, no known assemblage of words for its substance... like that fancied aether, which, in default of sensible matter, fills up the measure of the universe."^[49] Bentham's assault on this form of legal fiction was part of a strategy that modeled itself on the reforms of pneumatic chemists and in particular on the language they used. In 1774, as we have shown, he began corresponding with Priestley on the proper nomenclature to be used in medical and chemical philosophy. "Much more I could offer you on the same subject... other articles on Nomenclature." Bentham condemned Scheele for his "metaphysical" inquiry as to whether "fire be a real or fictitious entity." At the same period, he identified the close connection between the forms of chemical nomenclature and the flourishing of corrupt fantasy. "In speaking of an pneumatic (or say immaterial or spiritual ) object, no name has ever been employed, that had not first been employed as the name of some material (or say corporeal ) one. Lamentable have been the confusion and darkness produced by taking the names of fictions for the names of real entities." Priestley agreed: his pneumatics showed the proper understanding of spirits and the disasters visited upon true philosophy by assuming that material entities were really immaterial substances. Utilitarianism expelled fictions from legal discourse: pneumatic chemistry expelled them from philosophy. This great expulsion was accompanied by a revision of the principle that individuated human subjects. The belief in an immortal soul was simply the understandable consequence of the wrong state of mind: "a human soul would be a ghost, " according to Bentham, if it were separable and

[49] For Bentham on "paraphrasis" and fictions, see Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, xiii; for an analysis of these techniques, see Ogden, Bentham's Theory of Fictions, cxiii-cxxi, on Bowring, 3:177, 241; Harrison, Bentham, 53-74. For Bentham's comments on the connection between the disease of fiction and the immaterial principles of mind, see Bowring, 8:174; Parekh, Bentham's Political Thought, 48; Ogden Bentham's Theory of Fictions, 18.

immaterial. "At this time of day, custom scarcely does, fashion certainly does not, command us to believe in ghosts."^[50]

GHOSTS AND MACHINES

The reformers' strategies were built on the principles learned in pneumatics and mental pathology. Their roles aped those of medical managers and expert naturalists. As we have seen, this made them a vulnerable target for anti-Jacobins in the 1790s. It was alleged that the friends of the Revolution had the wrong state of mind, because they abandoned the established moral sanctions for a rationalized account of the right structure of society and of human nature. Brissot offered Priestley and Bentham seats in the National Convention: Burke said that Brissot's sanguinary addresses to the nation would allow the English "to judge of the information of those who have undertaken to guide and enlighten us."^[51] Guidance and enlightenment looked occult and enthusiast because when the reformers condemned orthodox religious pneumatology as a tissue of fictions, they had nothing better than a heretical ghost story with which to replace it. This story, exemplified in schemes for social machines such as the Panopticon, seemed to destroy conventional moral sanctions and install tyranny in their place. Bentham answered possible criticisms of his "inspection house": was it advisable "to give such herculean and ineludible strength to the gripe of power?" Yes, for this was a power that could manage the mind and guarantee its happiness. What authority could this new machinery of mental powers command? Priestley's answer helped itself to the combination of pneumatics and philosophy developed in the 1770s. The theology he proposed from the 1770s was supposed to satisfy the demands of reform. Anglican and Calvinist priestcraft was challenged quite directly with the rational principles of unitarianism, a denial of the immortal soul, an empirical psychology, and the claims of reformist managers to discharge functions hitherto the proper preserve of the pulpit and the

[50] For Bentham on nomenclature see Bentham to Priestley, 1774, Correspondence of Bentham 1:214, 216; for Scheele, see Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 9 November 1779, Correspondence of Bentham 2:31.5; for pneumatic objects, see Bowring, 8:119-120; for souls and ghosts, ibid., 195-109, and Ogden, Bentham's Theory of Fictions, 8-9.

[51] For Bentham, Priestley, and the Convention, see J. H. Burns, "Bentham and the French Revolution," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 16 (1966): 95-114; Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, 246-257; Gibbs, Priestley, 152, 216. For Burke on Brissot, see "Preface to the Address of M. Brissot to his Constituents" (1794), in Works of Edmund Burke, 6 vols. (London: George Be ll, 1891), 3:525.

bench. The Panopticon's chapel was placed inside the guard tower, where there would be no "thronging or jostling on the way to church," rather than occupying its traditionally independent site as autonomous from the system of discipline. Thus in order to complete an analysis of the social setting of the philosophy of mind and body made by reformers in the 1770s, it is necessary to provide an account of the counter-theology which they developed. As Foucault suggested, the reformers replaced the established Christian soul with a new "non-corporal" element, now defined as the product of disciplines and the target at which discipline should be directed. This substitution had important implications: the new model of the soul was used to explain why error had survived and how it could be corrected. It explained this error both in individual humans and in the body politic. Reformers sought to accomplish these aims with a therapy, the philosophical history of mind. That history gave each individual a chance of redemption and immortality: redemption through the pursuit of the calculated dictates of reason, and immortality through the progress of reform.^[52]

Both Bentham and Priestley lambasted established religion as superstition and false consciousness, that is, as a case of mental pathology. In a manuscript of 1773 entitled "Obstacles to Improvement," Bentham declared that "a man who after reading the scriptures can bring himself to fancy the doctrines of the Athanasian Creed" was in "that state of prepared imbecility which is necessary to a mind for the tranquil reception of one parcel of Nonsense." Priestley referred the prevalence of patent absurdities in church doctrine to political interest: rational clergymen in the established church "must every time they officiate not only profess, but in reality act upon the profession, of what they do not believe."^[53] Because of the bad faith of such priests, their religion was merely an ally of corruption. Their mental state was to be contrasted with that of the enlightened philosopher. An enlightened mind was both the most important subject for natural-philosophical research and the most important resource possessed by the researcher. Thus the mind was rep-

[52] Bowring, 4:47, 63. For Foucault on the "non-corporal" soul, see Discipline and Punish, 29. For Priestley's materialist theology, see Ira V. Brown, "The Religion of Joseph Priestley," Pennsylvania History 24 (1957): 85-100 and Erwin N. Hiebert, "The Integration of Revealed Religion and Scientific Materialism in the Thought of Joseph Priestley," in Kieft and Willeford, Priestley, 27-61. For an analysis of Bentham's anticlericalism, see James E. Crimmins, "Bentham on Religion, Atheism and the Secular Society," Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1986): 95-110.

[53] Bentham, "Obstacles to Improvement," in Mack, Bentham, 300; Priestley, "General History of the Christian Church," in Rutt, 10:538-541.

resented as a "laboratory," since it could be subjected to experimentation and observation, and as a "state," since it could be managed and reformed. In 1775 Priestley argued that mind was the result of "a certain organized system of matter," the brain, which was itself a "great laboratory and repository" for the purpose of converting phlogiston into electric fluid. Further inquiry would reveal the details of the forms of matter that acted in this way. It was demonstrated in pneumatics and optics that matter exhibited a wide range of power. "Nothing but a precise and definite knowledge of the nature of perception and thought can authorize any person to affirm whether they may not belong to an extended substance which has also the properties of attraction and repulsion." These "mental powers" were just as accessible to "observation and experiment" as were the powers of pneumatics and optics, even though "we ourselves are the subjects of the observations and experiments."^[54]

These remarks implied that a materialist philosophy of mind was the guarantee of the accessibility of the mind to research. Such research, however, was itself a means of reforming the mind, purging it of false doctrine and destroying its prejudices. Priestley referred to Hartley's celebrated claim that "the greatest and noblest use of philosophical speculation is... the opportunity it affords of inculcating benevolent and pious sentiments upon the mind." Ultimately, this mind would be a communal property, not exemplified in any specific individual but in the enlightened state of the whole social body. Priestley's example encouraged many of his colleagues to argue that only through the understanding and transformation of mind could reform succeed. This had implications for the collective work of radical natural philosophers, lawyers, divines, and writers. In 1778 Priestley encouraged his Cumbrian friend Adam Walker to take up public natural-philosophy lectures in London. Walker interspersed his lectures with the argument that governments warped the "qualities and tendencies" of the human mind, while proper natural philosophy restored them. In the 1780s, under Priestley's influence, William Godwin abandoned Calvinism for Socinianism, experimental philosophy, and the doctrines of David Hartley. These concerns were made evident both in his political treatises and fictions of the 1790s. In his Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) Godwin based his celebrated critique of government on a psychology

[54] Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (London, 1777), 24-30; Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 2d ed. (London, 1775), 277-279; An Examination of Dr. Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (London, 1774), lvii.

that relied explicitly on the doctrine of association, while in his reflections on the work of the novelist he described his enterprise as "the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses." For these men a combination of natural philosophy and the "logic of the will" was the key to moral understanding and progress. This was because the mind was no ghost but a part of the bodily machine.^[55]

In 1776 Bentham attacked traditional talk of the "will" as a faculty. He ridiculed the view that "there is really any such thing as a little being that under the name of will gets into men's heads, and exercises acts of volition or any other acts.... it is Man that exercises those various acts, that perceives these various emotions." The following years, in his Disquisitions concerning Matter and Spirit and in his comments on the doctrine of philosophical necessity, Priestley agreed with this monism. Will was unitary and identified with bodily powers. Insofar as notions such as "will" or "soul" were used as the specially privileged principle of individuation in each human subject, they would lead to delusion and philosophical error. Just as the term "our country" corresponded to "a part of the world subject to that form of government by the laws of which we ourselves are bound, as distinguished from other countries," so "the idea of self" referred to a "substance, which is the seat of that particular set of sensations and ideas of which those that are then recollected make a part, as distinguished from other substances which are the seats of similar sensations and ideas." Each body was to be seen as a unified state, constituted by a single network of powers, ruled as a single polity.^[56] It was for this reason that knowledge of material powers brought the right state of mind. Bentham explained that "the vast mass of mischief, of which perverted religion is the source," had a "preventive remedy" in a natural philosophy that generated "that mental strength and well-grounded confidence which renders him proof against so many

[55] Priestley, History of Electricity, xix; compare David Hartley, Observations on Man (London, 1749), part 2, 245-248. For uses of these principles, see Adam Walker, A Sys-tern of Familiar Philosophy (London, 1799), preface; William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. D. McCracken (1794; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1790), 339; Enquiry concerning Political Justice, ed. Isaac Kramnick (1798; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 360-376. Compare Martin Fitzpatrick, "William Godwin and the Rational Dissenters," Price-Priestley Newsletter 3 (1979): 4-28.

[56] Parekh, Bentham's Political Thought, 146, printing Bentham MSS, University College London, 69.70 (1776); for Priestley on the will, see Rutt, 3:451 (1777) and 25:96 (1791). For Priestley on the "self" as a state, see Priestley, Disquisitions, "Objections to the System of Materialism Considered: 5, from a Separate Consciousness Not Belonging to the Brain," 89-91.

groundless terrors." This was to be a natural philosophy that laid ghosts and anatomized minds. He drew an important contrast between the law of terror, spirits and fictions, and the law of utility, bodies and material interests. The former "drags men to its purpose in chains, from which... the captives break loose in crowds," while the latter, "transcendental legislation, leads men by silken threads round their affections and makes them its own for ever." This remark avoided all reference to a doctrine of the suffering soul—no threats of sin and redemption were present in "transcendental legislation." The Panopticon, which substituted the illuminated space for inspection for the dark confinement of the dungeon, relied on the power of these "silken threads" over subjects' minds and the knowledge of how they worked.^[57]

Bentham's language of "groundless terrors" and "bungling clumsiness" in castigating existing schemes of justice referred to real features of the treatment of the condemned. Historians as different as Douglas Hay and Michel Foucault have argued for the importance of awesome spectacle and the physical presence of power at the moment of the execution of justice upon the body of the eighteenth-century criminal. Clumsy executions were loudly criticized by large and enthusiastic audiences; on the scaffold, the priest, the surgeon, and the criminal joined in a state-supported theatrical performance. Bentham and his English allies sought to emulate the influence which Beccaria's utilitarian critique of these performances had enjoyed in France. One of the more significant aspects of the ritual was the explicit connection between secular and divine judgment, for the rituals of execution were also rituals of the fate of the soul. This was what utility challenged. Michael Ignatieff cites the sermon preached by John Wesley at Bedford Assizes in 1758: Wesley contrasted "the few" who would "stand at the judgement seat this day" with the fate of all his audience. "We shall all, I that speak and you that hear, stand at the Judgement Seat of Christ. And we are now reserved on this earth which is not our home, in this prison of flesh and blood, perhaps many of us in chains of darkness too, till we are ordered to be brought forth."^[58] While by no means blind to the force of imagination

[57] Bowring, 8:13; Mack, Bentham, 293, printing Bentham MSS, University College London, 149.63 (1794).

[58] For the eighteenth-century spectacle of punishment, see Douglas Hay, "Property, Authority and the Criminal Law," in Douglas Hay et al., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 17-64; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 32-69. For popular protest, see E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the Eighteenth-Century Crowd," Past and Present 50 (1971): 76-136. For Beccaria and Brissot, see McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, 392-401. For Wesley, see Ignatieff, Just Measure of Pain, 55.

on the multitude, neither Bentham nor Priestley held that such sentiments could bind men to right action or proper morality. The sanction of damnation disappeared. This was a fundamental assault on the commonplaces of law and religion. In 1792 Thomas Beddoes argued that the experience of temporal justice generated subjects' false doctrines of divine retribution and of the torments of Hell. A better society would change the state of mind of its citizens. He agreed with Priestley that "the material world easily supplied the notion of power," while reaching the extreme conclusion that hence "visible tribunals... led to the idea of remunerative justice, and that with scarce an exception in another life. Thus man created God, an Heaven and an Hell." Priestley and his allies supposed that "Chains of darkness" were removed by the science of "mental pathology," not the dictates of atonement and resurrection. Priestley classed these as "corruptions" of true Christianity, and their use alongside the public spectacle of state terror and popular enthusiasm was a mark of this corruption.

Our mode of respiting, for the sake of benefiting the souls of the Criminals, has arisen from a notion that such repentance as that of a condemned criminal may be of some avail to him with respect to his future state; a notion false and dangerous in the extreme, as it encourages the whole community to persist in evil courses, thinking that a few days, or hours, of repentance may cancel all their guilt, and prepare them for future happiness.^[59]

Bentham, as usual, took a calculated view of the problematic effects of established religion on criminality. He told Dugald Steward that since Scots Calvinists paid clerics less than did English Anglicans, and since the crime rate was lower north of the border, religious work was obviously more effective in Scotland. In general, as he argued in 1780, "the dictates of religion would coincide in all cases with the dictates of utility," were men possessed of the right account of God. This account would recognize divine benevolence in the sense in which it was attributed to humans, and thus account for the "theological sanction" in mental pathology as a derivative case of utilitarian rationality. Bentham envisaged no minister of public religion in his ideal polity: the correct analysis

[59] Thomas Beddoes, Letter to a Lady on Early Instruction (London, 1792), 16-17, cited in Stansfield, Beddoes, 84; Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History and General Policy (Birmingham, 1788), Lecture 47. For interesting remarks on Bentham's mission and law reform, see Himmelfarb, "Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham," 34-36.

of the powers of the human mind would fulfill all the functions hitherto discharged by priestcraft.^[60]

Priestley shared this view. The principle of benevolence, rather than retribution, was the key to his theology. "Benevolence" was given a remarkably secular interpretation. We have seen that this principle governed his pneumatics and the model of the natural economy he made in the 1770s. The argument against retributive justice also dominated his critique of Anglican or Calvinist accounts of the soul and its fate. The doctrines of a future state and of an immortal, separable, soul were fundamental resources for the natural philosophy, the legal philosophy, and the established religions which Bentham and Priestley attacked. In his metaphysical texts composed after his abandonment of Calvinism and of Arianism, Priestley turned against the textbooks he had studied in the dissenting academies. Doddridge had introduced the pneumatology of John Locke and of the Aberdonian metaphysician Andrew Baxter into the curriculum at Northampton, and they had remained as standard authorities at Daventry. Doddridge himself had insisted upon the immateriality of the soul and denied that matter could think. Doddridge and Baxter deduced from the principle that inertial force was essential to matter the consequence that it could not possess any innate activity. Doddridge's readings of Locke and Baxter were extremely influential, and they provided Priestley with much of the target he chose in establishing philosophical materialism in the 1770s. In these texts, he turned the weapons of Hartleian associationism and pneumatic chemistry on the devotees of immaterialism. Spirits were redefined as rarer forms of matter; powers were revealed in the laboratory and in the mind; the political and theological dangers of using the immaterial soul as the principle of consciousness and of subjectivity were spelled out in considerable detail.^[61]

[60] For Bentham on Scottish priests, see Bentham to Dugald Steward, 27 June 1783, in Bowring, 10:129—130; on religion and utility, see Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 138-139. For the state indifference to religion, see Crimmins, "Bentham on Religion."

[61] For "benevolence" in Priestley's pneumatics, see J. G. McEvoy, "Enlightenment and Dissent: Joseph Priestley and the Limits of Theoretical Reasoning," Enlightenment and Dissent 2 (1983): 47-67 at 49-50. For Doddridge's teaching, see Doddridge, Course of Lectures, 52-53, 205-209. For Doddridge and Andrew Baxter on immaterialism, see Yolton, Think ing Matter, 94-97, 144; P. M. Heimann and J. E. McGuire, "Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers: Concepts of Matter in Eighteenth-Century Thought," Historical Studies in Physical Sciences 3 (1971): 233-306. For Doddridge and dissenting textbooks, see Isabel Rivers, "Dissenting and Methodist Books of Practical Divinity," in Rivers, Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, 127-164. For Priestley's early reading, see R. E. Schofield, "Joseph Priestley: Theology, Physics and Metaphysics," Enlightenment and Dissent 2 (1983):69-81 at 71-72.

The critique of immaterialism involved a sensitive reformulation of the language of philosophy and a direct attack on the established authority in philosophical discipline. The reassessment of the status of matter was accompanied by a reassessment of the power exercised by Newton and his interpreters. Immaterialism made matter too base. Priestley described Baxter as "the ablest defender of the strict immaterial system" while suggesting that Baxter's metaphysics implied that it was a "pity that so mischievous a thing as he every where represents matter to be, should have been introduced at all." In Priestley's vocabulary, "matter" was to be defined as the subject of powers. He attacked Locke's timorous hesitancy before this obvious conclusion. In the Disquisitions, Priestley argued that it was "unaccountable in Mr. Locke" to concede that "the faculty of thinking may be a property of the body, and yet to think it more probable that this faculty inhered in a different substance, viz., an immaterial soul." Baxter himself was a well-chosen target. He was held up by Anglican apologists as the best example of the way Newtonian natural philosophy could be used against the joint dangers of deist materialism and the extreme immaterialism of the Tory philosophers such as Berkeley. Bishop Warburton described Baxter as "a great genius," whose metaphysics was unjustly neglected and "infinitely" superior to Berkeley's "miserable sophisms." Baxter's system emphasized the most committed form of voluntarism, for since matter was always and everywhere utterly inert, His subjects could see that "God hath not given the reigns of the world out of his hands, nor planted the laws by which it is governed, in brute matter."^[62]

By choosing Baxter as his main enemy, Priestley could blacken court Whig naturalists, such as Samuel Clarke and Henry Pemberton, with the sins of their Scottish contemporary. They had all succumbed to the hypochondriac fear of what Priestley called "the contagion of matter." Priestley replied that matter was the source of life, not death. In the Disquisitions he implied that Newton's immediate circle of interpreters had betrayed their master's legacy. Their false conception of matter defined

[62] Priestley, Disquisitions, 8, 66, 31-32. For Warburton on Baxter and Berkeley, see A. C. Fraser, ed., Works of George Berkeley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1901), 3:400; S. C. Rome, "The Scottish Refutation of Berkeley's Immaterialism," Philosophy and Phenomenological Reseach 3 (1943): 313-325. For Baxter on God's power, see Andrew Baxter, An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul (London, 1733), 45, and compare ibid., 11 on inertia and "a new theory of matter."

body as the mere object of divine will, rather than the noble seat of activity in the world. His controversies with Price in the 1770s concentrated on the propriety of Priestley's rewording of Newtonian utterances in the Opticks. A direct assault on Newtonian orthodoxy was a very dangerous strategy. As John Yolton has shown, controversies soon flared in the public sheets about the relative merits of Priestley's materialism and its Newtonian enemies. Contributors to The London Review and The Monthly Review during 1775 strenuously debated the mortalism and materialism they found in Priestley's new version of Hartley. Newtonian authority was satirized by Priestley's friends: "Dr. Clarke was confessedly so merely a reasoning machine, that he would almost tempt one to think that matter might think and that he himself was a living proof of it."^[63] In his own succession of defenses, Priestley implied instead that with the new lessons of experimental philosophy and reformed religion it was possible to purify Newton's doctrine of its more corrupt implications, notably those about the impenetrability and passivity of bodies. From an early age, Priestley had greeted new phenomena in the laboratory with the exclamation: "Oh, had Sir Isaac Newton seen such an experiment!" Indeed, in his Disquisitions Priestley argued that a strict application of Newton's rules of reasoning, to which he professed "a uniform and rigorous adherence," was precisely the strategy needed to show how little ground there was to the orthodox notion of inert matter. "The principles of Newtonian philosophy were no sooner known that it was seen how few, in comparison, of the phenomena of nature, were owing to solid matter, and how much to powers." Hence Priestley's use of the "nutshell" image to describe the quantity of solid matter in the world. He treated the transmission of Newtonian natural philosophy as he did any other important and established doctrine: he contrasted the purity of an original revelation with the subsequent corruption of the creed due to the interests of its interpreters.^[64]

[63] Priestley, Disquisitions, 170-173 on Andrew Baxter, Matho; or The Cosmotheoria Puerilis, 2d ed., 2 vols. (London, 1745), 2:212. For a critique of Newton's interpreters, see Disquisitions, 112 on the "rigid immaterialists"; for remarks on the Opticks, see ibid., 114 and Priestley, Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity (London, 1778), 8-9, 26-31, 231, 237. For assaults on Priestley and his defense, see Yolton, Thinking Matter, 117, which cites The London Review of English and Foreign Ligature, November 1775, 564.

[64] Timothy Priestley, Funeral Sermon Occasioned by the Death of the Late Joseph Priestley (London, 1805), 42-43; Disquisitions, 1-2, 5-7, 17. For Priestley's defense of his own version of natural philosophy against critics, see Priestley to Bretland, 7 March 1773, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 116-118, and Priestley to Kenrick, June 1778, in Free discussion, 183.

Priestley used exactly the same strategy in his analysis of the true idea of matter and the true idea of the soul. Both involved this appeal to the history of pristine truth and subsequent decay into error. Both could be restored by an appeal to the authority of experimental philosophy. It is important to emphasize the significance of this "historical method" in the philosophy of reform. We have already seen the way Bentham used Priestley's account of the history of philosophy in his own critique of Blackstone in the 1770s. Priestley's technique was useful because it showed how to establish truth against the errors of what Bentham baptized "sinister interests." The work that established the true pneumatology was coextensive with the work that analyzed the dangers of established interests. Priestley argued that "an opinion, and especially an opinion adopted by great numbers of mankind, is to be considered as any other fact in history, for it cannot be produced without an adequate cause, and is therefore a proper object of philosophical inquiry." This set up a very close connection between the philosophy of mind and the correction of error. A proper philosophy of mind would simultaneously correct these errors and explain their source. Thus this philosophy contested the orthodoxies of immaterialism by writing the history of immaterialism.^[65]

The events of the 1770s show how this therapeutic historiography worked. It was during this period that Priestley broke with the dogmas of immaterialism and then reflected on his conversion experience. He told his fellow rational dissenter Caleb Rotheram that only after 1775, when he began working on an edition of Hartley to accompany his experiments at Bowood, did he recognize that the doctrine of the immaterial soul "had been imported into Christianity" and was "the foundation of the capital corruptions of our religion." The scale of this break is most marked in the comparison between Priestley's Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, composed at Daventry Academy in the 1750s and completed in early 1772, and the doctrines of the Disquisitions, written in Wiltshire in 1776-1777 to defend his interpretation of Hartley and Newton. In the earlier text, matter was characterized as "sluggish and inert," while God was an ominpotent and omnipresent "immaterial being or spirit." In the latter text, God was "far from being immaterial" and matter was in no way different from the dynamic conception of spirit. In the Institutes, the doctrine of the "sleep of the soul" as a separate

[65] Rutt, 5:15 and 480; see Margaret Canovan, "The Irony of History: Priestley's Rational Theology," Price-Priestley Newsletter 4 (1980): 16-25. For Bentham on "sinister interests," see Harrison, Bentham, 200-206.

immaterial substance was stoutly defended, while by the later 1770s Priestley argued that this view was the basis of false religion.^[66] Both in his Disquisitions and in his debates with Richard Price in 1777-1778, he then analyzed the process by which this false view of the soul had commanded such authority. Characteristically, this analysis took the form of therapeutic history. Priestley said that in its pristine form the soul was "conceived to be an aerial or an igneous substance," "what we should now call an attenuated form of matter. " What had gone wrong? The defenders of priestcraft had realized that this original and truthful account would imply that "the soul and the body being in reality the same kind of matter must die together." So dualism was invented to keep mortalism at bay and the wrong authority in power. Both Locke and Descartes were authors of this falsehood. The Scottish philosophers of Common Sense were merely the most recent defenders of this corruption, and Bentham applauded this assault on the interests of Thomas Reid and his allies. Finally, when pneumatics, optics, and electricity demonstrated just how powerful matter could be, the resources were available for a philosophically authoritative attack on immaterialism. His experiments showed that "spirits" were indeed developed from rarer forms of matter, and so returned the pneumatology of the philosophers to its original truth.^[67]

This philosophy posed as a restoration of pristine truths established through rational analysis of mind and controlled experiments on body. It carried a history of civil society and of the doctrines that society had produced. All this made the philosophers look like a new sect. Any new sect needed sacred texts, well-established authorities, and a means of proselytizing. Both Priestley and Bentham spoke the language of sectarianism. New "saints" were found, new scriptures were edited. For example, during the 1770s Priestley produced his heavily edited version of Hartley's revelation of the powers of mind. He also made a remarkable new use of the natural philosophy of the Jesuit Roger Boscovich, who had argued for a model of matter as a network of point centers of forces. Both the treatment of Hartley and that of Boscovich were controversial because many protested against the new meanings Priestly found in these texts. Just as Priestley was forced to defend his rereading of Hartley against criticisms from Price, so he was forced to defend his use of Boscovich against the comments of fellow dissenters and those of

[66] Priestley to Caleb Rotheram, April 1778, in Rutt, 1:314-315; Priestley, Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, vol. 1 (London, 1772), 15-16, 156-159; Disquisitions, 16, 145-146; compare Priestley, Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind (London, 1775), xx.

[67] Priestley, Disquisitions, 72, 170-173; Free Discussion, 262-268.

the author himself. Boscovich met Priestley in 1775 and they discussed shared views of the penetrability of matter and the relation of body and power. Priestley then combined his own pneumatics, the views of John Michell on the forces innate in matter, and Boscovich's doctrine that "matter consists of powers only, without any substance" and published them in 1777. The Jesuit was horrified. He wrote to Shelburne protesting Priestley's use of his ideas to prove materialism and mortalism. Priestley was equally angry at the danger this posed to his relationship with his patron, and told Boscovich that "I have not made you an accomplice" in establishing the principles of philosophical materialism. Boscovich was unconvinced by these "impieties and absurdities."^[68] The life of body and the death of the soul were the most important principles which Priestley sought to establish through these editions. He made two shifts of emphasis in his interpretation of Hartley. First, he chose to emphasize Hartley's argument that "the whole man is of some uniform composition" rather than spelling out in detail the mechanism of vibration which Hartley used to explicate the process of thought. An ontology of pneumatic powers could do the work hitherto performed by an aether. The uniformity of body effaced the division between matter and spirit and guaranteed the truth of mortalism. Priestley told Price that powers of thought "reside in the organized body itself and therefore must be suspended till the time when the organization shall be restored." Mortalism was a central doctrine because it was the best way to guarantee the proper faith and the proper civic philosophy. So, secondly, Priestley swept aside Hartley's reservations about mortalism. Hartley's text argued that if body "could be endued with the most simple kinds of sensation," then it might also "arrive at all that intelligence of which the human mind is possessed." But he also pointed out that "the immateriality of the soul has little or no connexion with its immortality." Priestley disagreed. To show from pneumatics that the soul was material was to show that it was as mortal as body. This demonstration was a precondition of the proper conduct of philosophy and the proper conduct of moral life.^[69]

[68] For Priestley and Boscovich, see Priestley, History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light and Colours (London, 1772), 390, 393-394; Disquisitions, xii and 11; Priestley to Bretland, 7 March 1773, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 117; Priestley to Boscovich, 19 August 1778 and Boscovich to Priestley, 17 October 1778, ibid., 166-171.

[69] Priestley, Hartley's Theory, xx; Priestley to Caleb Rotheram, 31 May 1774, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 146. For Hartley and mortalism, see Free Discussion, xvi; Hartley, Observations on Man, part l, 511-512.

THE USES OF THE DEAD

Ultimately, the lessons of a philosophy of mind and body were made manifest at death. As has been argued, Hardey's system was at least as important for Priestley because of its account of life in the world to come. The combination of philosophical materialism and conjectural history implied a revised account of a future state. The rational subject would find consolation and hope in the prospects of general enlightenment rather than an individual fate. Visionary accounts of society's advance were consequences of this revised account of the progress of reason. Philosophical materialism argued that body and soul were indistinguishable in life. Orthodox pneumatology argued that the two substances became separated at death. So the materialists needed to define their own art of making a good end. For the pious, the idealized setting of the deathbed showed the superiority of secure faith over the darkness of irreligion. The existence of spirit was meant to sustain important moral sanctions. The stories told of the horrors of impious suffering, or of deathbed conversions, were important elements in the contest with materialism. Bentham was extremely critical of the force of these anecdotes: rational subjects "should be exempt from those horrors—from those pains of mind... infused... by the opium of the existence of man in a life to come." This "opium" should be replaced by a prospective account of the development of the new social and intellectual order, wisely guided by expert managers and gradually advancing toward a rational utopia. Optimism became a regulative principle for the reformer's life, and the future reputation of his philosophical sect took the place of the soul's immortality. This was a commonplace among the philosophes. Diderot put the point pithily: "posterity is to the philosopher what the next world is to the religious believer." Bentham echoed the sentiment at the end of his life: "my fear was—lest by dying... my fellow men... should be deprived of the happiness which it is my hope thereby to give them."^[70]

[70] For Hartley's millennium, see R. Marsh, "The Second Part of Hartley's System," Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959): 264-273; Fruchtman, Apocalyptic Politics of Price and Priestley, 16-20. For Bentham on the future see "J. B.'s Instructions for Living Happily or Not At All" (1831), in Mack, Bentham, 213. For enlightenment and orthodox immortalism in France, see Bernard Groethuysen, The Bourgeois: Catholicism versus capitalism in 18th-Century France (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1968), 50-77 and McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, 148-190; Diderot's remark is cited at p. 168. For an important treatment of the role of "posterity" in the formation of the intellectual, see Daniel Roche, "Talent, Reason and Sacrifice: The Physician during the Enlightenment," in Medicine and Society in France, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 66-88.

This implied that accounts of the future state were important items of a politics of philosophy. By the 1790s, it was obvious that the reformers' account of death had at least two political consequences. First, despite their own criticisms of the sanctions of public executions, many reformers seemed to endorse the judicial murders of the Revolution. As early as 1790, Jacobin pamphlets published in Birmingham debated Priestley's mortalism. The following year, just days after the Birmingham riot, the cartoonist James Gillray imagined a conversation between George III, facing death on the scaffold, and Priestley, ministering to the condemned monarch. "We must all die once," Priestley is envisaged as saying; "in fact a Man ought to be glad of the opportunity of dying, if by that means he can serve his country in bringing about a glorious Revolution. As to your soul, or any thing after death, don't trouble your self about that; depend on it, the idea of a future state is all an imposition." It was held that materialism licensed murder by making men machines. During the Revolutionary decade the regicide Terror was all too easily displayed as an inevitable consequence of the philosophy espoused by writers such as Beddoes, Godwin, or Erasmus Darwin. Since these materialists banned spirits from nature, anti-Jacobins could make fun of their enemies by populating the world with vengeful ghosts. Reformers would be haunted by their victims and by the souls which they had denied.^[71] The second consequence of the reformer's philosophy of mind was the emphasis placed on the confrontation between the enlightened, rational mind and the prospects of the future. When he answered Burke in 1791, Priestley ended his response with an account of a blissful future. He drew a vivid contrast between his own "pleasing dream" and the darker apocalypse prophesied by his adversary. Priestley lampooned Burke's self-appointed role as establishment's mes-

[71] For Priestley's mortalism in Birmingham, see John Money, Experience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760-1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), 145-148; for Gillray's cartoon, see James Gillray, "The Hopes of the Party Prior to July 14th," 19 July 1791, in The Satirical Etchings of James Gillray, ed. Draper Hill (New York: Dover, 1976), no. 21. Compare "The Progress of Man: A Didactic Poem," in Edmonds, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, 102-110, and this satire by David Davis, printed in., Priestley, 99:

Here lie at rest
In oaken chest
Together packed most nicely,
The bones and brains,
Flesh, blood and veins,
And soul of Dr. Priestley.

siah. "If, in these circumstances, you can save the church, as well as the state, you will deserve no less than canonization, and St. Edmund will be the greatest name in the calendar." Against the deceitful pieties of the conservatives, the reformers argued that confidence and optimism must be pursued in life and demonstrated in death. Both Bentham and Priestley provided exemplary instances of the right way to die. These instances were subsequently published as demonstrations of the right principles of philosophy and as aids to the dissemination of those principles.^[72]

Both Priestley and Bentham recognized the death of Socrates as the origin of philosophy and as the proper model for their own decease. The Socratic model referred both to the sufferings of the intellectual under the burdens of persecution and to the future hope of an immortal reputation. Priestley's son sent a graphic description of his father's last days to Theophilus Lindsey with the express purpose of proving the consistency and effectiveness of the doctrines of unitarianism and philosophical materialism. The account emphasized the sustained labor of composition, publication, and experiment which Priestley continued up to the moment of his death. "He had the satisfaction of witnessing the gradual spread of his religious opinions and the fullest conviction that he should prevail over his opponents in chemistry. He looked forward with the greatest pleasure to future exertions in both these fields." His final actions included plans for improvements to his laboratory and the study of the scriptural account of the raising of Lazarus, paying specific attention to the gospel's emphasis on the empirical basis of the story: "many of the Jews which had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on him." His very last deed involved correcting the proofs of a pamphlet on the comparison between Jesus and Socrates. Here virtue was displayed as care for the future distribution of rational philosophy and the strenuous exertions of the naturalist.^[73]

Bentham's death was equally exemplary. As is well known, at the age of 21 Bentham planned that "if I should chance to die of any such disease" whose study would advance "the art of Surgery or science of Physic... by observations to be made in the opening of my body," then

[72] Priestley, Letters to Burke, 153-154, and Fruchtman, Apocalyptic Politics of Prize and Priestley, 83.

[73] For an annotated account of the death, see Jack Lindsay, ed., Autobiography of Joseph Priestley (Bath: Adams and Dart, 1970), 133-139, and Joseph Priestley, Socrates and Jesus Compared (Northumberland, Pa., 1803); Thomas Cooper to Benjamin Smith Barton, 6 February 1804, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 321.

Fordyce or some other physician or surgeon should be given the body for an anatomy, "to the intent and with the desire that Mankind may reap some small benefit in and by my decease." During the 1820s, he pursued research with the anatomists John Armstrong and Edward Grainger on processes of preservation, work that culminated in the production of Southwood Smith's "The Uses of the Dead to the Living" (1824) and Bentham's own "Auto-icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living" in 1831. The following year Bentham confirmed his original provision for a postmortem dissection and laid down strict instructions for the preservations of his body. The body was to be displayed at future meetings of "my personal friends and other Disciples"; a codicil by Southwood Smith stated that the anatomy was to be used "to communicate curious, interesting and highly important knowledge, and secondly to show that the primitive horror at dissection originates in ignorance and is kept up by misconception and that the human body when dissected instead of being an object of disgust is as much more beautiful than any other piece of mechanism as it is more curious and wonderful." In the "Auto-icon," Bentham amplified this account of the utility of a corpse, suggesting ingenious machines that could animate "Dialogues of the Dead," notably between his own body and that of Socrates on the history of the principle of happiness.^[74]

In every respect, Bentham's body was used as a means of instruction and demonstration. Southwood Smith's famous performance over the corpse of his master at Grainger's Anatomy Theatre in June 1832 and the Anatomy Act of that year were irresistible symbols of "the uses of the dead." It was reported that during the postmortem, Bentham's features were dramatically illuminated by a chance thunderstorm and "rendered almost vital by the reflection of the lightning playing over them." Disciples such as James Mill and his colleagues were there as mute witnesses.

With the feelings which touch the heart in the contemplation of departed greatness, and in the presence of death, there mingled a sense of the power which that lifeless body seemed to be exercising in the conquest of

[74] Bentham's will, 24 August 1769, Correspondence of Bentham l:136; Thomas South-wood Smith, "The Uses of the Dead to the Living," Westminster Review 2 (1824): 59-97; C. F. A. Marmoy, "The Auto-icon of Jeremy Bentham at University College London," Medical History 2 (1958): 77-86; Crimmins, "Bentham on Religion," 105-108.

prejudice for the public good, thus cooperating with the triumphs of the spirit by which it had been animated.^[75]

From his earliest works on law reform, Bentham had connected the well-arranged "demonstrations" of rational argument with the theatrical "demonstrations" of the public lecturers. Southwood Smith's anatomy was a demonstration in both these senses. In common with the general strategy of the reformers, it was simultaneously the act of an expert in the principles of mind and of an investigator of the principles of body. The doctrine of mind explained how education and reform would work, the doctrine of body provided what educators and reformers should know. The examination of the means by which these initial aims were transmuted under the criticisms of conservatives and the realities of patronage and power has many important implications for further inquiry into the work of reformers in the nineteenth century. It has been suggested that behind the apparent simplicities of utilitarian and unitarian activists of the 1820s and 1830s lies a complex philosophy of mind and body designed to account for extraordinary future developments in the social body. Development of society demanded relentless observation of its members' habits. The ensemble of subjects' bodily and mental habits which observers could survey would replace old models of matter and spirit. With resources drawn from the principles of utility and association, educators and civil servants such as James Mill could combine a confidence about the future with a presentation of the mind as an observable network of matters of fact. New disciplines appeared: psychology, political economy, statistics. Each of these disciplines explicitly relied on the contrast between the pathological complexities of the social order and the luminous simplicities of the mental principles on which these diseases depended and from which experts could learn the means of cure. Under the care of these experts, it was intended that the whole nation become an inspection house, a Panopticon where the mentalities of citizens would be made clearly visible to the inspectors' gaze. "If I had time to write a book," Mill claimed in 1817, "I would make the human mind as plain as the road from Charing Cross to St. Paul's." The following year, pursuing this goal of clarity, Mill finished his article on the sub-

[75] For Southwood Smith's lecture and its effects, see Thomas Southwood Smith, Lec ture Delivered over the Remains of Jeremy Bentham (London, 1831); Lewes, Southwood Smith, 45-47; M.J. Durey, "Bodysnatchers and Benthamites: The Implications of the Dead Body Bill for the London Schools of Anatomy, 1820-1842," London Journal, 1976:200-225.

ject of colonies for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There he added notorious remarks on the wisdom of rational birth control as a solution to the crisis of population: "if the superstitions of the nursery were discarded, and the principle of utility kept steadily in view, a solution might not be very difficult to be found." So, for the reformers, the principles of a philosophy of mind would become principles for the management of individual bodies and of entire populations. These were projected as disciplines which, as Foucault observed, "characterized a power whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill but to invest life through and through."^[76]

[76] James Mill to Francis Place, 6 December 1817, in William Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 121; Mill, "General Remarks on the Principle of Population," in Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1824). 3:261. For Mill, Bentham, and Malthus, see Patricia James, Population Malthus: His Life and Times (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 382-388. For the emergence of new disciplines of the body and of population, see Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (Har-mondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), 139; Ian Hacking, "How Should We Do the History of Statistics ?" Ideology and Consciousness 8 (1981): 15-26; T. M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

Eight
The Marquis de Sade and the Discourses of Pain:
Literature and Medicine at the Revolution

David B. Morris

MADAME DE MISTIVAL, opening her eyes—Oh Heavens! Why do you recall me from the grave's darkness? Why do you plunge me again into life's horrors?
DOLMANCÉ, whipping her steadily —Indeed, mother dear, it is because much conversation remains to be held.
—SADE, Philosophy in the Bedroom^[1]

Pain is among the knottiest problems in the long, tangled history of relations between body and mind; moreover, the Marquis de Sade so thoroughly offends or resists the mentality of Anglo-American literary criticism that his works—when acknowledged at all—meet with a silence deeper and more ominous than censorship. It is therefore self-evidently quixotic to propose discussing Sade and pain together, as if to a study of the Atlantic Ocean one gratuitously added the Pacific. Nonetheless, despite its unwieldy expansiveness as a subject for inquiry, pain, like love, constitutes one of the apparently permanent experiences (chang-

This essay was supported by a grant from the Division of Research Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities. I should especially like to thank G. S. Rousseau and James Grantham Turner for their generous assistance in its preparation and composition.

[1] In The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 362. When citing the Grove Press translations of Sade, I will also provide (following the page number) reference to the volume and page number of the French text, as published in the definitive edition Œ uvres complè du Marquis de Sade, ed. Gilbert L ély et al., 16 vols. (Paris: Cercle du Livre Prècieux, 1966-1967). The French text of Dolmancè's words is revealing: "Eh! vraiment, ma petite mçre, c'est que tout n'est pas dit" (3:544-545). Juliette, in the novel that bears her name, argues in favor of a philosophy that seeks to "say everything" ("tout dire" [9:586]).

ing with different cultures and times) that help to define an unwritten history of Western man, and we cannot hope to understand pain—in its fullest perplexities—without confronting the obsessive, almost unreadable pages in which Sade meditated, endlessly, on the bond uniting pain with desire. Although a complete history of pain would be fruitless and impossible, we need to consider those moments when pain emerges as something that requires an explanation, something that thrusts above the plane of merely blind or unquestioned sensation. Sade's work, however resistant or offensive, confronts us with such a moment when pain enters the zone of interpretation.

My purpose in this essay is to explore Sade's literary treatment of pain, especially as his works consume and transform the conventional vocabularies in which pain was discussed. Foremost among these vocabularies—which included theology and libertinism as well as law—was medicine. Thus my specific focus will concern Sade's transvaluations of medical knowledge. Sade did not simply appropriate a scientific vocabulary borrowed from eighteenth-century medicine and (to varying degrees) evident in the work of contemporary British and Continental writers, for whom the "life" or "nature" imitated in the novel now proved inextricable from the language of Enlightenment science.^[2] Sade's transvaluations alter what they appropriate. His borrowings from scientific sources are not the most characteristic feature of his style, but they have not passed unnoticed. (In 1968 Jean Deprun published an important essay entitled "Sade et la philosophie biologique de son temps.")^[3] It nevertheless needs to be emphasized that Sadean transvaluations employ biomedical language and concepts in ways that ultimately estrange them from the scientific and humanitarian labor of eighteenth-century medicine. Medicine in Sade is so thoroughly transvalued that it comes to constitute the appropriately unstable foundation for an otherwise foundationless libertine world, where reason always leads back toward the irrational, where clear and graspable truths grow indistinct and unsteady as they encounter the dark, corrosive, liberating power of desire.

[2] See James Rodgers, "'Life' in the Novel: Tristram Shandy and Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Physiology," Eighteenth-Century Life 1 (1980): 1-20. Particularly relevant to the admixture of "medical language" in erotic or pornographic texts is G. S. Rousseau, "Nymphomania, Bienville and the Rise of Erotic Sensibility," in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul-Gabriel Bouc é (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 95-119.

[3] In Le Marquis de Sade (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968), 189-203. This useful volume (with no editor named) collects papers from the 1966 symposium on Sade at the Centre aixois d'études et de recherches sur le dix-huitième siècle.

Pain for Sade is far more than (as we tend to consider it) a medical subject, and after Sade pain would never be quite the same.

There is a fundamental level of organic life at which pain belongs to an unthinking biochemistry of nerves and neurotransmitters that connects King Lear with Skinner's rats. Unlike pleasure, which spreads far beyond specific erogenous or tactile regions in diffuse currents of well-being, pain typically takes up residence in specific bodily parts.^[4] Thus we complain of a headache or toothache or bad back, but no one announces experiencing a sudden pleasure in the thumb or foot. Our ability to locate pain in specific parts of the body is what allows pain to serve effectively as a biological defense, and we automatically pull our hand back from the fire in a reflex that occurs faster than thought. Consciousness seems necessary for us to register pain, in the sense that someone who is drugged or unconscious will not feel the fire's heat or the surgeon's knife. Still, few people would survive childhood if pain required accurate reasoning before we ran away or cried for help. Should we adopt a Cartesian vocabulary to describe this secret (unthinking) life of pain, we might say that it belongs to the mindless realm of res extensa, where whatever takes up space owes allegiance to the mechanical laws of matter. It was Descartes, in fact, who provided in his treatise on human physiology—De l'homme, published posthumously in 1662—an illuminating diagram for what we would now call an involuntary response to pain.

[4] The localized nature of pain—as opposed to the nonlocal nature of pleasure—is discussed by Gilbert Ryle, "Pleasure," in Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1054), 54-67. The best introduction to modern medical research on pain is by Ronald Melzack and Patrick D. Wall, The Challenge of Pain (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Several books written for general readers seek to place medical knowledge of pain in wider social and historical contexts. See, for example, Peter Fairley, The Conquest of Pain (1978; reprint, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1980) and H. B. Gibson, Pain and Its Conquest (London: Peter Owen, 1982). For more philosophical and more satisfying discussions of pain and its relations to pleasure, see J. L. Cowan, Pleasure and Pain: A Study in Philosophical Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1968); Rem B. Edwards, Pleasures and Pains: A Theory of Qualitative Hedonism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979); and Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., Pain and Pleasure: A Study of Bodily Feelings, 2d ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1975). A fuller bibliographical introduction to differing modern approaches to pain is available in my essay "The Languages of Pain," in Ex ploring the Concept of Mind, ed. Richard M. Caplan (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 89-99. Undoubtedly the finest recent study of pain in its cultural significance—ranging from torture and nuclear war to the Old Testament, Marx, and human creativity—is Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Scarry makes very little mention of Sade.

Descartes's diagram (see plate 16) provides an indirect but helpful introduction to the Marquis de Sade because its mechanistic assumptions provided a basis for Sade's work and have long continued to dominate Western thought. In Descartes's sketch, the nerve CC runs directly from the foot to the brain. When the fire scorches the foot, the internal response goes something like this. The "thin and mobile" filaments within the nerve cord are tugged, unequally, and thus become strained, separated, or broken. The resulting motion passes instantaneously to the brain—just as (in Descartes's mechanical analogy) by "pulling at one end of a cord, one simultaneously rings a bell which hangs at the other end."^[5] All nerves for Descartes originate within the brain, and thus the tugging on nerve cord CC opens the valve or pore "d/e"—in turn releasing the so-called "animal spirits" produced and stored in the brain. These animal spirits—which Descartes described conventionally as minute, rarefied particles—descend through hollow spaces within the nerve cord and cause the muscular response that removes, say, foot from flame. At least as important as Descartes's simplified diagram is the analogy he chooses to describe the process of pain. With the delight of his age in complex machines, he compares the network of nerves, muscles, and animal spirits to an elaborate mechanical fountain, like the intricate waterworks popular in gardens and grottoes throughout the century.

What I wish to emphasize in Descartes is not the quaintness of his vocabulary—which we meet more than a century later in the novels of Sade—but the modernness of his view that pain must be understood as an event of the central nervous system, including of course the brain. In this light, Descartes's diagram might be interpreted as an episode in the larger seventeenth-century encounter with antiquity sometimes known as the battle of the ancients and the moderns. The Cartesian model of pain—although far from original—implies innovations as far-reaching as the changes that champions of the moderns attributed to the invention of gunpowder, printing, and the compass. Plato and Aristotle, for example, simply have no knowledge of the central nervous system.

[5] Treatise of Man, translation and commentary by Thomas Steele Hall (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 34 ("ainsi que tirant l'un des bouts d'une corde, on fait sonner en même temps la cloche qui pend à l'autre bout"). Descartes repeats this same image in his treatise The Passions of the Soul (1649), where the physiology of nerves, fibers, and animal spirits is also described in detail (The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al., 2 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 1:333). On the origin and development of the term "animal spirits," see Walther Riese, A History of Neurology (New York: MD Publications, 1959), 50-52.

Pl. 16. From René Descartes, De l'homme (1662).

Indeed, Aristotle, like the biblical writers, locates thought and feeling in the heart.^[6] Galen, writing in the second century A.D., established with the help of anatomical dissections a much more accurate picture of the nervous system, and in many respects Descartes's diagram is deeply indebted to Galenic physiology, which remained influential throughout the eighteenth century. Pain for Galen had a two-part explanation: in reference to nerves and in reference to organs. Nevertheless, despite its discussion of nerves, Galenic medicine mainly came to be associated with the doctrine that pain results from an imbalance of the four bodily humors. It is this Galenic physiology of organs and humoral fluids that Alexander Pope evokes in The Rape of the Lock when he assigns the allegorical figure of Pain its appropriate residence in the Cave of Spleen. It is significant that later in the eighteenth century "nerves" comes to replace "spleen" as the fashionable, one-word explanation of undiagnosable illness.^[7] What matters most is that the Cartesian model of pain—in shifting discussion from organs and humors to the mechanics of the central nervous system—underwrites or permits a new way of thinking about man, a mode of thought that finds its most radical expression in the novels of Sade.

Sade, imprisoned for some twenty-seven years under five governments, might seem entirely isolated, remote from Cartesian physiology

[6] K. D. Keele, Anatomies of Pain (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1957), 16-39. For a more detailed study concerning early theories of nerves, see Friedrich Solmsen, "Greek Philosophy and the Discovery of the Nerves," Museum Helveticum 18 (1961): 150-167. The best introduction to later Galenic theories of nerves and organs is two books by Rudolph E. Siegel, Galen's System of Physiology and Medicine (New York: S. Karger, 1968) and Galen on Sense Perception (New York: S. Karger, 1970). For contexts closer to Sade, see Edwin 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. Lloyd G. Stevenson and Robert P. Multhauf (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 123-141; and Eric T. Carlson and Meribeth M. Simpson, "Models of the Nervous System in Eighteenth-Century Psychiatry," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 43 (1969): 101-115.

[7] In 1786, James Adair described the popular influence of De Morbis Nervorum (1762), written by Robert Whytt (Professor of the Theory of Medicine at the Edinburgh Medical School, First Physician to the King of Scotland, and President of the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh): "Before the publication of this book, people of fashion had not the least idea that they had nerves; but a fashionable apothecary of my acquaintance, having cast his eye over the book, and having often been puzzled by the enquiries of his patients concerning the nature and causes of their complaints, derived from thence a hint, by which he cut the gordian knot—'Madam, you are nervous '; the solution was quite satisfactory, the term became fashionable, and spleen, vapours and hyp, were forgotten" (in R. K. French, Robert Whytt, the Soul, and Medicine [London: The Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, 1969], 166).

and from Enlightenment medicine, but medicine in fact provides one of the major discourses he puts to use in his copiously heterogeneous texts. Never has obscenity engaged such powers of erudition. Sade lost some six hundred books when the citizens of Paris liberated his recently vacated cell in the Bastille, and his reading ranged widely through the iconoclastic philosophes of his day, from Rousseau and Voltaire to Buffon, d'Holbach, and La Mettrie. But we need not invoke Sade's prodigious learning—or the legend of the philosopher in chains—in order to explain his knowledge of medicine. No doubt one explanation for the general commerce between fiction and physiology in Enlightenment thought involves the changed status of medicine. Like theology in the Middle Ages, medicine in the Enlightenment approached the condition of a master discourse. It is worth pausing, before we examine Sade's writing, to consider some of the ways in which medicine had changed.

In Sade's time the spectacular advances in medical knowledge—which accelerated with special vigor in late-eighteenth-century France—lent to medicine the authority of an official language and point of view that extended its influence to numerous other disciplines. French physicians ranked among the most active reformers and philosophers, whose thought penetrated far beyond medicine to questions of education, government, and law, as in the writings of Idéologue polymath Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis. (Sade particularly admired the work of Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, a physician-philosopher publishing in the mid-eighteenth century, whose radical views—after forcing him from France and Holland—at last found shelter at the court of Frederick the Great.) Conversely, Diderot's Éléments de physiologie (1774-1780) suggests how far nonphysicians felt themselves drawn to medical studies, like Samuel Johnson devouring the vast literature on diseases of the imagination. Reformers argued forcefully for a medicine that renounced "hypothetical explanations" and "imaginary systems"—associated with traditional medical teaching—in favor of scientific experiments and clinical observations.^[8] Especially in pre-Revolutionary France, physicians and non-

[8] Phrases in quotation cite remarks by Philippe Pinel and Pierre-François Percy in 1812 (in John E. Lesch, Science and Medicine in France: The Emergence of Experimental Physiology, 1790-1855 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984], 12). In addition to Lesch's lurid study of changes in French medicine about the time Sade was writing, see Erwin H. Ackerknecht, M.D., Medicine at the Paris Hospital, 1794-1848 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); David M. Vess, Medical Revolution in France, 1789-1796 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1975); and Medicine and Society in France (selections from the Annales, vol. 6), ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, trans. Elborg Forster and Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). For two essays—relevant to Sade—on medical views of erotic passion, see Christine Birnbaum, "La vision médicale de l'amour dans L'Encyclop é die," in Aimer en France 1760-1860, ed. Paul Viallaneix and Jean Ehrard, 2 vols. (Clermont-Ferrand: Association des publications de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines de Clermont-Ferrand, 1980), 2:307-313; and Paul Hoffmann, "Le discours médical sur les passions de l'amour, de Boissier de Sauvages à Pinel," in Aimer en France, ed. Vaillaneix and Ehrard, 2:345-356.

physicians sometimes wrote of medicine as supplying the cornerstone for an entire philosophy of man, in which improved public health would be indivisible from enlightened morality and from political reform. Medicine, in short, stands near the center of the revolution in eighteenth-century thought we call the Enlightenment (or, recently, Enlightenments). The intersection of medicine and literature in Sade's work does not simply infuse the novel with technical data or miscellaneous insights. Medicine, I claim, is foundational for Sade. It provides him with a basis for utterly reorganizing our views of man.

Sade's connection with French medicine is necessarily indirect, subordinated to his obsession with human sexual behavior, but indirect alliances sometimes prove more fruitful than direct borrowings. The indirect relation that links Sade to French medicine is at one level a powerful kinship of spirit. His entire enterprise in probing human sexuality bears resemblance to the series of events and discoveries in French medicine that Michel Foucault has termed "the birth of the clinic." This profound revision of medical thought did more than vastly extend and institutionalize the practice of clinical teaching, which in effect displaced the moribund traditions of academic medicine centered in the Paris Faculty. It signified a new emphasis on the previously subordinate arts (or, rather, trades) of pharmacy and of surgery, which were now elevated as indispensable techniques for penetrating the opaque surface of the body. (By contrast, in 1751 the Paris Faculty had required an oath from all bachelors of medicine renouncing the practice of surgery and pharmacy.) Further, it implied a new way of thinking about disease—based upon research that emphasized interior processes and conditions. "As autopsies became routine," one historian tells us, "the causes of illness came to be seen concretely in the tumors, abscesses, ulcers, inflammations, and hemorrhages located inside the body."^[9] Monuments to this new clinical "gaze" (as Foucault calls it) are familiar to students of French medicine. They include the free instruction in clinical surgery provided by Desault in the large amphitheater he obtained at the Hôtel-Dieu; Pinel's studies of mental illness, designed to reveal correlations

[9] Vess, Medical Revolution in France, 189, italics added.

between human passions and physiology; Bichat's systematic study of tissue, which altered medical thinking about internal organs and helped to found the science of histology. Even—however utopian it sounds—the closing of all French medical schools between 1792 and 1794, as well as the practical demands of wartime medicine in the years following the Revolution, contributed to a major change in French medicine. Paris, during Sade's long imprisonment, surpassed both Leiden and Edinburgh as the international center of new medical knowledge.

The penetrating gaze of the clinic offers more than a complex metaphor for the demystifying, unmasking tendencies of Enlightenment thought, in which Sade participated so fiercely. Clinical medicine not only brought new facts to light but also undertook a complete reorganization of the system linking the visible body to its invisible sources of illness. With the new system of relations between body and disease, between the seen and the unseen, comes as well a new system of language. As Foucault puts it: "The new medical spirit to which Bichat is no doubt the first to bear witness in an absolutely coherent way cannot be ascribed to an act of psychological and epistemological purification"—as if simply better facts or improved modes of observation were sufficient. "It is," Foucault continues, "nothing [less] than a syntactical reorganization of disease in which the limits of the visible and invisible follow a new pattern; the abyss beneath illness, which was the illness itself, has emerged into the light of language—the same light, no doubt, that illuminates the 120 Journées de Sodome [and] Juliette. "^[10] Sade in effect renders what was previously unseen, hidden, or suppressed suddenly—if grotesquely—visible.

Foucauh's emphasis on a new visibility—characterized by the emblematic "gaze" of clinical medicine—sometimes obscures his equally important discussion of nonvisual (linguistic or auditory) changes. While Sade certainly exposes to view sexual practices traditionally unseen and unrepresented, he also shares the spirit animating contemporary French medicine in his passion for organized, analytical speech. As Roland

[10] The Birth oft he Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963), trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), 195. Various historians of medicine and historians of science, in reviews and in footnotes, point out inaccuracies in Foucault's facts or interpretations and criticize his method of writing history, but his book remains a powerful account of well-documented changes in Enlightenment medical theory and practice. For an explanation of Foucault's approach, see Hubert L Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3-15.

Barthes has shown, Sadean novels employ language as a means for dividing characters, practices, even space itself into previously unsuspected categories. Sexuality finds simultaneously both a new speech and a new system, much as Sade's 120 Days of Sodom proposes to take its structure from a sweeping fourfold reclassification of sexual passions into the simple, the complex, the criminal, and the murderous, while at the same time imparting to a generally chaotic and mute region of human experience almost a reinvented language: an organized, computational, repetitive, exhaustive speech that in some sense constitutes a wholly revised rhetoric and grammar of sexuality. (Homosexual passion instantly loses in Sade its traditional linguistic status as "that which cannot be named.") It seems incorrect to interpret Sade's unending discursiveness as merely pathological (logorrhea), the sign of obsession, imprisonment, and illness. In a spirit suggesting that literature, like science, must find a speech equivalent to its newly magnified powers of vision, Juliette explains at the end of the enormous novel that bears her name: "It is necessary for philosophy to say everything."^[11]

Sade (as his critics too often forget) is not a philosopher but a novelist. That is, despite the evident philosophical ambitions of his characters, we go wrong in seeking to extract from their speech a consistent, monological doctrine we can name "Sade's philosophy." A philosophy that seeks to say everything is, in the first place, impossible. Further, in favoring the inclusiveness of rhetoric as opposed to the exclusions of traditional philosophy, Sade's novels surround his monomaniacal reasoners with a verbal context in which no one ever has the last word. (Victims must be replaced immediately—or revived—so that the discourse may go on.) Finally, in the attempt to say everything, in transgressing every bound of bourgeois decency, Sade extends language into realms where the suppressed and the unspoken border on the unspeakable. The issue is no

[11] "La philosophie doit tout dire" (L'histoire de Juliette [1797], in Œ uvres completes 9:586). Austryn Wainhouse, in his Grove Press translation, renders Juliette's words as follows: "Philosophy must never shrink from speaking out." In one sense, to say "everything" implies a refusal to suppress unwelcome facts or to shrink from speaking. I suspect, however, a more radical sense appropriate to Sade's conclusion in which by saying everything philosophy approaches the scandalous possibilities of rhetoric—a rhetoric that abandons its traditional link with ethics in favor of exploring the limits of whatever can be said on any topic, such as sexuality. This "rhetorical" philosophy—in saying everything—would coincide with Sade's relentless attack on the foundations of traditional metaphysics, as well as expressing what he called "a mobility [mobilité ] in my opinions which reflects my innermost manner of thought" (Correspondance, in Œ uvres completes 12:505). On Sadean extravagance, both verbal and nonverbal, see Marcel Hénaff, "Tout dire ou l'encyclopédie de l'excès," Obliques 12-13 (1977): 29-37.

longer whether obscenity will be allowed the freedom to speak its (partial) truths. Such truths remain speakable and thinkable. Sade also employs the obscene as a means for exploring man's participation in an irrationality that goes beyond speech and thought, revealing its traces in the horror that ordinarily deprives us of language. Sade, who confessed to an extreme "mobility" or irresolution in his opinions and innermost thoughts, cannot offer a coherent philosophy of the unspeakable. Rather, engaging the resources of widely different systems and modes of speech, he employs language in such a way as to emphasize the conflict and opacity that occur when normally separate discourses intersect. In place of a philosophical language for penetrating the unspeakable, he provides instead a laminated style that refuses to let us ignore and deny what we do not understand. His words force us to confront a darkness more impenetrable than the inside of the human body.

The broad parallels linking Sadean novels with a new medical speech and gaze—however seductive to students of literature and medicine—cannot of course establish patterns of direct influence. Instead, they do something equally valuable in providing a context within which more specific studies of medical and of literary relations may assume a larger significance. Historically, the understanding of pain has often fallen to the two widely diverse social practices we call literature and medicine. Nonetheless, quite often and for long periods medical and literary discourses on pain seem to occupy divided and mutually indifferent territories. In Sade's work, we encounter a moment when literature and medicine converge—under the pressure of late-eighteenth-century culture—and then, explosively, fly apart. The explosion (as Sade transvalues medical knowledge for his own purposes) is no less illuminating than the convergence. What Sade makes of pain—the meanings he both discovers and ascribes—might be said to invert or turn inside out every humanitarian impulse of Enlightenment thought, impulses especially pertinent to the progress in medical knowledge and treatment, as if Sade rigorously pursued a denial of human norms so complete that it amounts to what Georges Bataille rightly calls a quest for "the impossible and the reverse of life."^[12]

Pain in Sade's writing is notoriously associated with its traditional opposite, pleasure. As important and far less obvious, however, is the Sa-dean bond that unites pain with truth. Sade is never more at home in

[12] Literature and Evil (1957), trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973), 98.

the Enlightenment than when he joins the unmasking philosophers who sought to demystify every form of intellectual humbug, but he immediately resumes his isolated stance in equating truth (a specifically masculine version of truth) with physical pain. The libertine monk Clement argues in Justine : "There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience."^[13] An almost identical argument, with its implicit phallocentric anxieties, appears in Sade's companion novel, Juliette, where the arch libertine Saint-Fond declares: "I've never cared much about seeing pleasure's lineaments writ over a woman's countenance. They're too equivocal, too unsure; I prefer the signs of pain, which are more dependable by far."^[14] These passages suggest that there is more to the libertine obsession with pain than an exotic, eccentric, sexual taste. Pain not only affirms (a clearly uncertain) male superiority and mastery. It also assumes the character of a sign-system that—in contrast with the slipperiness attributed to language and to appearances (no doubt to women as well)—establishes a direct, if limited, correspondence with truth. It communicates an authenticity that Sade's libertine heroes and heroines see everywhere eluding them in a world dominated by deceit, custom, equivocation, timidity, and ignorance. Here, pain for Sade has already absorbed a range of meaning that distinguishes it from merely random agonies or from meaningless sensation. Already we have entered the unstable realm of Sadean transvaluations, where familiar words and actions take on unfamiliar significance, even as libertine sexual pleasure adopts the unexpected vocabulary of screams and rage. It is a realm where medicine too cannot remain unchanged.

Medicine in fact assumes in Sade's work an appearance and function very different from what ancient or modern psychiatry might lead us to expect. Although sadism now belongs securely to the lexicon of sexual pathology, explained through theories of childhood trauma, passive-aggressive behavior, fears of impotence, repression, or a reversal of the death wish, sexuality in Sade's work is never annexed to illness, whether

[13] Justine, trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, 606/3:206. There are three separate versions of Justine, which was first published in 1791. (The earliest version, entitled Les infortunes de la vertu, Sade composed in 1787; the vastly expanded final version, entitled La nouvelle Justine, was published in 1797.) Except once where indicated, I have employed the 1791 version, because it is most accessible—in several translations—to Anglo-American readers.

[14] Trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 362/8:350. The libertine hero Dolmancé asserts in Philosophy in the Bedroom: "pain must be preferred, for pain's telling effects cannot deceive" (252/3:436).

organic or psychological. Indeed, Sade's refusal to regard even the most abnormal or self-destructive sexual behavior as illness directly opposes the medical and political wisdom of his own day, which diagnosed his condition as "sexual dementia" and decreed that his final years be spent with the mad patients incarcerated at the Asylum of Charenton. But if Sade obstinately refuses to follow medicine in linking sexual aberration with illness, he also practices the independence of Enlightenment thought in rejecting the immemorial, church-authorized bond yoking sexuality to childbirth. As Angela Carter has observed, Sade anticipates our own era of unprecedented sexual revolution, when pleasure has abandoned its former (imperfect but inescapable) unity with biological reproduction.^[15] To the libertine mind, pregnancy is intolerable, except as infants or pregnant women excite new breakthroughs in cruelty. It is common for Sade's most discriminating male libertines to renounce all contact—even visual contact—with the vagina. ("Your authentic sodomist," explains Juliette, "will always come unerect at the sight of a cunt.")^[16] Male libertines not only prefer male partners. Their preference expresses a desire to affirm that sexuality must be not merely infertile but consciously sterile. Thus, in affirming a sexuality that is overwhelmingly anal, excremental, and bloody, the Sadean libertine follows a logic that leads from the denial of procreation to an embracement of death. Sexuality finds its temporary fulfillment for Sade not in childbirth but in repeated acts of destruction, with murder redefined as an unjustly suppressed form of eroticism.

The absence of expected biomedical contexts in Sade's work—the void where illness and childbirth might normally appear—provides a useful background against which his transvaluations of medical knowledge stand out as visible, crucial components of the libertine system.

[15] The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), introductory note. Carter takes the position that Sadean pornography serves women indirectly by its exposure of a phallocentric social structure, by its stripping away the mask of romance to reveal the sexual politics implicit in male-female relations. In her feminist reading of Sade as a critique of bourgeois, male-centered ideology, Carter shares Susan Sontag's conviction that "the pornographic imagination says something worth listening to, albeit in a degraded and often unrecognizable form" ("The Pornographic Imagination," in styles of Radical Will [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966], 70). Other feminist critics deny pornography what Sontag calls "its peculiar access to some truth" (70-7l) and regard it mainly as reflecting and promoting the oppression of women. See, for example, Laura Lederer, ed., Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography (New York: William Morrow, 1980), and Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture 's Revenge against Nature (New York: Harper and Row, 1981).

[16] Juliette, trans. Wainhouse, 681/9:87.

"System," as a term applied to the views of Sadean libertines, does not refer to a tight, interlocking grid of clear and distinct ideas, held together by logic and constituting a coherent whole. The unsystematic libertine system depends on each individual's rigorous and total commitment to self-interest, so that reason serves a purely instrumental function in promoting the arguments of desire. Once, when fearing prosecution, Sade argued with startling lucidity—pursuing a stylistic analysis any literary critic may envy for its precision—that he could not possibly be the author of Justine.^[17] Desire in effect performs a faultless impersonation of reason. In similarly advancing their own interests, Sade's libertines assert a wide variety of dubious (if apparently reasonable) claims, some false, self-contradictory, or in conflict with the views of other libertines. Such disparate views do not add up to a homogeneous system of logic but rather reflect a heterogeneous system of discourse, in which the need to "say everything" (which Juliette attributes to this new "philosophy") in practice authorizes saying almost anything—violating the prohibitions that bind us not only to decorum but also to reason and consistency. The force that briefly holds Sade's anarchistic libertines together is not genuine friendship or the fraternity of criminals; nor can they depend on tacit or formal codes of mutual nonaggression, which fail to survive occasions when desire, whim, or self-interest turns one libertine against another. What truly binds them together, fleetingly but repeatedly, is their need to speak endlessly about deeds and desires that would mean nothing if forbidden such verbal disclosure. (If other libertines are not present, the victim must serve the role of listener/respondent, rescuing speech from pointless monologue.) The libertine system is finally a system of speech, to which medicine makes an indispensable contribution.

The most important contribution that medicine makes to Sade's novels is in supplying what the characters invoke as a scientific physiology of pleasure and pain. Sade's physiological accounts of pain do more (as we will soon see) than merely provide an instrument for silencing or for refuting traditional moral and religious explanations. Sade initiates his transformations of medical knowledge by reversing the durable custom in medicine—evident as far back as in the ancient Hippocratic writings—that assigns pain the secondary status of a symptom. In enlarging or aggrandizing the status of pain, Sade follows the same narrative logic that permits him—while banishing midwives from a world of

[17] "Note concerning My Detention," in Justine... and Other Writings, trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, 152-154/15:26-29.

marathon copulations—to sacrifice literary realism to the demands of libertine desire. Like the parricidal giant Minski in Juliette, whose penis (measuring eighteen inches long by sixteen in circumference) stays permanently erect, Sade's exaggerations refuse to obey the laws of normal science whenever science threatens to obscure the overriding laws of the erotic life.

Sade, quite clearly, rejects or ignores the medical tradition that regards pain as a symptom. Although its status as a symptom assures pain an important place within medicine, its importance is mainly instrumental, like the informer who tips off the police. Pain as a symptom may be forgotten or dismissed by the physician as soon as its instrumental service is over, and until very recently the history of medical interest in pain centers on the search for effective anesthetic and analgesic agents, where understanding pain is less urgent than annihilating or suspending it. Sade not only shows no interest in pain as a symptom; on the contrary, like Albrecht von Hailer, whose studies of "irritability" (which he demonstrated experimentally to be a specific property of muscles causing them to contract) soon encouraged expansive ontological and theological speculations, Sade elevates pain from its secondary, instrumental status within medicine to the central position accorded basic laws of nature.

The centrality that Sade assigns to pain finds an illuminating parallel in the work of another influential late-eighteenth-century thinker, who otherwise might seem Sade's opposite. Jeremy Bentham—like Sade, born in the 1740s—brought an almost Sadean passion for reason and for enumeration to the un-Sadean goal of eradicating the irrational, both in man and in social structures. His Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), while it seeks to construct a social theory rendering impossible or obsolete the abuses celebrated in Sade's dark libertine utopias, nonetheless begins from a premise that Sade would wholly accept. As Bentham declares in his first sentence: "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do." This rigorous dualism of pleasure and pain, which Bentham treats as secure and indisputable, comes in Sade's work to lose its distinctness, but both Bentham and Sade start from the same point in developing their very different visions of the consequences that follow from our commitment to pleasure and pain. Pain is no longer (as in classical philosophy) subordinated to pleasure, reduced to the pedagogic office of enforcing virtuous conduct. In its centrality, pain determines what shall be called virtue or vice, an insight that leads Sade's libertine

heroes to reject such conventional moral categories as simply a manner of speech.

Ignored as the symptom of temporary dysfunction and dismissed as the chastising pedagogue of traditional ethics, pain for Sade emerges in a new and primary role as coextensive with the truth of the body. Pain, that is, informs us truly about the state of the body. Further, this information gains immeasurable importance because the body's truth comes to define the limits of whatever Sade holds as true. It is, in effect, the sole truth in a world where every other foundation of knowledge ultimately dissolves into falsehood or uncertainty. Thus, even though Sade thoroughly alters the status of pain within medicine, medicine provides him with the knowledge indispensable for understanding the truth of the body. Sometimes this truth reflects little more than the general Enlightenment fascination with the discovery of natural facts, disentangled from theological corruptions or learned error. Medicine, for example, holds a purely positive, demystifying function in Philosophy in the Bedroom, where the willing ingenue Eugénie—as an introduction to her ensuing libertine education—receives a lecture in male and female anatomy, which might have come directly from a medical textbook (or indirectly from a medical textbook, through the libertine tradition in which such anatomy lectures were a recurrent narrative device). Here again Sade typically converts medicine from a healing and instructive art to an erotic practice. He seems to have understood a sense in which the penetrating gaze holds sexual as well as medical implications. As in the modern soap opera, sexuality and medicine prove inextricably entangled.

The Enlightenment emphasis upon medicine as a science—a practice grounded in experiment and in observable fact—proves fundamentally equivocal in Sade's work. Science matters to the libertine mind mainly as it permits or advances sexual practices that depend on cruelty. Thus the vivisection common to French medical experiments on animals reappears in Sade's work as a technique for generating pleasure. In Justine the libertine surgeon Rodin, an eminent technologist who extols "the progress of science," discovers in the probing, cutting, agonizing penetrations of (pre-anesthetic) surgery a lure that proves wholly erotic. When Rodin asserts that the science of anatomy will never reach its "ultimate state of perfection" until he has examined a child of fourteen or fifteen who has died a cruel death, experienced readers of Sade know instantly that this high-minded passion for scientific progress conceals a sexual aim and that the victim of Rodin's excited, protracted vivisection

will be his own beautiful daughter.^[18] Reduced to a mechanical technology for penetrating the body, medicine serves the libertine world less for relieving pain than for inflicting it. Like the ghoulish aristocrat in Justine who manages to achieve orgasm only by repeatedly bleeding his young wife in a vampirish simulation of phlebotomy, Sade's libertines find their ultimate erotic stimulation in blood, which is transformed from medical fact to sexual marker. The balms that miraculously restore Justine and other long-suffering victims of libertinage belong not to Enlightenment pharmacology but to primitive traditions of magic, where drugs are among the standard accoutrement of eroticism. Their Sadean purpose is simply to prepare the victim for new episodes of sexual pain.

The same process of transvaluation in Sade's work that renders medicine erotic also helps to eroticize and to medicalize pain. The most significant result of this process is not the pornographic description that it makes possible. (Sade, of course, did not invent erotic cruelty but rather refined and elaborated it within the contours of his libertine system.)^[19] Placing pain within a medical context offers Sade the insuperable advantage of thereby silencing and effectively refuting other discourses traditionally concerned with human suffering. In Sade, as in American courtrooms and hospitals, medicine has a tendency to overrule or to dominate alternative systems of thought, so that priest and judge defer to the wisdom of medical testimony. Because medicine in Sade carries the authority of Enlightenment science, it breaks free from the

[18] Justine, trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, 551-552/3:150-151. Rodin's libertine accomplice remarks concerning the human victims required by medical science: "in those hospitals where I worked as a young man I saw similar experiments by the thousand" (552/ 3:151).

[19] On cultural and literary contexts relevant to Sadean eroticism, see Robert P. Maccubbin, ed., Unauthorized Sexual Behavior during the Enlightenment (Williamsburg, Va.: College of William and Mary, 1985), a special issue of the journal Eighteenth-Century Life (9, n.s. 3), reissued under the title ‘Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Bouc é, Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain; Ann Thomson, "L'art de jouir de La Mettrie ô Sade," in Aimer en France, ed. Viallaneix and Ehrard, 2:315-322; and Aram Vartanian, "La Mettrie, Diderot, and Sexology in the Enlightenment," in Essays on the Age of Enlightenment in Honor of Ira O. Wade, ed. Jean Macary (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1977), 547-367. (Two studies forthcoming are Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter [Manchester: Manchester University Press] and Peter Wagner's Eros Revived: Erotica in the Age of Enlightenment [London: Secker and Warburg].) Although now outdated, The Romantic Agony by Mario Praz (trans. Angus Davidson, 2d ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1951]) was revolutionary and influential when it first appeared. Praz, of course, has much to say about Sade.

literary heritage that portrays the doctor as a greedy quack. Indeed, Sade's libertine surgeon Rodin is an anti-quack: a wealthy man-of-science whose reasoning is formidable. In its relentless appeal to the facts of human anatomy and physiology, medicine as Sade employs it thoroughly displaces the more speculative discussions of pain that had been a traditional employment of philosophers and theologians. The Sadean libertine ultimately empties virtue and vice (or sin and innocence) of their familiar content in classical and Christian writing, where our attraction to pleasure and aversion from pain seem changeless, natural, God-given responses that provide a foundation for the ethical life. In one sense, Sade exposes the unforeseen conclusions that follow from a Benthamite reliance upon pleasure and pain as a philosophical bedrock for ethics. In another sense, all traditional foundations crumble in Sade when virtue and vice are redefined as cultural artifacts characterized by their greater or lesser powers to stimulate the nervous system. Medicine, as various Enlightenment philosophes had predicted, now gives direction to philosophical thought.

Theology fares even worse than philosophy at the hands of Sade's libertine medicine. The voluminous Christian meditations on human suffering might be said to take their origin from the iconography of the cross and from the prophetic words of Isaiah: "With his pain we are healed" (54:4). Pain in Augustinian theology enters the world with original sin, but Christian pain is ultimately redemptive. Christ suffers so that man might find eternal life. The body suffers in order that the soul might be saved. Sade's contemptuous and relentless assault on Christianity as "incompatible with the libertarian system" includes his parodic transvaluation of Christian attitudes toward redemptive suffering.^[20] In fact, his fullest response to this pervasive Christian reading of pain is simply the plot of Justine. The innocent Justine's faith in God and her love of virtue are the qualities that generate each new episode of outrage and violence, as if the novel—far from reflecting picaresque random-ness—were a demonstration in logic. Sade contrives Justine's imitation of Christ to establish the absence of redemptive suffering. The world that she encounters inside the church mirrors exactly the libertine cruelties that she meets everywhere else. There is no inside, no outside. Even

[20] Philosophy in the Bedroom, trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, 301/3:483. Among numerous studies of the relation between pain and theology, see especially C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940: reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1944); John Bowker, Problems of Suffering in Religions of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); and David Bakan, Disease, Pain, and Sacrifice: Toward a Psychology of Suffering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

when she escapes from the debauched monks at St. Mary-in-the-Wood, Justine simply encounters their doubles wherever she turns.

Sade's equivocal representation of Enlightenment medicine mirrors an ambivalence in his treatment of Christianity. It is possible that Sa-dean atheism—so vocal and jubilant as to undermine its own claims—expresses (as Pierre Klossowski has argued) his unacknowledged need for God.^[21] It is certain that Christianity contains for Sade, as if despite itself, a hidden ground for affirmation. What Sade affirms in Christianity is not its doctrines but its historical concern with pain, from original sin, martyrdom, and self-flagellation to inquisitorial torture and the torment of the damned. The final episode of 120 Days of Sodom thus provides a culminating image of Sade's secular transvaluation of Christianity in the horrifying erotic carnage of a pastime called "The Hell Game"—complete with impersonated demons and agonized sinners. By comparison, the parody of Christian pain in Justine seems oblique and almost subtle. In Sade's work, theology—like philosophy—provides only a mocking, empty, archaic language for interpreting pain, no match for the up-to-date physiology of nerve impulses and electrical fluids. As Justine suffers each new excruciating episode of sexual abuse, her suffering leads nowhere, illuminates nothing, redeems no one.

Sade's transvaluations of medical knowledge will grow clearer if we focus upon two specific passages from Juliette and Justine. The first brings us openly to a question at the heart of Sade's work. How is it, asks the libertine statesman Saint-Fond, that we arrive at pleasure through the sight of others undergoing pain and, stranger still, through suffering pain ourselves? To this central problem in Sade's fiction—which might seem so complex as to evoke cloudbanks of obscure evasions—Saint-Fond's fellow libertine Noirceuil delivers an absolutely explicit reply. Like similar demystifying exercises of Enlightenment reason, it begins by citing the error it proposes to unmask, quoted in the exact words of the Port-Royal Jansenist theologian Pierre Nicole:

"Pain, logically defined, is nothing other than a sentiment of hostility in the soul toward the body it animates, the which it signifies through certain movements that conflict with the body's physical organization." So says Nicole, who perceived in man an ethereal substance, which he called soul, and which he differentiated from the material substance we call body. I, however, who will have none of this frivolous stuff and who consider man as something on the order of an absolutely material plant, I shall simply

[21] Pierre Klossowski, Sade mon prochain (Paris: Seuil, 1947).

say that pain is the consequence of a defective relationship between objects foreign to us and the organic molecules composing us; in such wise that instead of composing harmoniously with those that make up our neural fluids, as they do in the commotion of pleasure, the atoms emanating from these foreign objects strike them aslant, crookedly, sting them, repulse them, and never fuse with them. Still, though the effects are negative, they are effects nonetheless, and whether it be pleasure or pain brewing in us, you will always have a certain impact upon the neural fluids.^[22]

Although Noirceuil and Nicole are both French, they speak in effect two different languages. Noirceuil's confident talk of atoms, organic molecules, and neural fluids—however garbled by the standards of twentieth-century science—represents an effort to silence theology by invoking as a superior or superseding discourse the empirical language of Enlightenment medicine. Behind their use of these two distinct languages or systems of discourse stand two utterly opposed visions of man. Nicole's theological paradigm of pain requires the concept of an eternal, immaterial soul at odds with a material, ephemeral body. By contrast, for Noirceuil pain becomes the occasion for asserting a materialism so comprehensive that it denies substantial differences separating bodies from minds or souls. As another libertine philosopher explains: "All we attribute to the soul is all simply the effect of matter."^[23]

The word "soul" sounds particularly strange on the lips of Sade's atheistical libertines because they have redefined it in ways that drain off its traditional attributes. Descartes, for example, despite his innovations, essentially followed religious tradition in preserving an absolute difference between bodies (res extensa ) and souls (res cogitans ). For Descartes, body is material, ephemeral, mechanical, and unthinking, while soul is immaterial, immortal, conscious, and defined by its power of thought. For Sade's libertines there is no gap between body and soul. Sometimes, in fact, the soul itself simply disappears, swallowed up in matter. As Juliette's libertine instructor Delbène reports: "I am not aware of having any soul.... It is the body which feels, which thinks, which judges, which suffers, which enjoys." Here is a peculiarly modern solution to the mind/body problem. The problem simply dissolves into a comfortable monism. "Body and soul," Delbène continues, "they are one."^[24] As in La Mettrie, the monism of body and soul in Sade's work is

[22] Trans. Wainhouse, 267/8:255-256.

[23] Juliette, trans. Wainhouse, 386/8:372.

[24] Juliette, trans. Wainhouse, 44, 50/8:52, 59. Thinking (cogitans ) is of course the defining function of the soul for Descartes. Delbène's assertion reflects the process by which soul came to be supplanted in eighteenth-century discussions by the mind. This transition from soul to mind is part of John O. Lyons's subject in The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).

dynamic—not fixed or static—in the sense that different temperaments and different activities call forth a changing ratio in the relations between spirit and flesh. Still, Sade's libertines move in a world where everything—including minds or souls—is material. All belong to the same continuous moil and turmoil of molecular change.

Descartes's views on pain offer a particularly good contrast in helping to clarify the absolute materialism of Sade's libertines. For Descartes, soul alone is what gives us the ability to feel pain. Although the mechanical network of nerves (transporting the equally material animal spirits) allows the body to relay information automatically to and from the brain, Descartes emphasized that we do not feel pain—that is, we do not experience pain consciously —until the mechanical, neural impulse is communicated to the pineal gland, which he notoriously designated as the point where the material body intersects with the immaterial soul. Only when the thinking soul perceives what the mechanical responses of the nervous system tell it do we experience the feeling of pain. The evidence for this view Descartes drew in part from the puzzling phenomenon of phantom limb pain, in which amputees report painful cramps in a missing hand or arm or leg. This pain, Descartes reasoned, could not reside in the missing limb and must therefore exist in the mind or soul alone. Buttressed by traditional Christian doctrine, Descartes's argument led him to the extreme conclusion that animals feel no pain. He recognized, of course, that animals exhibit all the normal behavior associated with pain, for such signs belong simply to the mechanism of the body. Animals, however, because (by definition) they do not possess minds or souls, cannot in Descartes's view feel or experience pain. Pain for Descartes thus offers a privileged example for confirming the absolute dualism of soul and body. Sade in effect captures pain as his privileged counterexample for implicitly disputing Cartesian dualism and for discarding the immaterial soul as a Scholastic illusion.

Pain as it concerns nerve fibers and neural fluids—not the welfare of an immaterial soul or the effects of original sin—is the explicit subject of a second passage I wish to examine, from the novel Justine . Here again we can observe how medicine functions for Sade in providing a language opposed to the discourse of theology, but it is the erotic implications of his dryly technical language that deserve special attention. The passage, which appears as a note attached to a speech by Justine's libertine tempt-

ress Dubois, sounds less like novelistic talk than like textbook physiology and opens with a hyperbole typical of Sade, which perhaps only an anatomist could take seriously:

There is no part of the human body more interesting than the nerve.... Life and indeed the entire harmony of the body as a machine depend on the nerves. From them come sensations and pleasures, thoughts and ideas; they constitute, briefly, the center of the whole human structure. The soul is located there, that is to say the principle of life, which dies out among animals, which grows and declines in them, and is by consequence wholly material.
The nerves are imagined to be tubes destined to carry the animal spirits into the organs to which they are distributed and to report back to the brain the impressions of external objects on these organs.

Let me interrupt the passage to make two brief comments. First, the word translated here (and generally in Sade) as "pain" is "la douleur. " "Douleur " retains its traditional contrast with "peine " (also translated as "pain"), which implies physical injury or indefinite harm with no accompanying mental or emotional anguish. It is precisely the mental and emotional suffering of their victims—which includes the victims' awareness of their victimization—that makes Sade's libertines vastly prefer douleur to peine. Second, in defining the soul as the "principle of life" Sade remains securely within the boundaries of libertine materialism. There is no real difference—merely a change in vocabulary—between Noirceuil's vision of man as an "absolutely material plant" and the view, expressed in Sade's note, that the body is a "machine" animated by a life force. (Again, La Mettrie could provide Sade with a source for both metaphors: each pointing toward the same restrictive range of meaning.) In other writers, the metaphorical shift from machine to plant might well reflect conceptual changes important to medical and scientific controversies of the time, measuring the distance separating an older, strictly mechanistic physiology from the newer, vitalist physiology centered in Montpellier; in Sade's hands, however, both metaphors—plant and machine—equally serve to exclude the possibility of an immaterial spirit that survives independent of the body.^[25]

[25] The movement from a mechanistic to a vitalist-dynamic physiology—in which the nervous system is understood not as a lifeless machine but as a point of contact (controversial, it goes without saying) between body and soul/mind—is discussed by Robert E. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). On this change, see also two studies by Theodore M. Brown: "From Mechanism to Vitalism in Eighteenth-Century English Physiology," Journal of the History of Biology 7 (1974): 179-216, and The Mechanical Philosophy and the "Animal Economy" (New York: Arno Press, 1981). For France and Europe, see Jacques Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIIIe siècle: La génération des animaux de Descartes à l'Encyclopédie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1963); Thomas S. Hall, Ideas of Life and Matter: Studies in the History of General Physiology, 600 B.C.-1900 A.D., 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Elizabeth L. Haigh, "Vitalism, the Soul, and Sensibility: The Physiology of Théophile Bordeu," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 31 (1976): 30-41; and Sergio Moravia, "From Homme Machine to Homme Sensible: Changing Eighteenth-Century Models of Man's Image," Journal o f the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 45-60.

Sade's abandonment of the Christian and Cartesian immaterial soul is unmistakable as the note continues. Whether we attribute the note to author, character, or impersonated editor, its physiological language explains that the nervous system alone provides everything necessary to account for the experience of pleasure and pain:

An intense inflammation excites to an extraordinary degree the animal spirits that flow into the nerve tubes which, in turn, induce pleasure. If the inflammation occurs on the genitals or nearby parts, this explains the pleasures imparted by blows, stabbings, pinches or floggings. From the extreme influence of the mental on the physical comes likewise the painful or agreeable shock of the animal spirits, by reason of the mental sensation one receives. From all this it follows that with such principles and philosophy—with the total annihilation of prejudice—one can extend unbelievably (as we have said elsewhere) the sphere of one's sensations.^[26]

This passage does not contain the sort of writing that immediately springs to mind when someone mentions Sade, yet it is almost as typical of Sadean narrative as scenes of sexual cruelty. Sadean eroticism establishes its difference from unreflective violence—violence unconscious of its own nature—by insisting upon the replacement of antiquated theological doctrine with up-to-date, physiological fact.

Fact, we should recognize, plays a different role in Sadean narrative from that which it plays in scientific and medical writing. Thus the reader who seeks to extract a single, self-consistent Sadean physiology will go wrong exactly in the manner of readers seeking a unified, self-consistent Sadean philosophy. Sade's characters employ—and frequently mix—elements drawn from quite different systems of physiology. Pain may be explained with reference to stinging atoms, to excited animal spirits, to stretched nerve fibers, to irritated tissue. There is some reason for feeling that Sade has brewed up a gigantic, simmering soup

[26] La nouvelle Justine; ou, Les malheurs de la vertu, in Œ uvres complètes 7:108-109, translation mine. G. S. Rousseau cites this passage and notes the provenance in d'Holbach (see "Nymphomania, Bienville and the Rise of Erotic Sensibility," 111-112).

of fact in which pieces borrowed from widely disparate sources—early and late—float around together in suspension. What matters to Sade is not whether his characters have access to a final truth of science (too many questions are still in doubt) but whether their facts support a demystified vision of man. The passage we have just encountered, for example, might have come nearly verbatim from the celebrated encyclopedist, philosopher, atheist, and materialist d'Holbach. The exact source of Sade's facts, however, is far less important than their implications within his vastly heterogeneous narrative texture. When we examine what "follows" from the often mixed-up facts of Sadean physiology, it will soon be clear that the now antiquated vocabulary of hollow nerve tubes and of racing animal spirits entailed serious—even deadly—consequences.

Pain belongs at the center of Sadean eroticism because, as I have suggested, it serves as a comprehensive metaphor for truth. The truth that it affirms, however, appears from the perspective of theology or of ordinary life to be simply outrage, perversion, and scandalous error. As Georges Bataille writes of Sade: "He went as far as the imagination allows: there was nothing respectable which he did not mock, nothing pure which he did not soil, nothing joyful which he did not frighten."^[27] Sade's truth is in effect the negation of beliefs so basic to normal human life that we regard them as self-evidently true. The only self-evident truth in Sade's world, however, is the truth of the body, and it is pain that serves as spokesman for the body's truth. Pain for Sade is what we cannot deny, cannot evade, cannot forswear, while pleasure inevitably deceives, rhetoric beguiles, and logic unweaves its own constructions with the cunning of a false Penelope.

The truth of the body is, of course, exactly what Enlightenment medicine undertook to disclose, finding its most potent instrument and symbol in the newly routine practice of autopsy. Yet, Sade did not stop with the eroticized versions of anatomy and surgery we have seen him employ. Biomedical learning also provided crucial support for his explorations into previously unexplored areas of human sexual behavior, where the truth of the body makes itself known as desire. Pornography, of course, is an ancient and mostly superficial art dedicated to the description of sexual acts. Before Sade, however, never in the history of the novel had a writer employed the license of pornography to create such a blinding, exhaustive vision of desire freed from its normal social

[27] Literature and Evil, trans. Hamilton, 99.

constraints. The truth of desire for Sade leads both through and beyond the description of sexual acts to a comprehensive yet flexible system in which bodies, minds, and politics are complexly interlocked. If we follow the sequence leading from body to mind to politics, we will be better prepared to understand how Sade employs pain as the ultimate figure of desire.

The body constitutes for Sade not just the indispensable locus of sexual behavior but, far more important, the force that defines and determines our sexuality. Thus Sade's work posits as a central dogma that we live out a sexual destiny imposed not by God, not by gender, not by culture, but solely by the nerves and tissues of our individual bodies. He once wrote to his wife that his outrageous manner of thought "holds with my existence" (as he put it): "with the way I am made."^[28] Perhaps the best gloss on this slightly enigmatic statement is the explanation that the Count du Bressac offers Justine in discussing the libertine preference for anal sex. Here too we find physiology providing a discourse opposed to a more traditional language. The Count begins:

Do not suppose, Thérèse [as everyone calls Justine], we are made like other men; 'tis an entirely different structure we have; and, in creating us, Heaven has ornamented the altars at which our Celadons sacrifice with that very same sensitive membrane which lines your temple of Venus; we are, in that sector, as certainly women as you are in your generative sanctuary; not one of your pleasures is unknown to us, there is not one we do not know how to enjoy, but we have in addition to them our own, and it is this delicious combination which makes us of all men on earth the most sensitive to pleasure, the best created to experience it; it is this enchanting combination which renders our tastes incorrigible, which would turn us into enthusiasts and frenetics were one to have the stupidity to punish us.^[29]

The Count's delicacy as he encodes blunt sexual description in a mythological language of love perhaps explains why he is the single tormenter for whom Justine feels desire. Beneath his flowery rhetoric, however, lies the bedrock physiology to which Sade continually returns.

In Sade, physiology is destiny. What mankind calls virtue and vice (so runs the libertine argument) reflects merely the facts of biochemical fate.

[28] "Ma façon de penser est le fruit de mes réflexions; elle tient à mon existence, mon organisation. Je ne suis pas le maitre de la changer" (in Œ uvres complèes 12:409). A portion of Sade's correspondence is available in Selected Letters, ed. Margaret Crosland, trans. W. J. Strachan (London: Peter Owen, 1963).

[29] Justine, trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, 512/3: 111-112.

"Our constitution, our scheme, our organs, the flow of liquids, the animal spirits' energy," declares a typical Sadean libertine, "such are the physical causes which in the same hour make for the Tituses and the Neros."^[30] Sodomy and pyromania in effect are hardwired in the body. This conviction, which implicitly absolves Sade's libertines from the moral censure that only adds zest to their crimes, appeals for its support to the same progressive spirit of inquiry underlying Enlightenment medicine. As the dissolute monk Clément concludes, after laborious reference to the language of fluids, fibers, blood, and animal spirits: "When the study of anatomy reaches perfection they will without any trouble be able to demonstrate the relationship of the human constitution to the [sexual] tastes which it affects."^[31] Anyone foolish enough to punish a libertine will discover that it cannot be done. A taste for pain—like the monks' delight in blaspheming a God whom they believe not to exist—stands fully comprehensible for Sade as a proven truth of the libertine body, inscribed in a personal biology of nerves, tissues, and membranes.

The body in Sade's work sometimes seems entirely detached from mind, like the adjacent blocks of pornographic description and of argumentative reasoning that provide the alternating structure of his books. But the apparent separation of mind and body is always a temporary state or narrative illusion that conceals their fundamental unity. Mind, as we have seen, is not for Sade alien to the body, opposed in an irreconcilable division. In fact, we should recall Delbène's assertion to Juliette that it is the body which feels, suffers, enjoys, judges, and thinks. The concept of a thinking body is Sade's response to the Cartesian dualism that rigorously opposes material bodies and immaterial thoughts. Sade's libertine system, on the contrary, considers body and mind equally material, although they differ in the same degree as steam might differ from ice. Mind and body are for Sade not just equally material but also (as they were, surprisingly, for Descartes) mutually interactive. The mind relies wholly for its contents—"all sensations, knowledge and ideas" (as Sade noted in Justine )—upon the impulses that it receives through the nervous system. What complicates this far from original psychology—which Sade might have borrowed from various

[30] Philosophy in the Bedroom, trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, 254/3:438.

[31] Justine, trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, 603/3:203. On the eccentricity of libertine sexual tastes, the same speaker says: "sa singularité est le résultat de ses organes" (3:202). The studies most helpful to me in exploring the relations between Sadean eroticism and physiology are Jean Deprun's "Sade et la philosophic biologique de son temps" (see n. 3 above) and Marcel Hénaff's " Sade: L'invention du corps libertin (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1978).

empiricist philosophers, including his near contemporary Condillac—is his insistence that the sensations communicated through our nerves and fibers may in turn be altered radically by our thoughts, as if mind triumphed over matter.

The triumph of mind over matter in Sade is figurative ("as if")—not literal or actual—because, as we have seen, the libertine system regards mind as material: mind cannot literally triumph over itself. In this uncompromising materialism, Sade resembles such modern thinkers as John Searle, who in Minds, Brains and Science (1984) dismisses the traditional mind/body problem as a false dilemma or nonproblem. (For Searle, thinking is caused by and realized in functions of the brain, much as digestion is caused by and realized in functions of the stomach. He compares the mind/body problem to a digestion/stomach problem, finding them both equally comical and futile enterprises for philosophy.) What sets Sade apart from many materialists and monists, both ancient and modern, is the enormous power that he grants to consciousness or thought in reshaping the ways in which we normally experience our bodies. Mind, that is, possesses for Sade sufficient force to overrule or to alter organic responses (such as the response to pain) usually considered natural. The experience of pain, despite its organic basis in the functioning of the nervous system, may be changed, radically, by the intervention of mind, thus altering the almost physical revulsion normal in contemplating such typical Sadean practices as incest, torture, and the consumption of excrement. In imparting to the libertine body a dynamic (almost unlimited) power of change, mind thoroughly complicates Sade's description of physiology as destiny. Our physiology—through its union with mind—includes the potential for remaking our destinies.

Pain, like pleasure, in effect expands or contracts according to the play of the libertine mind. This play of mind is especially remarkable in Sade for harmonizing or reconciling the two normally antithetical powers of reason and imagination. Reason makes its most notorious appearance in the endless Sadean dissertations justifying libertine erotic tastes. Reason indeed proves a formal requirement of libertine sexuality in Sade, regularly preceding and following each episode of debauchery with an erudite harangue, and for dedicated libertines such as Juliette this Sadean dissertation serves less as an excuse or rationale than as an aphrodisiac. Her sodomite activities with the pope on the high altar of St. Peter's do not inflame her more than the thought of hearing his private lecture on the propriety of murder. Sade is among the few major writers to explore an eroticism of reason. It is not simply that his libertines reason about sexual topics or acts. Reasoning itself—as a mode of

personal power—holds erotic attractions. (Juliette: "I loved Noirceuil for his libertinage, for his mental qualities: I was not by any means captivated by his person.")^[32] Reason confers attractions as palpable as any of Sade's impossibly rounded buttocks or sensual perfections. In this office reason complements rather than opposes the work of imagination. It is important to recognize that imagination, like reason, has been assigned specific responsibilities or labor in Sade's erotic economy, which depends on mind for its more obvious fleshy exchanges. In Saint-Fond's aphorism: "The imagination's fire must set the furnace of the senses alight."^[33]

The power of the imagination to inflame the senses depends on the unity of mind and body basic to Sade's outlook, wherein sensuality is never merely an affair of the senses. This reciprocal interpenetration of mental and of physical states had preoccupied several innovative physicians among Sade's contemporaries, especially Cabanis and Alibert, who sought to understand the mind's power over specific bodily conditions.^[34] For Sade, the reciprocity linking the realms of the "physique " and "moral " (to cite the French terms commonly employed to indicate differences between bodily and mental states) extended even to the relationship be-

[32] Juliette, trans. Wainhouse, 159/8:157. On the aesthetics and semiotics of Sadean eroticism, see Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola (1971), trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976).

[33] Juliette, trans. Wainhouse, 341/8:329. On this subject, see Pierre Fedida, "Les exercices de l'imagination et la commotion sur la masse des nerfs: Un érotisme de tête," in Sade's Œ uvres complètes 16:613-625. The effect of the imagination upon the body—and vice versa—was a subject of continuing medical controversy during the eighteenth century, as in discussions of how the mother's imagination might affect the fetus (see Lester S. King, M.D., The Philosophy of Medicine: The Early Eighteenth Century [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978], 152-181). The physiological basis of the imagination is discussed by G. S. Rousseau, "Science and the Discovery of the Imagination in Enlightened England," Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1969-1970): 108-135.

[34] Cabanis develops the connections linking medicine and physiology with mind and culture in his Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme (1802). For a fine discussion of Cabanis and of his ideas, see Martin S. Staum, Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) (The Rapports is available in English translation, with helpful introductions by Sergio Moravia and George Mora, under the title On the Relations between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man, ed. George Mora, trans. Margaret Duggan Saidi, 2 vols. [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981].) A similar emphasis underlies the treatise entitled Discours sur les rapports de la médecinc avec les sciences physiques et morales (1798) by Jean-Louis Alibert—a young colleague of Cabanis associated with the Hôpital Saint-Louis. I have been unable to determine whether Sade knew the work of Alibert or of Cabanis (whose ideas circulated via lectures in the decade preceding publication), but in any case I am not concerned here with questions of direct influence.

tween text and reader. He anticipates that the imaginative, mental stimulation of reading will excite measurable, physiological changes in the reader. (In 120 Days of Sodom the narrator explains: "Many of the extravagances you are about to see illustrated will doubtless displease you, yes, I am well aware of it, but there are amongst them a few which will warm you to the point of costing you some fuck, and that, reader, is all we ask of you.")^[35] In addition to authorizing this pornographic variant of reader-response criticism, the regulating power of imagination makes itself felt in the aesthetic arrangements inseparable from Sadean eroticism. Rarely are passions satisfied in a chaotic haste and tangle. Sexual partners and groups observe a carefully discussed choreography. Setting—like the elaborate theatrical scene specially constructed at the chateau Silling—often requires costly and ingenious preparations. Crimes are seldom merely, perpetrated but rather lovingly premeditated with an artistic attention to minor details, and libertines who survive long enough frequently develop a brilliant flair for spontaneous dramatic gestures, as when Juliette (after climbing to the summit of a volcano) decides to cast a tiresome companion into the bowels of the earth and then follows this gothic performance with impromptu copulations staged imaginatively on the very brink of the gaping crater.

It is the imagination that permits Sade to approach the perfect freedom represented by libertinage: a freedom whereby nature as well as society may be overcome. Sade once defended himself by explaining that while he had imagined every possible form of sexual crime, he had not performed everything he imagined. He was a libertine but not a criminal.^[36] Yet, he also composed the speech in which a libertine—distressed at the idea of crimes limited to a single lifetime—is urged to consider the "moral crime" of writing, whereby the imagination permits a writer to extend corrupting fantasies far into the future. For Sade, our imagination—both in its intensity and in its tastes—depends on our physiology (on "the peculiar organization a particular individual is endowed with"), but our physiology thereby contains the power to remake both ourselves and the world. As the dissolute monk Clément expresses Sade's dark version of Romantic idealism: "Objects have no value for us save that which our imagination imparts to them."^[37] Pain, when objectified in a suffering victim, proves to be a supreme example of the imagination's power to transform anything into pleasure.

[35] The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 254/13:61.

[36] Correspondance, in Œ uvres complètes 12:276.

[37] Justine, trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, 599/3:200.

The imagination's power to transvalue (or to drain of value) the conventional world of objects and of bodies holds implications that extend beyond individual bodies or minds to politics. Political power is implicit in the imaginative capacity to reshape the world according to our own desires, at least when Sade's libertines possess the wealth, guile, and social standing that permit them to impose their desires upon other persons. The political implications of Sadean eroticism are not farfetched or oblique, as the recent history of feminist readings of Sade makes unmistakably clear.^[38] My choice here is not to focus on what might be called—somewhat metaphorically—Sade's sexual politics. The representation of women in Sade's novels, with its sources in social and economic structures as oppressive as any libertine desire, is a subject that leads far beyond the scope of this essay and that Angela Carter has discussed brilliantly at book length. Consistent with a study centering on transvaluations of medical knowledge, my focus concerns the less apparent moments when Sade takes as his subject, directly or indirectly, politics construed in its literal sense as the art or condition of government.

Sade's sexual themes are so prominent, so overwhelming, that they tend to obscure his representations of political power. Yet, he recognized a close link between sexuality and government. For example, he insisted upon a social and political significance in fiction where critics for generations have reported finding only sensationalism and debauchery. In his Reflections on the Novel (1800), Sade had high praise for Matthew Lewis’s gothic extravaganza The Monk, observing that it was "the inevitable result of the revolutionary shocks which all of Europe has suffered."^[39]Philosophy in the Bedroom places Saudi’s secluded libertines within a historical setting where incendiary pamphlets are distributed openly outside the palace of Equality. One such pamphlet Sad actually incorporates in his text—the famous libertine manifesto Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans, with its guidelines for a uto-

[38] For a helpful discussion of feminist approaches to Sade, see Donna Landry, "Beat Me! Beat Me! Feminist Appropriations of Sade," Enclitic (forthcoming). In addition to discussing the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Angela Carter, Landry rightly devotes major attention to the feminist-Lacanian studies by Jane Gallop, Intersections: A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981) and The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982).

[39] Reflections on the Novel (1800), in The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, trans. Wainhouse and Seaver, 109/10: 15. It is in this essay that Sade defines the novel as "le tableau des moeurs séculaires" (15) and locates the novelist's subject in those revelations that occur when mankind drops the "masque " of public dissembling. Clearly, the "revolutionary shocks" to which Sad refers cannot be restricted to political thought and action.

pian state in which legitimate forms of personal freedom now include prostitution, incest, rape, sodomy, and murder. From his cell in the Bastille Sad was a firsthand spectator of the gathering Revolutionary shock (the authorities removed him for inciting passers-by); during his less than four years of freedom after the fall of the Bastille, he held for a time the improbable office of assessor or judge on one of the innumerable Revolutionary committees; and upon his rearrest in 1793, the house in which he was temporarily imprisoned became the location for a guillotine, where some eighteen hundred victims of the Terror were executed. For Sad, who defined the novel as "the representation of secular customs" and who spent most of his adult life imprisoned because of his unorthodox tastes and writings, it would be hard indeed to avoid observing the link between sexual practice and political power.

Politics for Sad is closely and inseparably related to what he regards as the truth of the body. "The Body Politic," as one of his libertine heroes asserts, "should be governed by the same rules that apply to the Body Physical."^[40] More is at work here than the spell of analogy. Sadean politics is not just indirectly linked to the body through a physiology that includes the imagination. The body for Sad—through its nerves, fibers, and animal spirits—directly authorizes a larger, encompassing distribution of social power. "Stripping people of their liberty amuses me," explains one libertine, "I like holding captives." "Man likes to command," reports another, "to be obeyed, to surround himself with slaves compelled to satisfy him."^[41] Although Sad professed to distinguish between what he called "absurd political despotism" and the "delightful despotism" of the libertine, French political life under the ancien régime finds its perfect miniaturization (as Roland Barthes has observed) in the despotic power which Sade's libertines exercise over their powerless victims. Thus in a note to Juliette Sad writes that one of his grasping libertine statesmen resembles "those monsters that abounded under the ancien

[40] Justine, trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, 690/3:291 ("Le corps politique doit avoir sur cela les mêmes règles que le corps physique").

[41] Juliette, trans. Wainhouse, 712/9: 116; Philosophy in the Bedroom, trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, 317/3:500. Noirceuil instructs Juliette, in a language that reveals the connections among religious, political, and sexual despotism: "this tool is my god, let it be one unto thee, Juliette: extol it, worship it, this despotic engine, show it every reverence, it is a thing proud of its glory, insatiate, a tyrant; I'd fain make the earth bend its knee in universal homage to this prick, I'd like to see it guised in the shape of a terrific personage who would put to a death of awful torments every last living soul that thought to deny it the least of a thousand services" (185/8:180). On the development of Sade's political thought, see Jean-Pierre Faye, "Changer la mort (Sad et la politique)," Obliques 12-13 (1977): 47-57.

régime and personified it."^[42] This sexualized, social, and absolute power authorized by the body amounts to what we might call a politics of sensibility.

Sensibility, of course, is a crucial concept in late-eighteenth-century medicine and literature, where it permitted the development of a tightly woven argument about that favorite Enlightenment object of study, human nature. This argument, so pervasive that it operated usually in abbreviated versions accepted or offered as an unspoken assumption, rested on the belief shared by Sadean libertines that our sensibility or power of feeling depends ultimately upon the refinement of our individual nervous system. The stages of this argument have been reconstructed by G. S. Rousseau in the following series: "(A) the soul is limited to the brain, (B) the brain performs the entirety of its work through the nerves, (C) the more 'exquisite' and 'delicate' one's nerves are, morphologically speaking, the greater the ensuing degree of sensibility and imagination, (D) refined people and other persons of fashion are born with more 'exquisite' anatomies, the tone and texture of their nervous systems more 'delicate' than those of the lower classes."^[43] All we need in order to transform this physiological argument into a politics of sensibility is the conclusion supplied in a fascinating essay by Christopher Lawrence. Lawrence shows in a detailed study of Scottish Enlightenment thought how the argument based on physiology was employed to advance the political and social interests of an autocratic, landed minority, whose heightened capacity for exquisite feeling supposedly earned them a natural right as governors and custodians of power in a backward land.^[44]

Sad—in the transvaluations he so often performed upon Enlightenment thought—effectively converted the politics of sensibility into a sexual despotism based on pain. Understood solely as a phenomenon of nerves and tissues, pain supplies the foundation for a Sadean politics in

[42] Philosophy in the Bedroom, trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, 344/3:529; Juliette, trans. Wainhouse, 234/8:225. On the political and specifically antiroyalist bias of pornography written under the ancien régime, see Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 199-208.

[43] "Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility," The Blue Guitar 2 (1976): 143.

[44] "The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment," in Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, ed. Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1979), 19-40. Lawrence cites David Hume's view as representative: "The skin, pores, muscles, and nerves of a day-labourer are different from those of a man of quality: So are his sentiments, actions and manners" (A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2d ed., rev. P. H. Nidditch [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978], 402).

which mastery requires that other people suffer. If the Enlightenment man of feeling—whose acute sensitivity to pain was legendary—implicitly lent support to the political suppression of persons whose sensibility was deemed less delicate, Sade's libertines argue openly that their individual powers of feeling give them an absolute right over other people. "I affirm," declares the libertine statesman Saint-Fond, "that the fundamental, profoundest, and keenest penchant in man is incontestably to enchain his fellow creatures and to tyrannize them with all his might."^[45] Pain, however, plays a curious double role in this Sadean tyranny. Sad emphasizes that a taste for cruelty depends on a particularly sensitive nervous system, so that women—according to the libertine argument—are especially cruel. ("The extreme delicacy of their fibers, the prodigious sensitivity of their organs," explains a Sadean annotation, "cause them to go a great deal farther than men in this direction.")^[46] At the same time, the disposition for inflicting pain also requires a paradoxical deadening of the emotions in order that cruelty might be enjoyed to the utmost. It is said of Madame Ciairwil—"the most exceptional libertine of her century"—that for lack of sensibility she had no equal: "she indeed prided herself on never having shed a tear."^[47]

The paradox of libertine sensibility—simultaneously hypersensitive and numb—may be traced ultimately to the Sadean monism of body and mind. It is the body's "organization"—to use Sade's favorite biological term—that ensures our leaning toward what the world calls virtue or vice. Thus, in comparing women with men, Sad repeats the familiar argument that physiology is destiny. ("Their organs are more finely constructed, their sensitivity profounder, their nerves more irascible: barbarity is not a trait of the individual of inferior sensibility.")^[48] The libertine's superior sensibility, nonetheless, requires for the perfection of barbarism a complementary mental development. Sade's libertines therefore take particular care to harden their sensibilities against the normal pity or distress we are disposed to feel at the sight of human suffering. They cultivate the apathy —a rational indifference to feeling—

[45] Juliette, trans. Wainhouse, 317/8:305

[46] Ibid., 797/9:201.

[47] Ibid., 1042/9:440 and 274/8:262. As Clairwil explains to Juliette: "La sensibilité, ma chère, est le foyer de tous les vices, comme elle est celui de routes les vertus" (8:266). She goes on to describe the source of individual sensibility as physiological: "Cette sensibilité, purement physique, dépend de la conformité de nos organes, de la délicatesse de nos sens, et, plus que tout, de la nature du fluide nerveux."

[48] Juliette, trans. Wainhouse, 1058/9:456. Juliette summarizes the Sadean link between sensibility and pain in an aphorism: "la cruauté n'est elle-même qu'une des branches de la sensibilité" (9:456).

which Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno identify as a basic strain of Enlightenment thought: what Kant called "a necessary presupposition of virtue."^[49]

Sadean apathy is a necessary deadening of the emotions and elevation of reason that finds its significance not as a goal or end of conduct—and certainly not as a presupposition of virtue—but as one stage in a dialectic of pain. Because Sadean libertines must deaden their feelings in order to feel more intensely, their condition bears less resemblance to a generalized, Stoic apathy (in which reason everywhere dominates passion) than to a highly selective, local anesthesia (which eliminates only a specific band or zone of feeling, while thereby heightening the sensation that remains). Specific emotions such as pity are eradicated to assure a cold detachment; reason is magnified; imagination inflames the senses. Thus Sadean libertines encourage the tendency they discover within themselves for enjoying the intensest shocks to the nervous system that accompany both their own pain and the spectacle of pain in others. A body politic governed by the same rules that apply to the libertine body will find apathy a necessary precondition of social life. Selective anesthesia is perhaps what permits every ruling elite to transform its own principles and sensibility into a license for oppression. Sade's libertine societies are unique not in their brutality but in their undeceived awareness and open enjoyment of the suffering they inflict.

The twofold libertine education of the feelings—simultaneously hardening the sensibility to pity and enlarging its relish for pain—issues finally in the murderous supremacy which Saint-Fond and his fellow libertines accept as their natural right. In the sexualized torture they inflict upon their victims, Sade's libertines reveal how pain serves so often to reify or give visible shape to the political power that, as Elaine Scarry has argued, is always implicitly or explicitly claimed by the torturer.^[50] Unquestionably, the pain that Sade's work emphasizes is closely linked to social conventions of gender, so that women (represented by the pious, submissive, piteous Justine) are its normal site. Even Sade's emancipated libertine woman—as we see in Juliette—depends, like his male libertines, on a supply of victims who are usually powerless and mostly female. In Sade's work, however, the politics of sensibility does not co-

[49] Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 96. Horkheimer and Adorno cite Kant's view.

[50] The Body in Pain, 27-59. Two excellent studies that recognize the political uses and implications of pain are Helen Neal's The Politics of Pain (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978) and Martin S. Pernick's A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

incide exactly with a conventional sexual politics, in which males are invariably oppressors and women victims. Power in Sad is ultimately genderless, and gender sometimes grows as shifty as pain. The ultimate libertine erotic adventure—death—seems finally beyond gender, a mode of autoeroticism in which pleasure transcends distinctions of female and male. Like the brigand chief Roland, who trusts Justine to cut the rope, submissively, just when he hangs himself, the libertine mind makes use of gender in order to seek a state more archaic and indistinct, where social and biological differences between male and female dissolve in an erotic embrace of death. The victims of Sade's libertines—often mutilated past all recognition—divide simply into the dead and the about-to-die. In Sade's transvaluation of Enlightenment norms, the politics of sensibility leads logically to the androgynous or bisexual libertine witch Durand and to the final extension of undifferentiated, tyrannous power that she contemplates: genocide.

It was not tyranny, however, but revolution that provided for Sad the political metaphor best summarizing the meanings he discovered in pain. Sad settles for tyranny, we might say, because it represents a durable substitute for the transient purity of revolution. Revolution for Sad is the anarchic dream of absolute freedom realized in the moment when an established government falls and its successor has not yet come into being. In the temporary release from all law and all authority, it confronts us with a condition of utter ambiguity as the state dissolves into an elemental, inchoate, and primal disorder. "Lawful rule," as a Sadean libertine explains, "is inferior to anarchy: the greatest proof whereof is the government's obligation to plunge the State into anarchy whenever it wishes to frame a new constitution. To abrogate its former laws it is driven to establish a revolutionary regime in which there are no laws at all."^[51] The revolutionary regime is by definition unstable and transitional. It soon calls forth a new state with new laws and new authority, where absolute freedom is once again merely a dream. Indeed, politics as a social practice—as the day-to-day art of government—held almost no interest for Sad compared to the intoxicating and almost purely theoretical moment of revolution when all government dissolves. It is this moment of complete freedom and utter ambiguity when ordinary structures fly apart that fascinated Sad. Like the tumultuous moment of orgasm for Sadean libertines, it provides an image of the terrifying, exhilarating vertigo that ensues when human beings live fully the consequences of their own desire. Pain, I suggest, comes to signify for Sade

[51] Juliette, trans. Wainhouse, 733/9:137.

the vast and never wholly communicable ambiguity that he understands as implicit in the truth of desire.

Desire is an overworked topic in literary criticism of the novel, but it is also the central point to which Sade's treatment of body, mind, and politics continually returns. Within the almost limitless perimeters set by desire, what concerns me here is a quite limited, concluding issue: the relation of desire to pain. Indeed, Sadean desire seems nearly unique in selecting pain as its favored object. Sade's paradoxical argument—making pain a source of pleasure—in effect profoundly revises several powerful traditions that precede, but by no means predict, his work. In Sad, the ancient erotic topos of the lover's pain—a pain the lover half-enjoys because its poignancy and its intensity seem inseparable from love—reappears completely altered: love simply vanishes (along with religion) as a source of libertine feeling. Eros for Sad has little or nothing to do with Cupid. Similarly, Sad turns on its head the Socratic theory that desire always presupposes a painful lack or absence. (For Socrates, at least in the earlier dialogues, pain activates and accompanies desire, disappearing when desire attains its object, much as the pangs of hunger disappear after one eats.) Sadean pain not only arouses and accompanies desire but also satisfies it—or, more accurately, promises to satisfy it. Pain thus achieves a special value for Sad exactly in proportion to its capacity for resisting disappearance. It is something to be cherished and enjoyed and protracted: an additive that both prolongs and even replaces lesser modes of pleasure. Indeed, in its quest for permanence, Sadean desire no longer flees from absence and pain but actively courts them. It recognizes in pain the promise of an ultimate and unending and undeceiving satisfaction.

The Sadean embrace of pain is not merely a search for intense sensation. Desire, in seeking pain, seeks more than the satisfaction of carnal appetite, which is why bodies alone (gluttonously consumed) are never enough for Sade's libertines: they demand reasons and meanings as well. The two main clusters of meaning enfolded within the experience of Sa-dean pain should be now quite familiar. First, there is pain defined (against powerful religious and ethical traditions) strictly as an event of the central nervous system, measured through the shock that it delivers to the body and described in a biomedical language of neural fluids, animal spirits, and hollow nerve tubes. The social and sexual implications of this Sadean perspective on pain are, as I have tried to indicate, far-reaching. Second, there is the libertine insistence that pain somehow

unites us with truth. Pleasure deceives, pain informs. Pleasure is always doubtful, pain provides certainty. Pain, as I have argued, is regarded as expressing the truth of the body, and the truth of the body proves coextensive with the normally suppressed, repressed, and openly denied truth of desire. It is now necessary to complicate this picture, briefly but unmercifully.

Sadean desire, which we might define as a normally unheard and unheeded voice prior to all laws and all authority, always returns to pain—as if to its source or origin. Explanations for this recurrent pattern no doubt require an awareness that pain and desire share exactly the same structure within the libertine system. Pain, as we have seen, promises absolute certainty, a bedrock for belief that cannot be questioned because it is self-evidently true, an unfeigned and unambiguous speech uttered as if involuntarily by the body, a forced confession. At the same time, this bedrock truth proves far less firm than it appears. Within the libertine body, pain swiftly and imperceptibly passes into its opposite, pleasure, in a process that is never simply or solely a reversal, as if pleasure now meant pain, and pain pleasure. Their relation is more unstable, fluid, and shifting. For Descartes, the physiological differences between pleasure and pain involve potentially measurable changes in nerve fibers. In the sensation of pleasure, the fibers are merely stretched, while pain finds them strained and torn. (Quite different organs are also involved in exciting the joy of pleasure and despondency of pain.) For Sad, the physiological differences between pleasure and pain involve potentially measurable changes in "the neural fluid particles which circulate in the hollow of our nerves." Yet the differences that for Descartes seemed absolute and binding now for Sad appear relatively ambiguous. Inscribed on the victims of libertine cruelties, the signs of pain may still look certain. Within the libertine body, however, pleasure and pain no longer hold their normative role of opposites but commingle in uncertain and changing patterns. Like desire, pain for Sad leads away from clarities.

Pain in Sad is not just the object of desire but in some sense its double. Sadean desire is thus drawn to pain as to its own mirror image. What they share fundamentally is a negative power to block satisfaction, to prevent any firm or final accommodation with meaning. Sade's libertines obsessively follow the instructions of desire but discover (in or through satiety) a perpetual dissatisfaction, lack of fulfillment, the void from which desire springs anew. "Nothing measures up to the stature of my desires," explains a voracious female libertine, whose usual debaucheries

continue for twenty-four hours and reduce her genitals to what she calls "an open wound": "a hash."^[52] Desire—in seeking satisfaction through pain—remains unappeasable. The monk Clément, after putting Justine through a terrifying sexual ordeal indistinguishable from torture, regrets that her vividly physical sufferings are inevitably "a very pale image of what one should really like to do."^[53] Behind the breathtaking atrocities Sade's libertines perform there lies an unattainable—perhaps even unknowable—level of cruelty that always defeats them. Like pain, desire reserves to itself something that finally remains always unspoken, beyond or against language. In this sense Sade's work is a sea of horrors in which pain continually seeks and perpetually fails to drain dry the unspeakable.

Anyone who wishes to explore the assumptions underlying four decades of quite extraordinary French writing on Sad should begin with the belief that Sadean horrors represent an assault on the unspeakable. Simone de Beauvoir puts it this way: "He is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless, a tendency to be incommunicable." Maurice Blanchot writes of Sad: "Everything which is said is clear, but seems to be at the mercy of something left unsaid"; "everything is expressed, is revealed, but also everything is plunged back again into the obscurity of unformulated and inexpressible thoughts." Georges Bataille comments: "The evident monotony of Sade's books is due to the decision to subordinate literature to the expression of an inexpressible event."^[54] This consensus does not guarantee

[52] Ibid., 709/9:114.

[53] Justine, trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, 598/3:198.

[54] Simone de Beauvoir, "Must We Burn Sad?" (1951-1952), in The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, trans. Wainhouse and Seaver, 4; Maurice Blanchot, "Sad" [from Lautréamont et Sad (1949)], in Justine, trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, 39; Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Hamilton, 94. In comparison with the brilliant French writing on Sad since the Second World War—by writers (in addition to Beauvoir, Blanchot, and Bataille) including Pierre Klossowski, Jean Paulhan, Albert Camus, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Philippe Sollers—Anglo-American criticism of Sad seems less passionate and less adventurous, when it appears at all. When I mentioned the "silence" that has greeted Sad, I did not mean to ignore or to disparage the strong work on Sad by Lester G. Crocker, Ihab Hassan, Nancy K. Miller, R. F. Brissenden, and Joan De Jean. Still, any standard bibliography will indicate how far scholarly studies on Pope, Defoe, Molière, or Goethe (for example) vastly outnumber—almost bury—the few straggling Anglo-American entries on Sad.

Why has Sad received so much attention in France (and neglect abroad)? Most important, French intellectuals must come to terms with Sad (and with Racine) almost as a rite of passage into their national life. But Sade's work also provides unusually fertile ground for exploring connections—especially well recognized in France—among politics, sexuality, and psychoanalysis. The meditations on criminality and on self-punishment so prominent in postwar French thought find a cornucopia of illustrative material in Sad, where images of "mutilation" similarly serve to suggest a radical decentering of the stable ego inherited from classical psychology (see Carolyn Dean, "Law and Sacrifice: Bataille, Lacan, and the Critique of the Subject," Representations 13 [1986]: 42-62). Further, recent French history has exposed the fragility of assumptions underlying Western liberal democracies, and Sad offers a full-scale assault on such assumptions. In celebrating cruelty, he in effect reverses the gesture basic to all Western liberal democracies, which put cruelty first in the rank of moral, social, and political offenses (see Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984], 7-44). Finally, in France the presence of Sad has made it easier to accept and to develop Freud's insight that "the history of human civilization shows beyond any doubt... an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct" (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [1905], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. [London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974], 7:159). Anglo-American resistance to Freud on this point naturally coincides with a repugnance to Sad. It also does not help Sade's reputation in England and America—where literary analysis is closely tied to academic institutions—that Sad seems almost unteachable.

that its claim is correct, but it both defines a basis for the modern revaluation of Sad and helps to suggest why Sadean desire—in its endless torrent of repetitive images and words—finds in pain an appropriate vehicle for a quest characteristic of Romantic writing: the pursuit of the inexpressible. Pain in Sad draws to itself the speechless, erotic mysteries culminating and cohering in the embrace of death.

In its intrinsic contact with the inexpressible and the unspeakable, pain takes Sad far beyond the medicine of his day, when madness and unreason were still locked within the secure (if no longer absolute) classical confinement that Michel Foucault describes in Madness and Civilization. Foucault reads Sad as a figure of the late Enlightenment who exposes a truth that Enlightenment medicine mostly resisted. "Sadism," he writes, "is not a name finally given to a practice as old as Eros; it is a massive cultural fact which appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century, and which constitutes one of the greatest conversions of Western imagination: unreason transformed into delirium of the heart, madness of desire, the insane dialogue of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite."^[55] Sad, I would guess, is among the crucial, ambiguous monuments that Foucault's unfinished history of sexuality would unavoidably reconsider. In such a reconsideration, Sad should appear not as the author of a few vast, unreadable pornographic novels but as an almost impersonal force giving voice to a newly transformed discourse on the erotic life. It is not only as a sign of mastery or as a well-recognized surrogate for death—with its speechless myster-

[55] Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), trans. Richard Howard (New York: New American Library, 1965), 210.

ies and sensual affiliations—that pain served Sad. Modern clinical treatment now frequently begins with the Sadean assumption that pain is always solitary and private, full of sound but essentially inarticulate, a measure of the immense distance that separates individuals. Against cultural pieties proclaiming a human community, an almost infinite space opens between the person in pain and the comforters or tormenters who stand close by. Not even the physician or research scientist who seeks to relieve pain, tracing its shared vocabulary and redefining the biochemistry of the brain, can as yet successfully collapse the distance. Words and knowledge carry poorly across this abyss. Pain, as one modern treatment center advises its staff, is "anything that the patient says it is."^[56] "Pain," wrote Emily Dickinson, "has an Element of Blank."^[57] The blankness, the anythingness of pain, especially its power to summon up experience ultimately inaccessible to language, its power to engage ambiguities too slippery for even the slickest libertine reasoners: these are among the meanings with which Sad endowed the mechanical rush of animal spirits through hollow, fibrous nerves.

[56] B. L. Crue et al., "Observations on the Taxonomy Problem in Pain," in Chronic Pain: Further Observations from City of Hope National Medical Center, ed. Benjamin L. Crue, Jr., M.D. (New York: SP Medical and Scientific Books, 1978), 20. Dr. Crue and his colleagues are writing specifically about chronic (as distinguished from acute ) pain. In Sade's work, this distinction is often difficult to apply, because all pain inflicted in libertine sexuality tends toward the repetition and totalization characteristic of chronic pain. For an authoritative discussion, see John J. Bonica and C. Richard Chapman, "Biology, Pathophysiology, and Therapy of Chronic Pain," in American Handbook of Psychiatry, ed. Silvano Arieti, 2d ed., 8 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1974-1986), 8:711-761. Volume 8 is edited by Philip A. Berger et al.

[57] In The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1960), 323 (no. 650).

Nine
Mind and Body in the Clinic:
Philippe Pinel, Alexander Crichton, Dominique Esquirol, and the Birth of Psychiatry

Dora B. Weiner

... so this league of mind and body, hath these two parts, How the one discloseth the other, and how the one worketh upon the other, Discoverie, & Impression·
The former of these hath begotten two Arts. . .. The first is PHYSIOGNOMIE, which discovereth the disposition of the mind, by the Lyneaments of the bodie. The second is the EXPOSITION OF NATURALL DREAMES....
In the former of these, I note a demodeficience. For Aristotle hath verie ingeniously, and diligently handled the factures of the bodie, but not the gestures of the bodie; which are no less comprehensible by art, and of greater use, and advantage.
—SIR FRANCIS BACON, The Two Bookes of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning (London, 1605)

THE DOCTOR AS CLINICIAN

The vast seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature about mind and body derives its major themes from philosophers trained in medicine. John Locke discussed sensation and reflection while David Hartley explored the association of ideas. Julien Offray de La Mettrie depicted the body as a machine and Georges Cabanis envisioned the brain as an organ that secretes thought, just as the stomach processes food. All these men were practicing physicians.^[1] Materialistic philosophy motivated

[1] This essay is indebted to the stimulating and apt criticism of George Rousseau, to the medical wisdom of my scholarly colleague and husband, Dr. Herbert Weiner, to the thought-provoking critique of professors Ludmilla Jordanova and Dieter Jetter, and to courteous and prompt help from Victoria L. Steele, former Head of the History and Rare Books Division, Biomedical Library, UCLA. Thanks are also due to the staffs of the Wellcome Institute Library, London, the Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden, and the Bibliothèque de la Faculté de médecine, Paris.

An earlier version of the section on Crichton was presented at the thirtieth International Congress of the History of Medicine, Düisseldorf, West Germany, on 2 September 1986 and was published in its Proceedings.

Some of the outstanding general treatments in the vast literature on seventeenth-to-early-nineteenth-century "medical psychology" are the following:

For Great Britain, W. F. Bynum, Jr., "Rationales for Therapy in British Psychiatry, 1780-1835," in Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era, ed. A. Scull (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 35-57; D. Leigh, The Historical Development of British Psychiatry: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1961); R. Porter-, "A Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry?" Medical History 27 (1983): 35-50; and G. S. Rousseau, "Psychology," in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. G. S. Rousseau and R. Porter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 143-210.

For France, the outstanding recent contribution is J. Goldstein, Console and Claasify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). I regret that the present essay had gone to press when this book appeared so that I could not include Goldstein's insightful comments. See also P. Carrette, "Un demisiècle d'assistance aux aliénés avant la loi de 1838," Annales médico-psychologiques, 151ST ser., 1 (1938): 674-680, and the relevant segments of the following books: M. Laignel-Lavastine and J. Vinchon, Les malades de l'esprit et leurs médecins, du 16ème au 19ème siècle (Paris: Maloine, 1930); Y. Pelicier, Histoire de la psychiatrie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971); J. Postei and C. Quétel, Nouvelle histoire de la psychiatric (Toulouse: Privat, 1983); and C. Quétel and P. Morel, Les fous et leurs médecines, de la Renaissance au 20èrae siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1979).

For Germany, K. Dörner, Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History of Insanity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981); K. W. Ideler, Grundriss der Seelenheilkunde, 2 vols. (Berlin: Enslin, 1835); Th. Kirchhoff, Grundriss einer Geschichte der deutschen Irrenpflege (Berlin : Hirschwald, 1890); E. Kräpelin, "Hundert Jahre Psychiatrie," Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatric 38 (1918): 161-275; and G. Verwey, Psychiatry in an Anthropological and Biomedical Context: Philosophical Presuppositions and Implications of German Psychiatry, 1820-1870 (Dordrecht: Reidei, 1984).

For Spain, D. Desmaisons, Des asiles d'aliliénés en Espagne: Recherches historiqnes et médicales (Paris: Bailliére, 1859), and J. E. Iborra, "La asistencia al enfermo mental en España durante la Ilustraciòn y el reinado de Fernando VII," Cuadernos de historia de la medicina española 5 (1966): 181-215.

many medical investigators of mental functions to study the bodily substrate of human thought and emotion: from Thomas Willis to Gall and Spurzheim, they dissected and scrutinized nerves and brains. But William Harvey had taught them to conceptualize bodily functions in terms of systems: therefore they focused on circulatory, respiratory, digestive, or nervous physiology. Researchers curious to understand the relationship of mind and body concentrated on the nervous system. However, a categorical difference separates a physiologist, such as Harvey, who experimented on living animals and man, from anatomists or neurologists who work on dead animals and human corpses. It is impossible to apprehend human thought and feeling by studying the inert body and

brain, and therefore postmortem dissection proved unrewarding for physicians interested in mental illness. They could not ascertain how a nervous fluid might affect the mind, and where in the brain to locate thought, pain, or the emotions. They rather turned to another method favored by their eighteenth-century colleagues in anatomy and physiology, namely the intensive and systematic observation of the living patient, preferably in the clinic.

This practice was fundamental to the diagnostic method of Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), and he stands out as the eighteenth-century clinician who made the mentally ill patient his central concern. His Traité médico-philosophique sur l'aliénation mentale ou la manie (Medico-philosophic treatise on mental alienation or madness) became famous immediately upon publication in 1800:^[2] no doubt his mythical feat during the Terror—unchaining the insane at the Sallpêtrière, known in France as le geste de Pinel —served as publicity for the book.^[3] Its true merit also found outstanding admirers, including the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; and when Stendhal wanted to buy the Traité in 1806, it was sold out.^[4] Pinel's was the only work on the nascent medical specialty, psychiatry, to achieve universal fame.^[5] Most commentators underlined the novelty and psychologic aptness of his case histories, and indeed Pinel's first concern was neither theory, nor classification, nor clinical research, nor therapy, even though he made fundamental contributions to all of them. He believed that a doctor, and particularly a doctor concerned with mental illness, must first of all get to know his patients well. To do this, he must listen and observe.

In order to explore the subject of mental illness Pinel also read widely, and he was particularly familiar with contemporary British medical thought, having edited three volumes of a twelve-volume abridgment of

[2] (Paris: Caille et Ravier, 1800). For a complete Pinel bibliography, including foreign translations of the above work, see Appendix, Biobibliographic Note 1.

[3] The controversy and the demise of this myth were first discussed by G. Swain in her brilliant thesis, Le sujet de la folie (Toulouse: Privat, 1977). The arguments are summarized in English in D. B. Weiner, "The Origins of Psychiatry: Pinel or the Zeitgeist?" in Zusammenhang: Festschrift für Marielene Putscher, ed. O. Baur and O. Glandien, 2 vols. (Cologne: Wienand, 1984), 2:617-631.

[4] Swain, Le sujet, 39 and 96-97. For Hegel's acknowledgment of Pinel's contribution, see G. W. F. Hegel, Enoclopãdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830), ed. F. Nicolin and O. Poggeler (Hamburg: Meiner, 1969), 338.

[5] On the comparative importance and popularity of the early books on psychiatry, see D. B. Weiner, "The Madman in the Light of Reason, Part II: Alienists, Asylums, and the Psychologic Approach," in Handbook of the History of Psychiatry, ed. E. R. Wallace, IV and J. Gach (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).

the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.^[6] He found plentiful confirmation for the validity of his approach in a British book that came to his attention in 1798, when his own was already written, but in time for lengthy comment in his Introduction. That book was the work of the Scottish physician Alexander Crichton (1763-1856), an author virtually unknown in the medical literature, entitled An Inquiry into the Nature and Origins of Mental Derangement, Comprehending a Concise System of Physiology and Pathology of the Human Mind, and History of the Passions and Their Effects.^[7] Crichton's importance in the context of the present study is threefold: his book, particularly part 3, "On the Passions," confirmed Pinel's belief that his reliance on observation of the patient's feelings, as expressed in words, gestures, moods, and attitudes toward others, offered a reliable—indeed, the only reliable—path toward a diagnosis of mental illness in the living patient. Furthermore, Crichton's work alerted Pinel to German learning in medical psychology. Crichton had resided for three years in various German university towns, learned the language, and acquired a keen interest in contemporary German research and writing in anthropology, natural history, and the literature of what would become psychiatry—then called Erfahrungsseelenkunde. And lastly, Crichton's emphasis on the passions helped shape the thought of Pinel's favorite student and intellectual heir, Jean Dominique Esquirol (1772-1840).^[8] For these combined reasons, and because Crichton's career has remained almost totally undocumented, he is discussed at length later in this essay.

The meeting of minds between Pinel and Crichton in the fall of 1798 marks a significant moment in the history of medical ideas. It is surprising, given Britain's close ties to Germany at the time, that her physicians

[6] See Jacques Gibelin, ed., Abrégé des Transactions de la Société royale de Londres, 12 vols. (Paris: Buisson, 1789-1791). Pinel was sole editor of volumes 5-7, entitled Chimie, anatomic et physique animate, and Médecine et chirurgie, and coedited part 2 of Matiére médicale et pharmacie.

[7] (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798). There are only two scholarly studies of Crichton: H. Hopf, Leben und Werk Alexander Crichtons (1763-1856 ) (Munich: Medical Thesis, 1962) and E. M. Tansey, "The Life and Works of Sir Alexander Crichton, F.R.S. (1763-1856): A Scottish Physician to the Imperial Russian Court," Royal Society of London: Records and Proceedings 38 (1983-84): 241-259. For a complete Crichton bibliography, including foreign translations of the Inquiry, see Appendix, Biobibliographic Note 2.

[8] The present essay is greatly indebted to M. Gauchet and G. Swain, La pratique de l'esprit humain: L'institution asilaire et la révolution démocratique (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). Marcel Gauchet is a philosopher and Gladys Swain a psychiatrist: it is her contribution that is most relevant here. She is among the rare historians who pay any attention to Crichton (PP. 347-349), and she elucidates the relationship between Pinel and Esquirol.

only discovered German writings on mental illness at the turn of the nineteenth century. The deafness of French doctors to German thought is more easily explained because, ever since the days of the "sun king," the French saw themselves as the most civilized of European nations, a model for their neighbors on the Continent. Despite the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment, French attention continued to focus on France and on Paris, and the dramatic unfolding of the Revolution concentrated all energies on ideas and events at home. French medical thinkers shared in this national involvement. By the turn of the century, however, this introversion gave way to new interests in foreign lands: just as Madame de Stall's De l'Allemagne (1811) revolutionized French attitudes toward German literature and philosophy, so active interest in German medical writings evidenced a new openness to Continental ideas in the French medical milieu. A set of translations and two journals represent significant examples of the new literature: the Recueil des mémoiressur les établissements d'humanité, the Recueil périodique de littérature rnédicale étrangère, and the Bibliothèique médico-chirurgicale germanique all began publication in the Year VII (1798-99).^[9] The prominence of translations is significant: ever since German physicians and medical scientists had begun to publish in their own language instead of Latin, the French lost touch, for hardly any Frenchman knew German, and Pinel was typical of his countrymen in this respect.

That is why Crichton's work, with its emphasis on German sources, was a revelation for him. But he also shared Crichton's approach to patients as well as his diagnostic and therapeutic outlook. For Pinel as for Crichton, a reliance on personal and prolonged observation held numerous implications: it demanded a rejection of all "systems" and of almost all ancient as well as modern writers, except the few who were committed to the inductive method and proceeded as medical scientists. It called for a critical reexamination of the traditional a priori categories of mania, melancholia, dementia, and idiocy. It implied a refusal to indulge in speculation about nervous fluids and vapors circulating through the nerves, and it meant renouncing diagnosis based on

[9] Under the auspices of the minister of foreign affairs, Francois de Neufchâteau, Adrien Cyprien Duquesnoy edited Recueil des mémoires sur les établissments d'hurnanité, 18 vols. (Paris: Agasse, An VII-XIII), which contained translations of foreign, including German, humanitarian writings. Recueil périodique de littérature médicale étrangère, an offshoot of Recueil périodique de la société de médecine under the editorship of Sédillot, jeune, began publication in the Year VII (1798-99), and Bibliothèque médico-chirurgicale germanique; ou, Traduction des meilleurs auteurs allemands qui ort écrit sur l'art de guérir also began in the Year VII under the editorship of Oedenkoven and Thiriart.

humoral and pneumatic theory with the consequent activist therapeutic regimen of bleeding, purging, sweating, and puking. The new approach relied on data gathered in the clinic.

Pinel developed a method of systematic observation that helped him understand his patients' minds by studying their behavior. In 1793 he had finally reached a position commensurate with his interests and talents when the government appointed him "physician of the infirmaries" at the male division of the General Hospital in Paris, Bicêtre Hospice. From this experience Pinel developed a new conceptualization of mental illness, the conviction of its curability, and the notion that distinct "species" of patients needed to be separately lodged. He incorporated that idea into his detailed prescription about "policing" the asylum, that is, managing it with firmness, but in a humane manner, with the help of attendants restricted to using psychologic treatment only. He was delighted to find his views confirmed on reading Crichton a few years later.

Specifically, Pinel watched and recorded the behavior of each of the two hundred internees at Bicêtre: their dress; their habits and demeanor; their relationships with their companions, the servants, the supervisor; their gestures and gesticulations; their moods and mood swings; their affects as expressed on their faces and in "body language"; their words—mainly their words. Pinel engaged each patient in lengthy and repeated conversations, attempting to learn his personal history, his preoccupations, even if delusional, the precipitating event of his illness. He visited each patient, often several times a day, and took careful notes over two years. His twin objectives were to assemble a detailed case history while also improving his grasp of the natural history of the disease before him. He could often document a logical progression from a man's traumatic life experience to the pathologic symptoms he was observing.

Both in the lecture room and on the hospital ward. Pinel had many opportunities to teach his views to the young generation. It is well known that he sponsored Dominique Esquirol's thesis, published in 1805 and entitled Des passions, considérées comme causes, symptômes, et moyens curatifs de l'aliénation mentale (On the passions, considered as causes, symptoms, and means of cure for mental alienation).^[10] The resemblance of this title to that of part 3 of Crichton's book is startling, and we are not surprised to find that Esquirol mentions Crichton in one breath with the abbé de Condillac and Pinel as the main authors who molded his thought. But instead of merely acknowledging Crichton, as Pinel had done when his own book was already in press, Esquirol had time to read the Scottish

[10] On Esquirol, see Appendix. Biobibliographic Note 3.

author with care before writing his own thesis. He studied Crichton's volume on the passions and his volume on the mental functions. The contrast struck him and reinforced his conviction that certain passions might be useful as a means of cure. Seventeen years later, when Pinel reviewed Esquirol's paper on hallucinations before the Academy of Sciences, he confirmed that Crichton's "learned research" stood at the cradle of Esquirol's formulations on this subject.^[11]

Pinel and Crichton, like many philosophers, dramatists, and observers of human nature before them, analyzed the antagonism between reason and emotion, but they were not interested in this struggle per se. Rather, in observing involuntary irrational behavior, they perceived unconscious psychologic meaning. Pursuing therapeutic strategies, they wondered whether awareness of this meaning might help the patient understand his behavior, realize its harmful consequences, and therefore change his ways. Esquirol, in contrast, following Crichton's emphasis on the passions and citing his own clinical experience, argued that the therapist could use the passions to shock the patient who, as a consequence of that experience, might regain the use of his reason. Since Crichton's analysis of the passions relies so heavily on the German literature on this subject, there is no doubt that Crichton's work forms a hitherto neglected link between German and French thought.

In fact Martin Schrenk, the most percipient German historian of this era, describes two circles of intellectual influences: one reaching from Scottish moral philosophy through Kant and his Anthropologie to Crichton's German student days, back to Britain, via Crichton's book; the other circle originating in German learning as absorbed by Crichton, reaching French psychiatry through Pinel and Esquirol and back to Germany, where Pinel's method of observation and Esquirol's model hospital at Charenton exerted a deep and lasting influence on academic and institutional psychiatry.^[12] We shall also see that Henri Ey, in his authoritative biographic sketch of Esquirol published in K. Kolle's Grosse

[11] P. Pinel, "Rapport sur le mémoire sur les hallucinations de M. Esquirol," Procès-verbaux des séances de l'Académie depuis la fondation juaqu'au mois d'aoüt 1835, Institut de France, Académie des sciences, 11 vols. (Hendaye: Observatoire d'Abbadia, 1910-), 6:196-199.

[12] M. Schrenk, "Pathologie der Passionen: Zur Erinnerung an J. E. D. Esquirol, geboren 1772," Der Nervenarzt 44 (1973): 195-198; see also idem, Über den Umgang mit Geisteskranken: Die Entwicklung der psychiatrischen Therapie vom "moralischen Regime" in England und Frankreich zu den "psychischen Curmethoden" in Deutschland (New York: Springer, 1973), 50, 123-124; see also W. Leibbrand and A. Wetley, Der Wahnsinn: Geschichte der abendländischen Psychopathologie (Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 1961), 360.

Nervenäirzte, emphasized a "similarity of human and scientific outlook" between Esquirol and the German school of "Psychiker," namely Johann Christian Heinroth (1773-1843), Karl Wilhelm Ideler (1795-1860), Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813), and Johann Gottfried Langermann (1768-1832). Ey cannot explain the origin of this resemblance: we suggest that it lies in Crichton's book.^[13]

While Pinel's explicit appreciation of Crichton's book brought the British work to French attention, Pinel himself remains the crucial figure in any international overview of early psychiatry. In the past decades, he has become the subject of lively controversy owing to Michel Foucault's Birth of the Clinic of 1963. That controversy has served to explode the myth of Pinel the "chainbreaker," even though every textbook still depicts him as the first to free the insane from their shackles. More interestingly, it has raised the question of Pinel's unique importance among a growing group of physicians who specialized in the theory and treatment of mental illness. Pinel's awareness of German learning and its influence on Esquirol explored in this essay matter in the early history of psychiatry mainly if Pinel was indeed a pivotal figure and founder of this medical specialty. This has recently been disputed by G. Lantéri-Laura and J. Postel, who claim that Pinel was but an "eponym" for a general European development and that the French Revolution attracted the spotlight of history to Paris and enhanced Pinel's stature beyond his intrinsic merit.^[14]

In order to assess his role, and the importance of that meeting of minds among Pinel, Crichton, and Esquirol, we shall present Pinel the autodidact, the learned but unemployed modern who rejected traditional systematic theories of mental illness. We will interpret his thought in the context of the French school of scientific social reform known as Ideology, of custodial and therapeutic strategies prevalent at that time, and of the contemporary literature on medical psychology. It is hoped that, viewed in this context, his original contributions to the nascent psychiatric specialty will stand out clearly. As for Crichton, his biography, particularly the German and Russian phases, and his major work remain to be analyzed. But mainly we will assess Pinel's endorsement of Crichton's book and its impact on Esquirol. He came to conceive of the asylum superintendent as the director of a therapeutic program that used the mental hospital as a tool to control the patient's body and used the pas-

[13] See p. 389 below, for discussion and documentation of this argument.

[14] See G. Lantéri-Laura, Encyclopaedia Universalis 30:750 s.v. "Psychiatrie," and J. Postel, Genése de la psychiatrie: Les premiers écrits de Philippe Pinel (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1981), 45.

sions as a means of cure. To cure meant to restore the mental faculties as agents of containment and domination over the emotions. In surveying these theories and therapeutic formulations in a broader philosophic context and in historical perspective, we may be justified in interpreting Esquirol's concept of the passions as a manifestation of Romantic Naturphilosophie, brought by Crichton from Germany, a challenge to the rationalism of Ideology and the Enlightenment.

THE SCIENTIFIC STANCE OF MEDICAL IDEOLOGY

Pinel should be seen as an Idéologue and a disciple of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and the abbé de Condillac.^[15] The Idéologues conceptualized man as the product of his environment: by changing it, they sought to improve the human condition; they were eager to apply their "science of man" to concrete social situations and to assume the role of public servants. Among physicians, the leading exponents of Ideology were P.J.G. Cabanis (1757-1808),^[16] J. L. Moreau de la Sarthe (1771-1826),^[17] Philippe Pinel, and Jean Antoine Chaptal (1756-1832), Bonaparte's minister of internal affairs under the Consulate, who had special power

[15] The Idélogues have, after a long delay, received appropriate scholarly attention, especially from M. Regaldo and S. Moravia. See Regaldo, Un milieu intellectuel: La décade philosophique, 1794-1807, 5 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1976), and Moravia, Il tramonto dell'illuminismo: Filosofia e politica nella società francese, 1770-1810 (Bari: Laterza, 1968), La scienza dell'uomo riel settecento (Bari: Laterza, 1970), and especially Il pensiero degli Idéologues: Scienza e filosofia in Francia, 1780-1815 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974). Among Moravia's articles, see especially "The Capture of the Invisible: For a (Pre)History of Psychology in Eighteenth-Century France," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 19 (1983): 370-378; "The Enlightenment and the Sciences of Man," History of Science 18 (1980): 246-268; "From 'homme machine' to 'homme sensible': Changing Eighteenth-Century Models of Man's Image," Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 45-60; "Les idéologues et l'âge des lumières," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 154 (1976): 1465-1486, and "Philosophie et médecine en France à la fin du 18ème siècle," ibid. 89 (1972): 1089-1151. On the impact of the Idéologues on medical developments, see also G. Rosen, "The Philosophy of Ideology and the Emergence of Modern Medicine in France," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 20 (1946): 328-339.

[16] On Cabanis, see especially the recent book by M. S. Staum, Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). See also F. Colonna d'Istria, "La Iogique de la médecine d'après Cabanis," Revue de mètaphysique et de morale 24 (1917): 59-73; S. Moravia, "'Moral'-'Physique': Genesis and Evolution of a 'Rapport,'" Enlightenment Studies in Honor of Lester Crocker, ed. J. Bingham and V. W. Topazio (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1979), 163-174; and A. Vartanian, "Cabanis and La Mettrie,' Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Centuy 155 (1976): 2149-2166.

[17] There appears to be no secondary literature on Moreau.

to transform theory into practice.^[18] At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Ideologues exerted a pervasive intellectual influence through their newspaper, the Décade philosophique,^[19] their membership in the National Institute, the Normal and Central School faculties, and "free" associations such as the Lycée des Arts, the Philomatic and Natural History Societies, and the Society of the Observers of Man.

Pinel was no typical Ideologue, and we can use the Introduction to the Traité as a convenient guide to delineate his intellectual position. He shared his colleagues' materialistic view of life, and their desire to serve society: his thirty years as physician-in-chief of the Salpêtrière Hospice bear witness to that. Among Ideologue physicians Pinel stands out as a clinician: his lifelong commitment was to minister to physically and psychologically ill patients, particularly the poor. While he followed his friend Cabanis's philosophic postulates with keen attention, Pinel believed that medical truth derived from clinical experience. Despite his interest in theory, Pinel knew that, at the sickbed, philosophy is of little use. And at the sickbed Pinel was at his best—by all accounts a brilliant diagnostician.

The Introduction to Pinel's Traité shows that Hippocrates remained his model because observation of the patient formed the basis of the Greek physician's writings.^[20] Among other ancient authors Pinel singled out several whose opinions and attitudes paralleled his own. He praised Aretaeus of Cappadocia, the Greek physician who lived in Rome in the mid-second century A.D. , for dwelling on the distinctive traits of mental alienation, the predisposition to relapses, and the physical and mental excitement that madness provokes.^[21] Coelius Aurelianus also found favor with Pinel: this fifth-century Algerian doctor, living in Rome, translated and commented on the writings of the great Greek physician Soranus. Pinel praised Aurelianus because he focused on the precipitat-

[18] On Chaptal, see M. Peronnet, Chaptal (Toulouse: Privat, 1988); J. Pigeire, La vie et l'œuvre de Chaptal, 1756.-1832 (Paris: Domat-Montchrétien, 1932); a good chapter on Chaptal in J. Savant, Les ministres de Napoleon (Paris: Hachette, 1959); and R. Tresse, "Jean Antoine Chaptal et l'enseignement technique de 1800 à 1819," Revue d'histoire des sciences 10 (1957): 167-174. See also M. Crosland, The Society of Arcueil: A View of French Science at the Time of Napoleon I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).

[19] La décade philosophique, littéraire, et politique, par une Société de républicains [later: gens de lettres ] (Paris: An 11-An IX [1794-180l]).

[20] Jackie Pigeaud has explored the ancient philosophic issues that influence the relationship of physician to patient in La maladie de l'âime: Etude sur la relation de l'âme et du corps dans la tradition médico-philosophique antique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1981).

[21] Pinel. Traité, Introduction, ix.

ing events in mental illness, the correct assessment of symptoms, patient management, and especially

the happy talent of choosing the appropriate tone in communicating with mental patients, an imposing gravity or a genuine empathy to earn their respect and esteem by a frank and open manner, to inspire them with both affection and fear, a skill credited to certain Moderns whose true source I indicate here.^[22]

The "Moderns" whose "skill" Pinel attributed to Coelius Aurelianus were surely the Quakers at the York Retreat whose originality Pinel thus questioned.^[23]

Pursuing his review of the ancients, Pinel lauded Celsus for his attention to the therapy of mental illness, and the management of patients.^[24] Galen, however talented, fell victim to his own vanity, in Piners judgment, and to his "rare skill for timely self-advertisement." He was so busy fighting the different sects, Dogmatists, Methodists, Empiricists, and Eclectics, that he had no time or wish to study any specific doctrine in depth.^[25] (The veiled allusion to the sterile squabbles of the Paris medical faculty surely struck contemporary French readers.) The fight against Galenism and iatrochemistry, according to Pinel, gave rise to "systems," and those he castigated, like a latter-day Bacon. Thus the scant selective praise from this Enlightened physician typically singles out those rare passages in ancient medical writings that indicate psychologic sensitivity and imagination and that mirror late-eighteenth-century beliefs. With a blindness typical of the Enlightenment, this Idèologue ignored Jewish and Arabic contributors to modern medicine, as well as medieval and even Renaissance writers. Pinel indiscriminately dismissed their work as "sterile language of the Schoolmen" and condemned their unscientific and indiscriminate use of drugs.^[26]

Having thus disposed of the ancients and their Renaissance imitators, Pinel proclaimed his allegiance to medical science and greeted modern

[22] Ibid., xi.

[23] Ibid., xliv, n. 2. See below, n. 72.

[24] Ibid., xii-xiv.

[25] Ibid., xi.

[26] Ibid., xv-xvi. This condemnation includes the work of Daniel Sennert (1572-1637), Lazare Riverius (1589-1655), and Felix Plater (1536-1614), who wrote Praxis medica (1602-1608), the "first modern attempt at a classification of diseases," according to Castiglioni. These included mental illness, of which he distinguished four types: mentis imbecillitas, consternatio, alienatio, and defatigatio. In addition, Pinel dismissed as irrelevant the work of Johann Heurnius (1543-160l), Gregor Horst (1578-1636), to some the "German Asklepios," and Jan Baptista van Helmont (1577-1644).

times as a breath of fresh air, a liberation. He admired van Helmont for his auto-experiment with monkshood^[27] and praised Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734) and Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738) for their scientific teaching of medicine and chemistry—Boerhaave in particular for establishing bedside teaching in Leiden, whence his disciples spread the practice, primarily to Edinburgh, London, and Vienna. By implication, Paris lagged behind. Therefore medical psychology must now build a firm clinical base, precisely what Pinel was engaged in doing. Taking a leaf from the book of biology and citing numerous examples, he argued that medical psychology should now become comparably scientific.^[28]

The Ideologues rejected the traditional belief in a soul and adopted Albrecht von Haller's concepts of sensitivity and irritability as the only bases of sensation and movement. "We feel, therefore we are," taught Cabanis, in his famous lectures on the mind/body problem at the Institut de France in 1796.^[29] Feelings emanated from matter, experiments in biology assumed major importance, and therefore Pinel particularly appreciated Crichton's reports on plant and animal behavior involving hydatids, polyps, Venus's-flytrap, and the heart rate of the hamster.^[30] In the same vein, Cabanis favored examples of animal behavior with implied similarities to humans. He wrote, for instance:

Puppies and kittens smell their mothers approaching from far away. They do not confuse them with other animals of their species and of the same sex.... Kittens often stretch their necks to seek the nipple while their rear and thighs are still lodged in the vagina and in the womb of the mother. (Note: I have witnessed this fact myself.)^[31]

[27] Pinel, Traité Introduction, xvii-xviii.

[28] In this connection, he referred to the Genevan Théophile Bonnet (1620-1689), author of the famous Sepulchretum anatomicum (1679); Marcello Donatus (1538-1602), author of De medica historia mirabili libri sex (1568); Friedrich Hoffmann (1660-1742) the mechanist and author of Medicina rationalis systematica, 9 vols. (1718-1740); Johannes Nicolaas Pechlin of Leiden (1646-1706), physician to the duke of Holstein, who practiced in Stockholm; Johannes Schenk yon Grafenberg (1530-1598)' author of Observationum medicarum, rararum, novarum, etc. libri duo (1600); Gerard Van Swieten (1700-1772)' the disciple of Boerhaave whom Empress Maria Theresa called to Vienna in 1745 to reform medical education and public health; and Nicolas Tulpius (1593-1674), so famous because Rembrandt painted him at the anatomy lesson, author of Observations medicae (1652).

[29] P.J.C. Cabanis, "Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme," in Πuvres philosophiques, 2 vols., ed. C. Lehec and J. Cazeneuve (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1956), 1:142. See also O. Temkin, "The Philosophical Background of Magendie's Physiology," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 20 (1946): l0-35.

[30] A. Crichton, An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798), book 1, 7, 9, 23.

[31] Cabanis, "Rapports," 184.

Animal experiments were not a scientific activity that Idéologue physicians pursued for its intrinsic merit, but rather a source of information to buttress their study of human behavior, emotions, and illnesses. They believed that, like a naturalist gathering knowledge in the field, the practicing physician should gather data in the clinic. The body and, through it, the mind would become the objects of scientific observation: the body would reveal the mind.^[32] Pinel and Crichton agreed with Bacon that

the Lyneaments of the bodie doe disclose the disposition and inclination of the minde in generall; but the Motions of the countenance and parts, doe not onely so, but doe further disclose the present humour and state of the mind and will. For... as the Tongue speaketh to the Eare, so the gesture speaketh to the Eye. And therefore a number of subtile persons, whose eyes doe dwell upon the faces and fashions of men; do well know the advantage of this observation.^[33]

In agreement with Sir Francis, Pinel and Crichton saw the mental patient as a person in ill health whose body and mind were simultaneously afflicted and whose somatic and psychologic symptoms interacted. Crichton's book offered detailed and perceptive analyses of joy, grief, fear, anger, and love, their physiologic and psychologic manifestations, particularly those that a physician judged dangerous to health. Following David Hartley, Crichton underscored the material origin of motion and even of feelings, "repeated impressions on the sensory organs."^[34] Along the lines of "faculty psychology," he singled out one feeling at a time and explored how it affected the patient's mind and body, comparable to an infected wound from which sepsis spreads, or an ailing organ that debilitates and alters body and mind. Gone is the notion that excessively aggrieved persons "lose" their minds completely, go "out of" their minds, or go in -sane. Gone is all moralizing or judgmental comment. Crichton presents us with scientific observations on a clinical syndrome: the madman has become a medical patient.

This view was familiar to Pinel. It agreed with the prevailing philosophy in his circle of forward-looking French physicians. It is surprising that Crichton makes no reference to Ideology, even though he spent the winter of 1785-86 in Paris, where future Ideologues discussed

[32] Ibid., 195.

[33] F. Bacon, The Twoo Bookes . . . Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human (London: Tomes, 1605), book 2, fol. 37.

[34] On Hartley, see p. 368 below. Roger Smith has recently explored this question in an illuminating article, "The Background of Physiological Psychology in Natural Philosophy," History of Science 11 (1973): 75-123.

and planned medical and political reform—in the press, in the coffeehouses, and especially in the salons.

PINEL IN 1800

The salon of Madame Helvétius in Auteuil opened its doors to Pinel in the 1780s, on the initiative of Cabanis, the hostess's adopted son. Thus Pinel joined a circle of brilliant men and women including the marquis A. N. de Condorcet (1743-1794), later Cabanis's brother-in-law, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), who attempted to lure Pinel to America, and Michel Augustin Thouret (1748-1810), a prominent member of the Royal Society of Medicine and the first dean of the Revolutionary Health School of Paris. The friendship of Thouret and Cabanis, who were soon to serve as hospital commissioners of the Seine department, would finally help Pinel reach a worthwhile professional appointment. But while Cabanis, the collaborator and doctor of the comte de Mirabeau (1749-1791), was drawn into participation in public affairs, Pinel's interest remained tied to clinical medicine. Already in his forties, he had trodden a narrow and arid path, winding from adolescence as a cleric to a medical degree in Toulouse in 1773, through twenty years of auto-didactic life in Montpellier and Paris. A careful study of the biographic documents reveals Pinel's early and strong bent toward clinical medicine and psychology.^[35] He left Toulouse in 1773 because the training was entirely theoretical, whereas Montpellier afforded opportunities to gather clinical experience. Pinel did not register for postdoctoral courses but, in his own words,

faithfully attended the daily medical rounds in the main hospital. . .. took written notes at the sickbed and... wrote case histories of the entire course of acute illnesses; that was my general plan for four years.^[36]

[35] See especially the following papers by the late Pierre Chabbert of Castres: "Les années d'études de Philippe Pinel: Lavaur, Toulouse, Montpellier," Monspeliensis Hippocrates 3 (1960): 15-23; "L'œuvre médicale de Philippe Pinel," in Comptes-rendus du 96éme Congrés national des sociétés savantes (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1970, 153-161; "Philippe Pinel à Paris jusqu' à sa nomination à Bicêtre," in Aktuelle Probleme aus der Geschichte der Medizin: Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of the History of Medicine (Basel: Karger, 1966), 589-595. See also D. B. Weiner, "Health and Mental Health in the Thought of Philippe Pinel: The Emergence of Psychiatry during the French Revolution," in Healing and History: Essays for George Rosen, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg (New York: Science History Publication, 1979), 59-85.

[36] Quoted in Chabbert, "Les armies d'études," 22. On the life of medical students in Montpellier, see also C. Jones, "Montpellier, Medical Students, and the Medicalization of 18th-Century France," in Problems and Methods in the History of Medicine, ed. R. Porter and A. Wear (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 57-80.

Beyond this clinical work, Pinel's autobiographic statements also reveal a long-standing interest in the patients' feelings. He wrote in 1793:

During the years when I visited hospitals for my education, . . .I often found that patients responded well to comforting words. . . . Frequently left to themselves, abandoned to dire thoughts about their fate, often isolated from their relatives and all they loved, disgusted by the crudity and harshness of the servants, often plunged into the blackest depression by the ever-present thought of a real or imagined danger, they expressed the liveliest gratitude toward those who empathized with their sufferings and tried to inspire them with confidence in their recovery. It is an excellent remedy to go to their bedside and ask how they are, express an interest in their ailments, encourage them to persevere and to believe in a prompt return to health.^[37]

An early and unusual interest in the psychologic aspects of illness thus distinguished this regular visitor to the Montpellier wards.

Even though he did not register as a student, Pinel undoubtedly attended lectures, particularly those of Théophile de Bordeu (1722-1776), who influenced him decisively. Bordeu developed his own brand of vitalism and posited "secondary centers" of sensitivity outside the brain, in the precordial and epigastric region. We shall see later how useful this concept would prove to be, particularly for Esquirol, in developing strategies for psychologic therapy.^[38] In 1778 Pinel walked all the way to Paris in search of a career but had to spend fifteen years earning his living as a writer, translator, and editor because the restrictive regulations of the old regime prevented him from practicing medicine. The Paris faculty did not recognize a degree from a provincial university like Toulouse, and all he could secure was a little doctoring on the sly at the maison de santé of the ex-carpenter Jacques Belhomme.^[39] But he used the time to educate himself further.

[37] D. B. Weiner, ed. and tr., The Clinical Training of Doctors: An Essay of 1793 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 84.

[38] On Bordeu, see E. Haigh, "Vitalism, the Soul, and Sensibility: The Physiology of Théophile de Bordeu," Journal of the History of Medicine 31 (1976): 30-41. On Cabanis's debt to Bordeu, see M. S. Staum, "Medical Components in Cabanis' Science of Man," Studies in History of Biology 1 (1978): 1-32, particularly 11 and 23-24.

[39] The most informative and best-documented source on the maison Belhomme is R. Bénard, "Une maison de santé psychiatrique sous la revolution: La maison Belhomme," Semaine des hôpitaux 32 (1956): 3990-4000. See also J. Postel, "Les premières experiences psychiatriques de Pinel à la maison de santé Belhomme," Revue canadienne de psychiatrie 28 (1983): 571-576. Postel has also recently published a manuscript detailing Pinel's first cures: "Un manuscrit inédit de Philippe Pinel sur 'Les guérisons opérées dans le 7ème emploi de Bicêtre, en 1794,'" Revue internationale d'histoire de la psychiatric 1 (1983): 79-88.

The French Revolution emancipated this provincial physician, and the essay that Pinel submitted for a prize from the Royal Society of Medicine in 1793 led to his first full-time job.^[40] Arriving at Bicêtre during the Terror, Pinel found himself in the midst of some four thousand imprisoned men—criminals, petty offenders, syphilitics, pensioners, and about two hundred mental patients. In that forbidding fortress he met Jean Baptiste Pussin (1746-1811), the supervisor of the mental ward: appreciating Pussin's outstanding talent, Pinel decided to apprentice himself to that unschooled but experienced custodian of the insane. Here was the "clinic" where Pinel learned to observe mind and body. As a first move, the new physician asked the "governors" of the various sections for medical reports: one of these has recently come to light, namely the "Observations of Citizen Pussin on the Insane."^[41] It provides a picture of the St. Prix ward, where order and cleanliness reigned, violent treatment of inmates was strictly banished, and humane management prevailed. The site-visitors from the National Assembly in 1790 had already recorded their surprise about this ward, remarking particularly that very few of the inmates were chained, in most instances only at night.^[42] Even more than they, Pinel appreciated Pussin's ability to practice a crude classification of new arrivals according to their complexion and temperament which permitted him to house them appropriately. Here was a modest beginning of that "division into distinct species of illness" that Pinel would later practice at the Salpêtrière. He admired Pussin's strict adherence to nonviolence: even if the governor or his underlings faced attack by an inmate, they subdued the attacker without causing injury. Pussin reported that he had to dismiss numerous employees in order to assemble a nonviolent staff. He resorted to a variety of strategies to control unruly patients, including stern warnings, the manipulative use of food and privileges, and physical restraints, if necessary, making sure that these would not cause physical pain. It was Pussin, we learn from his "Observations," and not Pinel, as every textbook tells us, who first struck the chains from the insane at Bicêtre. This strict, nonviolent, nonmedical management of mental patients has been called

[40] The circumstances are explained in Weiner, The Clinical Training, Introductory Essay.

[41] "Observations du citoyen Pussin sur les fous." The manuscript is in the Archives nationales, Paris, 27 AP 8 (doc. 2). For an annotated English translation, see D. B. Weiner, "The Apprenticeship of Philippe Pinel: A New Document, 'Observations of Citizen Pussin on the Insane,'" 136 (1979): 1128-1134.

[42] C. Bloch and A. Tuetey, eds., Procès-verbaux et rapports du comité de mendicité de la Constituante, 1790-1791 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1911), 604.

"moral treatment," owing to a misleading literal translation from the French. "Moral " does not mean "moral" but "psychologic," and it would be helpful if English-language terminology aligned itself with the German where the terms "psychisch " and "Psychiker " were adopted in Pinel's day.^[43]

It was a rare, perhaps unprecedented, role-reversal that occurred at Bicêtre in 1793-1795: the spectacle of a middle-aged doctor who had mastered Greek, Latin, and the entire medical literature apprenticing himself to an unschooled but experienced asylum superintendent. In the Introduction to the Traité, Pinel wrote:

I abandoned the dogmatic tone of the doctor. With the help of frequent visits, sometimes during several hours a day, I familiarized myself with the deviations, shouts, and uncontrolled behavior of the most violent maniacs. I then talked repeatedly with the man who was most familiar with their previous state and their delirious thoughts. I took extreme care to manage his self-esteem, and asked him numerous and repeated questions on the same subject if the answers were not clear. I never objected if he said anything doubtful or improbable, but waited for a subsequent examination to enlighten or correct him. I took daily notes on the observed facts with the sole aim of having as many accurate data as possible.
Such is the course I have followed for almost two years, in order to en rich the medical theory of mental illness with all the insights that the empirical approach affords. Or rather, I strove to perfect the theory and to provide practice with the general principles that it lacked.^[44] [emphasis added]

[43] The best overviews of "moral treatment" are E. T. Carlson and N. Dain, "The Psychotherapy That Was Moral Treatment," American Journal of Psychiatry 117 (1960): 519-524; C. Geduldig, Die Behandlung von Geisteskranken ohne physischen Zwang (Zürich: Medical dissertation, 1976); R. Porter, "Was There a Moral Therapy in Eighteenth-Century Psychiatry?" Lychnos: Annual of the Swedish History of Science Society, 1981-82: 12-26; J. Postel, "Naissance et décadence du traitement moral pendant la premiere moitié du 19ème siècle," L'évolution psychiatrique 44 (1979): 588-616; and L. Sederer, "Moral Therapy and the Problem of Morale," American Journal of Psychiatry 134 (1977): 267-277. An interesting account, along the lines of Michel Foucault's views, is A. Scull, "Moral Treatment Reconsidered: Some Sociological Comments on an Episode in the History of British Psychiatry," in Scull, Madness, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen, 105-120.

[44] Pinel, Traité, Introduction, xlviii-xlix. All references are to the first edition, unless noted otherwise. The only English version of this text is in G. Zilboorg's History of Medical Psychology (New York: Norton, 1941), where the translation is, in part, sheer nonsense. A Passage reads: "I held repeated conversations with whatever men knew best their former condition and their delirious ideas. Extreme care is necessary to avoid all pretensions of self-esteem and many questions on the same subject if the answers are obscure. I never object if patients make equivocal or improbable remarks but postpone my questions to a later examination, for the purpose of enlightenment and correction" (340).

All his life, Pinel would acknowledge his debt to Pussin and to Madame Pussin, her husband's talented collaborator.

During the two years' apprenticeship at Bicêtre, Pinel assembled a large collection of case histories where the reader meets individuals in distress whose past and symptoms Pinel had probed in numerous encounters and conversations. Let us adduce two examples, beginning with a musician who had "fallen into madness" because of the Revolution:

While he was convalescing, he recalled a confused memory of his favorite instrument, the violin. I urged his family to provide him with that pleasure, so useful for his total recovery. In a few days he recaptured his old skill and, for eight months, he practiced for several hours daily. Calm and reason were decidedly returning.

At that point, an agitated patient was admitted to the same ward. His presence so upset the musician that he relapsed and became permanently insane.^[45] Next, we cite this intriguing case:

One of the most famous clockmakers in Paris, beguiled by the illusion of perpetual motion that he longed to capture, set to work with indefatigable enthusiasm.... His loss of reason exhibited a unique trait. He believed that his head, severed on the scaffold, got mixed up with that of other victims and that the judges... ordered the heads restored... but, through some mistake, his shoulders now carried the head of an unfortunate companion.^[46]

While Pinel's examples usually depicted men from Bicêtre, he learned about mentally ill and senile women upon his transfer in 1795 to the Salpêtrière Hospice as physician-in-chief. He soon missed Pussin acutely. This immense establishment, with some seven thousand elderly indigent and ailing women, was like a large village with an entrenched bureaucracy, a teeming market and huge infirmaries in disarray. Pinel secured Pussin's transfer in 1802 and obtained the appointment of assistants, Esquirol foremost among them.^[47]

Pinel needed help with clinical teaching, for students crowded into his thirty-bed ward. He and Jean Nicolas Corvisart were the most famous clinicians in Paris at the time.^[48] He was professor of internal med-

[45] Pinel, Traité, 202-203.

[46] Ibid., 66-437.

[47] Other collaborators were A. Landré-Beauvais (1772-1840) and Charles Schwilgué (1774-1808).

[48] A good overview of clinical teaching in the early nineteenth century can be gained from M. Wiriot, L'enseignement clinique dans les hôpitaux de Paris entre 1794 et 1848 (Paris: Thèse histoire de la médecine, 1970), and from E. H. Ackerknecht, Medicine at the Paris Hospital, 1794-1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967). See also J. C. Sournia, La médecine révolutionnaire, 1789-1799 (Paris: Payot, 1989).

icine ("medical pathology" in the contemporary idiom) at the Paris Health School, and.in 1803 he was elected to the Academy of Sciences, succeeding Georges Cuvier (1773-1838).^[49] "This M. Pinel is unique," wrote a student from Strasbourg:

he can't say two words without a hiccup and he doesn't cure his patients better than anyone else.... yet... I admit that he made a doctor of me, though I cannot say exactly how. It was at the sickbed that he taught me to recognize the main symptoms of each illness, and to relate them to the genera and species of his nosographic scheme.^[50]

And François Leuret (1797-1851), the future physician-in-chief at Bicêtre, summed up the students' experience at the turn of the century in Paris: "Under Corvisart one learned quickly; with Pinel, one learned well."^[51]

Pinel taught internal medicine, hut with constant reference to the psychologic parameters of bodily illness. Conversely, he never failed to explain the physical substrate of mental disorders, if these were apparent in the patient. We know this from the case histories of patients seen on this teaching ward, recorded by Pinel's assistants and published as La médecine clinique rendue plus precise et plus exacte par l'application de l'analyse; ou, Recueil et résultat d'observations sur les maladies aigües, faites à la Salpêtrière.^[52] He thus taught what we call psychosomatic medicine, whereas the teaching of psychiatry was initiated by Esquirol at the Salpêtrière in 1817.^[53] Pinel also used his data for research, and with that goal in mind and with Pussin's help he reorganized the wards, particularly the mental ward. In 1802 he wrote:

A hospital destined for sick women and as large as the Salpêtrière, opens a great career for new research on women's diseases that have always and rightly been considered as the most difficult and complicated of all.^[54]

[49] Cuvier became permanent secretary.

[50] P. B. Bailly, Souvenirs d'un élève des écoles de santé de Strasbourg et de Paris pendant la révolution, publiés par... son arriére-petit-fils (Strasbourg: Strasbourg médical, 1924), 17-18.

[51] F. Leuret, "M. Esquirol," Gazette médicale de Paris, 2d set., 9 (2 Jan. 1841): 1-6. The quotation is on p. 1.

[52] For this and further editions, see Appendix, Biobibliographic Note 1.

[53] For a synopsis of Esquirol's course, see his "Introduction à l'étude des aliénations mentales," Revue médicale française et étrangère 8 (1822): 31-38.

[54] Pinel, La médecine clinique, 1st ed. (Paris: Brosson, Gabon et Cie, 1802), Introduction, xxxiv.

Contrasting conditions at the Salpêtrière with his previous experience at Bicêtre, Pinel explained the difference in the Preface to the second edition of the Traité (1809):

Several circumstances made medical treatment quite incomplete [at Bicêtre]. The mental patients had already been treated one or several times at the Hôtel-Dieu, according to the usual methods, and they were then taken to Bicêtre to bring about or reinforce their cure. This rendered my results inconclusive.^[55] The use of iron chains to restrain a great number of madmen was still very much in force (it was only abolished three years later);^[56] and how could one distinguish between the resulting exasperation and the symptoms specific to illness? The defects of the buildings, the lack of subdivisions to separate patients according to their degree of agitation or calm, frequent changes in administration, the lack of baths, and several other necessary facilities—these were many hurdles. . ..^[57] [emphasis added]

At the Salpêtrière I was able to resume the pursuit of my goals: the hospital administration had just transferred the treatment of all female mental patients to that hospice and this was of enormous help to me. The buildings were vast, convenient and easy to subdivide. . .. The barbarous use of iron chains was abolished, just like three years earlier at Bicêtre, and treatment then followed its regular course, according to a new method.^[58]

Distinguished travelers anxious to visit the Salpêtrière and witnessing the order and calm that usually prevailed there, sometimes remarked with surprise, as they examined the hospital, "But where are the madwomen?" Little did these strangers know that this was the most encouraging praise for the establishment, and that their question underlined a remarkable difference in comparison with other hospitals.^[59]

By 1800, Pinel was thus well known in French academic and scientific circles, a widely read author, popular among medical students, and an innovator in hospital administration. He therefore spoke with authority when, in the Introduction to the Traité, he defined the context for the study of mind and body in the clinic, that is, for French medical psychology around 1800.

[55] The "usual methods" were purges, vomits, venesection, and baths. Pinel was well aware of iatrogenic symptoms produced by the administration of drugs and debilitating procedures.

[56] This statement provides additional proof that it was not Pinel who first removed the chains.

[57] Pinel, Traité, 2d ed. (Paris: Brosson, 1809), Introduction, xxxi.

[58] Ibid., i.

[59] Ibid., 193. This passage echoes Pussin.

PINEL'S ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHIATRY

Between 1796 and 1798 Pinel published three papers, "Mémoire sur la Maine périodique ou intermittente" (On periodic or intermittent insanity), "Recherches et observations sur le traitement moral des aliénés" (On psychologic treatment), and "Observations sur les aliénés et leur division en espéces distinctes" (On the mentally ill and their division into separate species).^[60] Numerous themes call for our attention: Pinel's respect and empathy for the patient; his use of observation, including a new diagnosis; a new concept of the doctor-patient relationship; his guidelines for therapy; the subdivisions in his nosology; his call for a thoughtful administrative policy in the asylum; and the exploration of new avenues for research.

All of Pinel's writings convey the importance of each patient as a special person endowed with reason, personal feelings, and a unique tragic history where the cause of the patient's mental illness lay hidden. The physician-in-chief of the Salpêtrière knew, of course, that the Revolutionary reformers had proclaimed the right of every ailing and needy citizen—the "citizen-patient"—to health care, and he interpreted this right to include the mentally ill.^[61] As a public servant who headed the largest hospital in the world, he set an example, but he knew the difficulties of dispensing psychologically sensitive care and therapy to hundreds of inmates. All around him he witnessed young physicians on Paris hospital wards who assumed an increasingly impassive attitude toward the suffering indigent—young medical scientists who favored large series of cases that yielded numerical data. Pinel realized that two contrasting kinds of psychologic therapy were emerging at the end of the eighteenth century: individual care for paying patients and collective management for the poor.

Crucial among Pinel's original contributions is the careful observation of the patient over a long time if necessary. This led him to emphasize two aspects essential to diagnosis: one is a precise record of the precipitating event that may determine the character and course of the illness,

[60] P. Pinel, "Mémoire sur la manie périodique ou intermittente," Mémoires de la Sociéié médicale d'émulation 1 (An V [1796-97]): 94-119; "Recherches et observations sur le traitement moral des aliénés," ibid. 2 (An VI [1797-98]): 215-255; "Observations sur les aliénés et leur division en espèces distinctes," ibid. 3 (An VII [1798-99]): 1-26.

[61] This argument was presented to the French National Assembly in 1790 by the duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, chairman of the Poverty Committee. See D. B. Weiner, "Le droit de l'homme à la santé: Une belle idle devant l'assemblée constituante, 1790-1791," Clio Medica 5 (1970):209-233.

the other is the physician's knowledge of the natural history of the disease afflicting the patient. Only with such knowledge can the physician accurately assess the signs and symptoms that he must interpret. It was precise observation that led Pinel to diagnose "reasoning madness" ("folie raisonnante "), a definition based on the concept that mental illness often involves one faculty only while the others remain unaffected. In the case of folie raisonnante, reason and logical thinking are intact, but the patient is captive to an insane conviction or delusion, for example that he is the prophet Mohammed. No psychiatrist could undo such madness.

Pinel's most important contribution consists of a new approach to the doctor-patient relationship. It was based on a reinterpretation of the phenomenon of periodicity in "intermittent insanity." Observers of the mentally ill had long mused about the influence of the changing seasons, the phases of the moon and sun, and biorhythms such as the patient's menstrual cycle upon morbidity. These influences of the patient's surroundings or internal milieu (to use Claude Bernard's phrase) could cause regular or irregular successive phases of morbidity and sanity. Pinel now conceptualized intermittence or periodicity anew. He focused on the periods of mental sanity as the moments when a skilled therapist can establish a relationship of trust with the patient. He must build this gradually, through repeated visits and conversation. By timing his interventions with care and using the patient's intact faculties, he may involve the patient in his or her own cure. Pinel thus established a new avenue toward recovery and psychologic treatment.^[62] The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel praised Pinel for this innovative approach when he wrote:

... true psychologic therapy holds to the point of view that madness is not an abstract loss of reason, neither of intelligence nor of will, but only a derangement, a contradiction within the remaining rationality. Similarly illness is not an abstract and total loss of health (that would mean death), but a contradiction within health. This humane, that is kindly and reasonable treatment—Pinel deserves the highest recognition for his efforts on this behalf—assumes the patient to be rational and clings to this belief and engages the patient in this manner. Similarly the physician deals with the living body, in which health is still to be found.^[63]

[62] This is not possible in all species of insanity. The above paragraph is indebted to G. Swain, Le sujet de la folie, especially section IX, and W. Riese, "Outline of a History of Psychotherapy."

[63] See Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 338. The remark appears in part I, section I: Der subjektive Geist, A. Die Anthropologie, b. Die fühlende Seele. B. Das Selbstgefühl. Swain discovered this passage.

Hegel thus saw the dialectic process at work in the struggle of doctor and patient to wrest health from illness.

While diagnosis fascinated Pinel, therapy was never his main interest: a correct diagnosis would produce the appropriate follow-up. As an admirer of Hippocrates he believed in the "healing powers of nature": removing harmful influences and letting nature run her course was often best. He condemned the uncritical and untested use of drugs because he was wary of side effects and iatrogenic symptoms, derided the "hotchpotch" of polypharmacy, and preferred mild natural pharmacologic agents. Diet and regimen seemed aspects of therapy that physicians must supervise closely. He agreed with William Battle that "management does much more than Medicine."^[64] Patients must be treated according to their individual needs, with well-designed management and therapy.

In order to administer a mental hospital successfully, the director must follow clear rules. Therefore guidelines for "policing" the asylum form an important part of the Traité, and Pinel outlined them in the Itroduction. He advocated the dignified individualized treatment of the mentally ill citizen-patient, cleanliness, regularity in hospital routine, the banishment of violence even though firmness was of the essence. Mainly, he believed, insanity was a curable illness.

Research was always on Piner’s mind, and to that end he favored couching his nosographic distinctions in the language of the natural sciences. His division of the mentally ill into "separate species" reflects the influence of Boissier de Sauvages, Linnaeus, and Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707-1788), whom Pinel undoubtedly met at the Jar-din du roi in the 1780s, while studying with his assistant L. J. M. Daubenton, who became Pinel's friend. When Crichton brought the ideas of Blumenbach to Pinel’s attention a few years later, they obviously fell onto well-prepared, fertile ground. The initial objective of Pinel's research was nosographic clarity. That was his first hurdle when he entered the Bicêtre mental ward in 1793, and we have a tantalizing piece of paper, 12 × 15 inches, on which he jotted down his impromptu formulations.^[65] Once he subdivided and regrouped the patients, he could observe them to better advantage. He applied the "numerical method," crude statistics.^[66] Conversant with skull measurements as an index of in-

[64] Battie, A Treatise on Madness (n. 80 below), 68.

[65] See R. Semelaigne, "Notes inélites de Pinel, avec un 'Tableau général des fous de Bicêtre,'" Bulletin de la société clinique de médecine mentale 6 (1913): 117-221. Jacques Postel has published this "Tableau" in Genèse de la psychiatric, 226-229.

[66] See, for example, "Résultats d'observations et construction de tables pour servir à déterminer le degré de probabilité de la guérison des aliénés," Mérnoires de la classe des sciences matématiquts et physiques, Institut national de France, 1st ser., 8, (1807): 169-205.

telligence, he discussed them in the Traité but remained skeptical, and the same can be said of dissecting patient brains in order to locate the "seat" of mental illness.^[67] He tried to ascertain the therapeutic value of electricity but doubted its effects,^[68] and he wrote about the relationship of psychiatry and the law.^[69] However, while he was open to new trends and problems, as exemplified by his attention to Crichton's book, his major involvement was a personal relationship with students such as Esquirol and with his patients, a relationship symbolized and reinforced by his residence inside the asylum walls for thirty years.

This secluded residence did not isolate Pinel from the national nor from the international medical scene. He continued to read widely, as the contents of his library indicate, and he followed the latest developments in research: we know that he hardly ever missed a meeting of the Academy of Sciences and wrote frequent reports on new experiments and books. His Introduction to the Traité allows us to assess his familiarity with contemporary developments in psychiatry.

THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT OF MEDICAL PSYCHOLOGY IN 1800

In the Introduction to the Traité, Pinel generalized about the important role that experienced laymen played in the management of contemporary asylums and even in the cure of mentally ill persons throughout the Western world. He singled out the concierge of the Amsterdam asylum,^[70] Father Pouthion at Manosque in Provence,^[71] and Francis Willis, Thomas Fowler, and John Haslam in England. Pinel's facts are faulty,

[67] Pinel, Traité, section III, "Recherches anatomiques sur les vices de conformation du crâne des aliénés."

[68] P. Pinel, "Recherches sur le traitement général des femmes aliénées dans un grand hospice, et résultats obtenus à la Salpêtrière après trois années d'expérience," Le moniteur universel, 11 Messidor, An XIII, 1158-1160.

[69] P. Pinel, "Résuhats d'observations pour servir de base aux rapports juridiques dans les cas d'aliénation mentale," Méraoires de la société médicale d'émulation 8 (1817): 675-684.

[70] Pinel, Traié, Introduction, xliv. Pinel refers to an article by Thouin (identified as a professor of agriculture at the Museum of Natural History in Paris) entitled "Description de la Maison des Fous d'Amsterdam, extraite du journal manuscrit des voyages du cit. Thouin dans la Belgique et la Hollande," Décade philosophique littéraire et politique (Vendémiaire-Frimaire), An IV:418-424.

[71] Pinel, Traité, Introduction, xliv. On Father Pouthion, a Brother of the Observance, see M. Mourre, Observations sur les insensés (Toulon: Surre fils, 1791), and M. J. Alliez, "Un précurseur de l'assistance moderne aux aliénés dans notre région, le R. P. Pouthion, de Manosque," Bulletin de la société de psychiatrie de Marseille et du Sud-Est méditerranéen 6 (1966-67): 36-47.

since most of the men he listed were not laymen but physicians.^[72] His judgment, however, is correct: laymen can make good psychiatric nurses. He might have adduced the example of the Brothers of Charity, experts at psychiatric nursing who played a prominent role in the custody of men incarcerated in France by lettre de cachet, that is, by the king or the courts. In the eighteenth century the Brothers administered thirty-eight charités in France alone; they charged from six hundred to six thousand livres, according to the inmates' ability to pay. They prodded individually programmed custody with carefully graduated privileges and even medical care, if we can believe their admirers.^[73] The Brothers' practices seem not to have been widely known at the time of the French Revolution, or perhaps the anti-Catholic temper of the times minimized the Church's achievements and Pinel adopted that attitude. His acknowledgment of Father Pouthion suggests, however, that he was unaware of the Brothers of Charity's expertise, or he would have mentioned them in this context.

One should also emphasize that it was no one's unique accomplishment to strike the chains from the insane at the turn of the nineteenth century. Progressive physicians throughout Europe were replacing traditional heavy iron shackles with leather straps or canvas tunics called "straitjackets." One might cite Dr. Abraham Joly (1748-1812)^[74] and Dr. Charles Gaspard de La Rive (1770-1834) of Geneva,^[75] Dr. Gastaldy of

[72] Most of the men whom Pinel cited did indeed have medical degrees. The Reverend Dr. Francis Willis (1718-1807), M.D. Oxon., was the chief manager of George III's mental illness in the 1780s; Thomas Fowler (?-180l), M.D. Edin., became nonresident physician at the York Retreat in 1796; and John Haslam (1764-1844), M.D. Aberdeen, served as "apothecary" at Bedlam. (Haslam did not acquire the M.D. degree until 1816.) Pinel's incomplete information stems from reports in the Bibliothéque britannielue, published in Geneva, the chief source of news about medico-scientific activities in Great Britain available to the French while England and France were at war, that is, for twenty-three years in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. On the important function of the Bibliothéue britannique as translator and mediator of medical information, see M. A. Barblan, "La santé publique rue par les rédacteurs de la Bibliothéque britannique, 1796-1815," Gesnerus 22 (1975): 129-146, and idem, "Journalisme médical et échanges intellectuels au tournant du 18ème siècle: Le cas de la Bibliothèque britannique, 1796-1815," Archives des sciences (Geneva) 30.(1977): 283-398.

[73] On the Brothers of Charity, see D. B. Weiner, "The Brothers of Charity and the Mentally Ill in Pre-Revolutionary France," Social History of Medicine 2 (1989): 321-337.

[74] L. Gautier, La médecine à Genève (Geneva: Jullien, 1906), 346. On Switzerland, see also W. Morgenthaler, Bernisches Irrenwesen, yon den Anfängen bis zur Eröffnung des Toll-hauses, 1749 (Bern: Grunau, 1915).

[75] I. Benguigui, "Charles Gaspard de La Rive (1770-1834), métdecin aliéniste et physicien," Gesnerus 42 (1985): 245-252.

Avignon,^[76] and Dr. Johann Theobald Held of Prague (1770-1851).^[77] There were undoubtedly many others.

In the Introduction to his Traité, Pinel also reviewed contemporary medical writers and academic compendia on mental illness. He dismissed the British and German books and the international journal literature in one footnote each. The books, he wrote, "assemble scattered topics, lay them out in the scholastic manner, and often produce no more than some brilliant hypothesis."^[78] The journals contain "scattered data, raw material that a skillful hand must elaborate."^[79] This curt rejection of British works is startling, particularly since Pinel was well informed. He cited Battie, Harper, Arnold, Pargeter, Ferriar, Perfect, Haslam, and, of course, Crichton.^[80] It is true that, in the body of his Traité, Pinel repeatedly acknowledged indebtedness to certain of these authors, particularly John Ferriar and William Pargeter—that is, those Britishers whose books speak of their practical experience with the hospitalized mentally ill. Nevertheless, Pinel's global rejection of British writings on insanity is surprising, even after making allowance for the anti-British feelings of a patriotic Frenchman in 1800.

It can be explained as follows: as we have seen, Pinel admired the work of practitioners, whether medical or lay, whose successful management of the mentally ill led to their patients' recovery. Therefore he praised the Retreat at York and admired the work of men like William

[76] J. P. Huber, J. P. Macher, and J. Alliez, "L'hospitalisation 'forcée' des insensés à Avignon au 18ème siècle," Information psychiatrique 56 (1980): 1257-1266.

[77] Johann Theobald Held received the M.D. degree in Prague in 1797 and became physician at the Brothers of Charity's hospital in that city where he served from 1799 until 1824. In 1806, he added one section of the municipal hospital to his duties. After the battle of Leipzig in 1813, he took over a service of the Ursuline monastery, and the mental asylum of the Brothers of Charity, where he became physician-in-chief in 1822. It was there that he introduced humane treatment for the mentally ill. He was elected dean of the university five times, and rector magnificus, and was made an imperial councillor in 1841. He left only minor writings.

[78] Pinel, Traité, Introduction, xxi.

[79] Ibid., xlii-xliii.

[80] He lists these British books on mental alienation: William Battle (1703-1776), A Treatise on Madness (London: Whisten and White, 1758); Andrew Harper (?-1790), A Treatise on the Real Cause and Cure of Insanity (London: Stalker and Walter, 1789); Thomas Arnold (1742-1816), Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes, and Prevention of Insanity, Lunacy, or Madness, 2 vols. (London: Robinson and Cadell, 1782-1786); William Pargeter (1760-1810), Observations on Maniacal Disorders (Reading: The author, 1792); John Ferriar (1761-1815), Medical Histories and Reflections (London: Cadell and Davies, 1792-1798); William Perfect (1737-1809), Select Cases in the Different Species of Insanity, Lunacy, or Madness, with the Modes of Practice as Adopted in the Treatment of Each (Rochester: Gillman, 1797); John Haslam (1764-1844), Observations on Insanity (London: Rivington, 1798).

Perfect at Mailing Place, Kent, or Thomas Arnold, at Belle Grove, Leicester. But he did not extend his admiration to the theoretical writings of these British practitioners—and how right he was! Thomas Arnold, for example, indulged in the most complex nosologic subdivisions in order to accommodate his observations; he divided insanity into "ideal" and "notional"—corresponding to Locke's "sensations" and "reflections"—and then proposed four "ideal" species of insanity, namely phrenitic, incoherent, maniacal, sensitive, and nine "notional" species: delusive, whimsical, fanciful, impulsive, scheming, vain or self-important, hypochondriacal, pathetic, appetitive. As for William Battie, the co-founder of St. Luke's Hospital for Lunaticks in 1751, one wonders how he could have taught his students how the mind worked while he hewed strictly to humoral pathology and treated his patients with an exhausting regimen of "depletion and revulsion." Pinel tended to shrug his shoulders at his British colleagues' theories while admiring their practical results.

In a different context, Continental observers found it astonishing that King George III's bouts of "madness" should provide a major topic of public discussion and even Parliamentary debate. In more conventional Continental fashion, the Spaniards, for example, kept the manic-depressive illness of King Ferdinand VI a secret even though a significant forerunner in psychiatry, Dr. Andrès Piquer of Valencia (1711-1772), cared for the king and wrote a revealing "Discurso sobre la enfermedad del Rey."^[81] The Spaniards considered the king's person sacred and the manuscript lay unknown in the private archives of the duke of Osuna for one hundred years.^[82] In contrast with the British physicians in charge of George III, Piquer and his colleagues never manhandled or mistreated their patient nor failed in their "respect for his Royal Person." Though he "did none of the things they prescribed. . . . [m]elancholics must be treated with great gentleness and kindness," wrote Piquer, "and the hotchpotch of medications belongs to quacks rather than physicians who try to know and imitate nature."^[83]

[81] On Piquer, see J. L. Belinchon, "La psicologìa medica en la filosofìa moral de Piquer (1755)," in Actas—III Congreso national de historia de la medicina, Valencia, 1969 (Madrid, 1972), 2:261-266, and V. Ll. Peset, "Andrès Piquer y la psiquiatria de la Ilustra-ción," in Actas del XV Congreso internacionnal de historia de la medicina, 1956 (Madrid, 1958), 2:433-439, published as vol. 8 of Archivo Ibero-Americano de historia de la medicina y antropología.

[82] A. Piquer, "Discurso sobre la enfermedad del Rey nuestro Señor Don Fernando VI (que Dios guarde) escrito por Don Andrés Piquer medico de camara de S. M.," in Colecc ccc n de documentos ineditos para la Historia de España, vol. 18 (Madrid: Viuda de Calero, 1851), 156-221.

[83] Piquer, "Discurso," 186.

Piquer's younger contemporary, the Savoyard physician, Dr. Joseph Daquin (1732-1815) of Chambéry, wrote a sensitive Philosophie de la folie in 1791, in which he advocated humane treatment.^[84] Its tone reminds one of the Confessions that his countryman and friend Jean-Jacques Rousseau had recently published. Daquin mixed traditional and modern attitudes: a humoralist, he spoke of "hot" and "cold" brains^[85] and believed in the influence of the moon on "lunatics." Yet he pursued the scientific method to establish his thesis: he regularly examined five men and five women for sixteen years and kept notes on his findings at full and new moon, "lunistice," apogee, and perigee during a total of over eight hundred visits. But he decided against publishing his journal out of discretion and respect for his patients and unfortunately for us.^[86]

Across the Alps, the Florentine Vincenzo Chiarugi (1759-1820) served as physician-in-chief at the renovated Bonifazio hospital for mental and dermatologic patients and taught students at the school of practical medicine of Santa Maria Nuova. He undoubtedly collaborated in the humane Regolamento for Florentine hospitals that was issued under the auspices of the enlightened Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo in 1789. Chiarugi and Pinel were, in fact, the only full-time academic "psychiatrists" of the eighteenth century. In 1793-94, that is, six years before Pinel, Chiarugi authored a two-volume work on insantiy, Della pazzia. Pinel dismissed this book as utterly conventional in the Introduction to the Traité, but the Italian's admirers nevertheless consider him the real founder of "moral management" because he insisted on humane care for demented hospital inmates.^[87]

[84] J. Daquin, Philosophie de la folie (Chambéry: Gorrin, 1791); 2d ed. (Chambéry: Cléaz, 1804).

[85] Daquin, Philosophic, 2d ed., 53.

[86] Ibid., 207-241, passim. Gladys Swain has recently discovered the tracks of a prize essay by Daquin, dated 1787, in carton D, Archives de la Société de l'Ecole de Mtédecine, in the archives of the Paris Academy of Medicine. Though the essay itself seems to be lost, there subsists a "Plan du journal sur les fous renu depuis le rer janvier 1790, et visités à chaque phase de la lune, afin d'observer si cette planète influe sur eux," dated 9 June 180l. The latest overview and update regarding Daquin is the "Presentation" of his Philosophic de la folie by Claude Quétel in Collection Insania (Paris: Frénésie Editions, 1987).

[87] Pinel, Traité, Introduction, xli. The full title of Vincenzo Chiarugi's book is Della pazzia in genere ed in specie: Trattato medico-analitico con una centuria di osservazioni, 2 vols. (Florence: Carlieri, 1793-2794). On Chiarugi, see the Introduction to the English edition, On Insanity and Its Classification, ed. George Mora (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 1987). Mora is undoubtedly right in attributing the provisions for the mentally ill, spelled out in the Regolamento, to Chiarugi, but the physician is not mentioned as author, editor, or contributor, and his collaboration can only be inferred. See also G. B. Bock, "Ancora su Vincenzo Chiarugi: Revisione bibliografica e breve analisi critica del suo pen-siero," Acta medicae historiae patavina 18 (1971-72): 37-37; E. Coturri, "Le sostanziale innovazioni introdotte in psichiatria da Vincenzo Chiarugi," Episteme 6 (1972): 251-265; E. Padovani, "Pinel e il rinnovamento dell'assistenza degli alienati: I suoi percursori: I predecessori italiani: Giuseppe Daquin e Vincenzo Chiarugi," Giornale di psichiatria e di neuropatologia 55 (1927): 69-124; A. Scapini, La pazzia nell'intepretazione di Vincenzo Chiarugi (1759-1800) (Pisa: Giardini, 1966); and L. Stroppiana, "La riforma degli ospedali psichiatrici di Chiarugi nel quadro del riformismo toscano ed europeo," Rivista di storia della medicina 20 (1976): 168-179.

While Pinel was highly critical of his Italian contemporary, his treatment of the German literature on psychiatry is another matter. His main reference is contained in a footnote that reads as follows:

These entries indicate that Pinel did not understand what he was writing: it seems likely that he took these references from the Introduction and Appendix of Crichton's book, adding them at the last minute, as his Traité went to press.^[88] The footnote exemplifies the damage that the decline of Latin brought to international understanding in the eighteenth century: Germans now wrote in their own language which few foreigners bothered to learn. Not to take German-language scholarship seriously was of course a typical French attitude in 1800. The French Enlightenment expected cultured Germans to speak and write in French, like the "enlightened despot," Frederick the Great.

In contrast with Frenchmen of the late Enlightenment and Revolutionary era, those classical "pagans" whose gaze remained riveted to the Roman horizon,^[89] the British had strong and recent German ties. Thus

[88] This garbled foomote translates into the following: [Robert?] Faucett, Über Melancholie (Leipzig, 1785) [I have not been able to identify this author]; Leopold Auenbrugger (1722-1809), Von der stillen Wut oder dcm Triebe zum Selbstraorde als einer wirklichen Krankheit, mit Originalbeobachtungen und Anmerkungen (Dessau: Verlagskasse, 1783), 71 pp.; Johann Ernst Greding (1718-1775), Medizinisch-chirurgischt Schriften (Altenburg: Richter, 1781); Johann Georg Zimmermann (1728-1795), Von der Erfahrung in der Arzneikunst (Zürich: Heidegger, 1763-1764); Melchior Adam Weickard (1742-1803), Der philosophische Arzt (Leipzig, 1775; 2 vols., Frankfurt: Andreas, 1790). The question raised by this footnote is further explored in D. B. Weiner, "Philippe Pinel, Linguist," Gesnerus 42 0985): 499-509.

[89] The term "pagan" is, of course, Peter Gay's key to understanding the Enlightenment.

a young Britisher like Alexander Crichton might elect to spend three years studying in Germany, something very few Frenchmen are known to have done.^[90] "In the summer of [1786]," Crichton's biographers tell us, "Dr. Crichton was prevailed upon by his friend, Dr. [Robert] Pringle, to give up his original plan, and to accompany him to Stuttgart, in order that they might study the language of the country.^[91] There Crichton undoubtedly made contact with the local circle of young natural scientists, for his lifelong interest in physiology and psychology took root at that time. Crichton then spent the winter in Vienna, where Maximilian Stoll had recently replaced Gerard van Swieten as the leading physician and where emperor Joseph II had just opened the Narrenturm; three months in Halle, where Crichton lived with the family of the distinguished anatomist Philip Friedrich Theodor Meckel; and the winter of 1787-88 in Berlin. He ended up in Gõttingen in March 1788 for a stay of six months. That is where the famous Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) was then teaching, surrounded by an active circle of students.^[92]

What did Crichton learn at Gõttingen about mental illness that he eventually conveyed to Pinel and especially to Esquirol? In German lands, it would seem, interest in mental illness grew out of an entirely different conceptual framework than in Great Britain or France. German doctors traditionally learned their medicine at the universities as a coherent philosophical system, and within this system there reigned the towering figure of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). His long essay on insanity, "Versuch fiber die Krankheiten des Kopfes," appeared in 1764 in five installments in Kõnigsberger gelehrte und politische Zeitung. Eventually he incorporated his brilliant though abstract classification of mental

[90] I can think of only two, namely the naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), who had spent his college years in Stuttgart, and the medical and forensic hygienist Charles Marc (1771-184l). There are undoubtedly others, but few indeed.

[91] Proceedings of the Geological Society 13 0857): lxiv.

[92] These included young medical scientists whose interests and future careers paralleled Crichton's. He may have met Karl Friedrich Kielmeyer in Stuttgart, where the young physiologist studied at the famous Karlsschule, together with Georges Cuvier and Fried-rich Schiller; Kielmeyer came to Gõttingen in the mid 1780s. Other personal acquaintances at Gõttingen may have included the medical publicist Christian Girtanner, and Heinrich Friedrich Link, whose lifelong interest in medical botany, as well as his career, resembled Crichton's closely. Common interests may have forged connections with other Gõttingen students of Blumenbach's in later years, for example with the famous naturalist and explorer Alexander yon Humboldt, and with Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, the biologist. For background, see O. Temkin, "German Concepts of Ontogeny and History around 1800," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 24 (1950): 227-246.

disorders into his Anthropologie.^[93] For Kant, the distinctive human trait was reason, and he stressed the power of the rational mind over the emotions. (He once wrote a thank-you letter that became a short essay, on the theme one might paraphrase as "mind over matter.")^[94] Crichton adhered to this contrast of reason and the passions, and Esquirol would use it, but in a special way.

While familiar with Kant's philosophy and anthropology, of course, Blumenbach was particularly interested in the development of the individual organism. His curiosity also focused on voyages of exploration and primitive peoples all over the globe, their physical growth and living habits; he owned a famous collection of skulls. His personality and his inquisitive mind inspired a number of young explorers, and Crichton fell under his spell. Blumenbach was also a lifelong friend of Sir Joseph Banks; he visited London in 1791, and we may assume that he saw Crichton on that occasion.^[95] Blumenbach coined the concept of the "Bildungstrieb" as in innate biologic drive in 1781. Obviously this term held broad implications for mental illness, for, if the physician could make the patient aware of pathogenic irrational drives and explain their psychologic meaning, then he could chart a path toward the patient's recovery of his health. Crichton translated Blumenbach's brief essay into English in 1792 under the title On generation, a poor equivalent of the German.^[96] It should have read On the Developmental Drive. For indeed he dealt with the central problem of contemporary physiology and develop-

[93] I. Kant, Anthropologie in pragrnatischer Hinsicht (Kõnigsberg: Nicolovius, 1798), part I, book I, sections 35-45. See also K. Kisker, "Kant's psychiatrische Systematik," Psychiatria e neurologia (Basel) 133 (1957): 17-28; R. Tõllner, "Kant und die Evolutionstheorie," Clio Medica 3 (1968): 243-249; G. B. Risse, "Kant, Sehelling and the Early Search of a Philosophical 'Science' of Medicine in Germany," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 27 (1972): 145-158; and N. Tsouyopoulos, "Schellings Krankheitsbegriff und die Begriffsbildung der Modernen Medizin," in Natur und Subjektitrität: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der Naturphilosophie des jungen Schelling: Referate, Voten und Protokolle der II. Internationalen Schelling-Tagung, Zürich 1983, ed. R. Heckmann, H. Krings, and R. W. Meyer (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Froman-Holzboog, 1985), 265-290.

[94] A thank-you letter from Immanuel Kant for a book that Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland sent him is in fact a short essay entitled "Von der Macht des Gemüths durch den blossen Vorsatz seiner krankhaften Gefühle Meister zu sein." Hufeland published it in his Journal der praktischen Arzneikunde und Wundarzneikunst 5 (1798): 701-751, and reissued it later, with comments (Leipzig: Reclam, 1824).

[95] See H. Plischke, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's Einfluss auf die Entdeckungsreisenden seiner Zeit (Gõttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1937).

[96] Blumenbach's full tide is Ueber den Bildungstrieb und dos Zeugungsgeschäfte (Gõt-tingen: Dieterich, 1781; 2d ed., 1791), translated as An Essay on Generation (London: Cadell, 1792).

ment and assumed a stance that Timothy Lenoir has recently called "vital materialism."^[97]

Some German attitudes toward the mind/body problem found their most famous formulations after Crichton's visit; but since he stayed in touch and received packets of books after his return to England, these writings should be mentioned here—also because they continued to attract attention in France in the early nineteenth century. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph yon Schelling (1775-1854) reminded philosophers and psychologists that man's body and mind were part of living, ever-changing Nature. Therefore Schelling's Naturphilosophie, first formulated in 1799, gave German medicine a vitalistic and Romantic bent.^[98] Many researchers tried to resist this "spiritualistic" development, among them the great physiologist Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813), in the opinion of some, the "German Pinel."^[99] He published his first important essay, "Von der Lebenskraft," as the lead article in his new Archiv für Physiologie in 1795. He also wrote a book on psychiatry in 1803. It was entitled Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen (Rhapsodies on the use of the psychologic method for the cure of mental derangement) and makes for extremely difficult reading.^[100] Yet Reil had many astute and profound thoughts about the mentally ill, even though psychiatry was not his specialty and he never worked in a psychiatric hospital. In contrast with the main body of his book, Reil's Preface adopted Naturphilosophie and exemplified the broad undercurrent of evangelical religiosity in the German attitude toward insanity and a tendency to equate insanity with sin and recovery with salvation. Reil wrote his Rhapsodieen of 1803 with the original intention of contributing a short piece to the journal of his friend Pastor Wagnitz. But the short essay grew to five hundred pages, which Wagnitz refused to publish.^[101] Reil's Preface conveys a sense of mission that Naturphiloso-

[97] T. Lenoir, "Kant, Blumenbach, and Vital Materialism in German Biology," Isis 71 (1980): 77-108.

[98] See F. W. J. yon Schelling, Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (Jena & Leipzig: Gabler, 1799).

[99] On Reil, see, for example, Sir A. Lewis, "J. C. Reil: Innovator and Battler," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1 (1965): 178-190, and I. Petzold, "Johann Christian Reil, Begründer der modernen Psychotherapie?" Sudhoff's Archly 41 (1957): 159-179.

[100] (Halle: Curt, 1803).

[101] Pastor Wagnitz had recently written a stern denunciation of German workhouses and asylums, and Reil emphasized his agreement with his friend's call for reform. See Heinrich Balthasar Wagnitz, Historische Nachrichten und Bemerkungen über die merkwürdigsten Zuchthäuser in Deutschland, nebst einera Anhang über die zweckmässigste Einrichtung der Gefängnisse und Irrenanstalten, 2 vols. in 3 (Halle: Gebauer, 1791-1794).

phie tried to impart to humanitarians of all nations. In a similar vein, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland's Journal of the 1790S called upon doctors to become medical missionaries to the poor.

In fact, an active German journal literature, not only books, discussed and publicized philosophical anthropology, natural history, religion, and their implications for mental health and mental illness. Two new journals, Zeitschrift für empirische Psychologie and Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde, began publication in 1783, the latter edited by Karl Philipp Moritz (1757-1793) and Salomon Maimon (1754-1800).^[102] Moritz was a friend of Goethe's and a well-published esthete, Maimon a protég<a0233> of Lessing's and Moses Mendelssohn's and a philosopher of whom Kant thought highly. And Erfahrungsseelenkunde was, in fact, the scientific study of psychologic experience, the very specialty that physicians like Crichton and Pinei were about to transform into psychiatry. In the Magazin, Crichton found what he "had not yet met with in any other publication, a number of well-authenticated cases of insane aberration of mind, narrated in a full and satisfactory manner, without a view of any system whatever."^[103] Neither of the two editors was a physician. Crichton, in contrast, brought the clinical approach to the perusal of the German case histories.

He had initially embarked on writing a physiology of mind and body in health and disease—until he read John Augustus Unzer's Erste Gründe einer Physiologic der eigentlichen thierischen Natur thierischer Körper^[104] and found that Unzer had accomplished the task. Nevertheless Crichton continued to study German thought about anthropology, physiology, and psychology, and his "esteemed friend" Blumenbach kept sending packages with German books and journals. Crichton's indebtedness to German learning is obvious from his repeated citations of a dozen contemporary German authorities. Of particular importance to Crichton was Melchior Adam Weickard's publication, Der philosophische Arzt, and Johann Ernst Greding's Sämtliche medizinische Schriften. Crichton appended eighty-five pages of Greding's Medical Aphorisms on Melancholy and Various Other Diseases to his Inquiry.^[105] It was thus the German

[102] Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde, als ein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte, mit Unterstützung mehrerer Wahrheitsfreunde herausgegeben, ed. C. P. Moritz and, as of vol. 8, Salomon Maimon (Berlin: Mylius, 1785-1805).

[103] Crichton, Inquiry, Preface, v.

[104] (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1771).

[105] Weickard, Der philosophische Arzt, and idem, Sarnmlung medizin-praktischer Beobaehtungen und Abhandlungen (Ulm: Stettin, 1798); Greding, Vermischte medizinische und chirurgisehe Schriften and idem, Sämtliche medizinische Schriften, 2 vols. (Greiz: Henning, 1790-1791). Greding (1718-1775), physician to the poorhouse at Waldheim in Saxony for seventeen years, recorded numerous observations and conducted over three hundred autopsies. On Greding, see N. Bondy, "Johann Ernest Greding (1718-1776): A Contribution to the History of Modern Psychiatry," Medical History 16 (1972): 293-296. Among the plentiful German sources mentioned by Crichton, the following were of particular importance to him: Schack Hermann Ewald, Ü ber das menschliche Herz: Ein Beitrag zur Charakteristik des Menschheit (Erfurt: Schlegel, 1784); Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, Grundlehre zur Kenntniss des menschlichen Willens und der natürlichen Gesetze des Rechtsverhaltens (Gõt-tingen: Dieterich, 1779); Johann Peter Frank, for his "truly elegant and learned work," System einer vollatändigen medizinischen Polizei (Mannheim: Schwann, 1779-1827); Christoph Girtanner, Ü ber das Kantische Prinzip für die Naturgeschichte: Ein Versuch diese Wissenschaft philosophisch zu behandeln (Gõttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1796); Marcus H. Herz, Versuch über den Schwindel (Berlin: Voss, 1786); Johann Gottlob Krüger, Naturlehre (Halle: Hemmerde, 1740-1749); Georg Friedrich Meier, Über Gemütsbewegungen (Halle: Hemmerde, 1759); Johann Joachim Schmidt, Behandlung der Krankheiten des Organs der Seele (Hamburg: Hoffmann, 1797); and Friedrich Gabriel Sulzer, Versuch über die natürliche Geschichte des Hamsters (Gõttingen and Gotha: Dieterich, 1774).

philosophers and physicians who attempted new formulations for the theoretical substrate of psychiatry in the early Romantic era. Crichton found their thought fascinating because of their focus on observation, on individual case histories, and on the natural history of diseases. Yet he developed his own approach.

SIR ALEXANDER CRICHTON (1763-1856): THE MAN AND HIS WORK

We can easily imagine Pinel’s surprise and pleasure when he read the Introduction to Crichton's Inquiry. He discovered a self-assured innovator equally impatient with ancient and modern models: Crichton proposed to practice observation and follow the analytic method including, we are amazed to read, "abstracting his own mind from himself, and placing it before him as it were, so as to examine it with the freedom and with the impartiality of a natural historian."^[106] (This attempt at self-analysis seems to foreshadow Sigmund Freud.)^[107] Crichton discarded traditional nosologists, even Linnaeus, as "generally and justly neglected."^[108] The mainstream of new knowledge, for Crichton, flowed from Germany, that "learned nation."^[109] His enthusiasm for Germany

[106] Crichton, Inquiry, Preface, x.

[107] R. Hunter and I. Macalpine suggest the comparison. See Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860: A History Presented in Selected English Texts (Hartsdale, N.Y.: Carlisle, 1982), 559.

[108] Crichton, Inquiry, Preface, xxvii.

[109] Ibid., iii.

Pl. 17. Portrait of Sir Alexander Crichton attributed to C. H. Harlow (no date).

set him apart from his British medical colleagues whose travels to the Continent had long taken them to Leiden and Paris, and then to Italy and perhaps Vienna. Stuttgart, Halle, and Berlin were unusual places to visit, but Crichton did not mind taking a different track than his colleagues: he did not even mention the large group of British medical practitioners who recorded their experience with mentally ill patients in books during the last third of the eighteenth century.^[110] The exception is Dr. Thomas Arnold, whose book Crichton lambastes repeatedly in his Introduction, and quite justifiably so. But Crichton spent little time on a critique of his colleagues—he was so convinced of being an innovator that he preferred to look ahead rather than backward.

He earned lavish praise from Pinel in the Introduction to the Traité of 1800. After heaping scorn on most contemporary writers on the subject, Pinel continued:

I except the research of Crichton, a profound work full of new observations based on the principles of modern physiology. It focuses on the pathogenesis of mental alienation rather than on its history or therapy. I believe I should now give an exact idea of the origins, development, and effects of the human passions on the animal economy, as this author has presented them, and as they should be known, namely as the most usual cause of derangement of our psychologic functions.^[111]

Pinel then proceeded to an eighteen-page paraphrase and analysis of History of the Passions and Their Effects. It is strange indeed that until now no one has explored the relationship of Pinel to Crichton.^[112] This relationship might have blossomed had Dr. F. R. Bidauh de Villas (1775-1824) carried out his intention of publishing a translation of Crichton's book, a project revealed in a manuscript at the Wellcome Institute, London. Instead, Bidauh wrote a close textual analysis and synopsis of Crichton's book but stopped short of part 3, On the Passions, the most novel and important section. He sent his work to his friend A. A. Royer-Collard, who eventually published it in his Bibliothèque médicale, but only in 1816-1817. By that time, the nascent psychiatry was turning its atten-

[110] See n. 80 above.

[111] Pinel, Traité, Introduction, xxi-xxii.

[112] Swain voices the opinion that Crichton was of great importance to Pinel, but she does not pursue this insight (Gauchet and Swain, La pratique de l'esprit, 347-349). Goldstein argues that Pinel "sought guidance" from Crichton (Console and Classify, 95). Yet when Pinel read Crichton's book, his own was already being printed. 1 incline to argue for a meeting of minds.

tion increasingly to brains, not the mind, and thus interest in the work of Pinel and Crichton was on the wane.^[113]

Who, then, was Crichton? There are only two monographic studies on Crichton in the literature,^[114] and only a few historians of medical psychology acknowledge his work.^[115] And yet Crichton, eventually Sir Alexander Crichton, born in Edinburgh in 1763, dead at the age of ninety-three at Seven Oaks, Kent, F.R.S., F.L.S., F.G.S., and a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians, not only wrote an important early book on psychiatry but served two tsars with distinction as head of the Russian civilian medical department for fifteen years, and then lived in London for another third of a century as a respected member of his profession.^[116] Crichton's education was broadly based, and his published writings are heterogeneous.^[117] He had studied at the Edinburgh medical faculty with Joseph Black, Alexander Monro, secundus, and especially James Gregory (1753-1821), who influenced him deeply. Indeed, a comparison of the topics and opinions in Gregory's Conspectus medicinae theoreticae reveals striking analogies to Crichton's Inquiry.^[118] But theory

[113] See Wellcome Institute, London, MS. 1164, dossier 29, and F. T. Bidault de Villiers, "Recherches sur la nature et le principe de l'aliénation mentale par A. Crichton," in Bibliothéque médicale; ou, Recueil périodique d'extraits des medleurs ouvrages de médecine et chirurgie 53 (1816): 30-67; 54(1816): 289-324; 55 (1817): 289-331. Bidault's essay on Crichton is not included in a collection of his Œ uvres posthumes (Paris: Veret, 1828), whose editor comments that "M. Bidault de Villiers seems to have given up that translation and limited himself to a detailed analysis... published in 1816-1817" (ix).

[114] See Hopf, Leben and Werk, and Tansey, "Life and Works;" for full citations see n. 7 above. Tansey gives a detailed account of Crichton's Scottish background and lifelong connections. She also offers some new information on his London practice and on his Continental experience.

[115] The best among these are A. Boldt, Über die Stellung und Bedeutung der "Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttung" von Johann Christian Red (1759-1813) in der Ceschichte der Psychiatric, Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften, Heft 12 (Berlin: Ebering, 1936), 45-51; Hunter and Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, especially 559-564; R. Hoeldtke, "The History of Associationism and British Medical Psychology," Medical History 11 (1967): 46-65; Schrenk, "Pathoiogie der Passionen" (n. 12 above) and idem, Über den Umgang mit Geistesltranken (n. 12 above), 123-124.

[116] Crichton was decorated by Tsar Alexander I with the order of St. Vladimir, Knight Grand Cross, second class, in 1814, and by King Frederick William III of Prussia with the Grand Cross of the Red Eagle, second class, in 1820. He was knighted by King George IV in 1821 and honored with the Grand Cross of St. Anne by Tsar Nicholas I in 1830.

[117] See Appendix, Biobibliographic Note 2.

[118] J. Gregory, Conspectus medicinae theoreticae; or, A View on the Theory of Medicine (Edinburgh: Stirling and Shade, 1823). It was first published in 1780-1782, at the very time when Crichton was a medical student in Edinburgh. A much earlier edition was translated into German as Übersicht der theoretischen Arzneiwissenschaft, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Fritsch, 1784-1785).

did not predominate in Crichton's training: he served an apprenticeship with the surgeon Alexander Wood and undoubtedly also "walked the wards" of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh.^[119] Moving to London at the age of twenty-one, he spent one year with another surgeon, William Fordyce, while also attending the hospitals. By the time he reached maturity, Crichton had absorbed three deeply influential British traditions, Baconian empiricism, Lockean Associationist psychology, and Scottish "Common Sense" philosophy. This was so obvious to Crichton that he wrote in his Introduction to the Inquiry; "The most useful of these authors, and their works, I shall now enumerate.... Those of our British Psychologists, such as Locke, Hartley, Reid, Priestley, Stewart and Kaims [sic ] need not be mentioned."^[120] And indeed Crichton incorporated these authors' ideas into his work in a casual and familiar manner.

The inductive method was basic to Crichton's approach: that is why he, like Pinel, set so much store by detailed case histories reported without reference to any preestablished "system." The absence of innate ideas and moral values—the tabula rasa —was another essential prerequisite for Crichton's Inquiry. A passage in History of the Passions that Pinel commented on with admiration reads:

The passions are to be considered, in a medical point of view, as a part of our constitution, which is to be examined with the eye of a natural historian, and the spirit and impartiality of a philosopher. It is of no consequence in this work whether passions be esteemed natural or unnatural, or moral or immoral affections. They are mere phenomena, the natural causes of which are to be inquired into.^[121]

Further, Crichton mentions the association of ideas as if this were a generally recognized and adopted truth: David Hartley's conclusions had by Crichton's time become obvious assumptions for the nascent psychi-

[119] G. B. Risse confirms that surgeons lectured there, beginning in 1770, and their students were admitted to clinical rounds and to surgical procedures: see Hospital Life in Enlightenment Scotland: Care and Teaching at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 266-271.

[120] Crichton, An Inquiry, Preface, xxvii.

[121] Ibid., book 11, 98-99.

atric specialty.^[122] For Hartley, association was a material process caused by the vibration and gravitation of particles in a fluid acting on the brain. Crichton combined this explanation with faculty psychology. According to this theory, a defective association acting on a mental faculty such as attention, will, memory, reason, or imagination will result in "derangement."^[123] Crichton's ideas of faculty psychology stemmed from Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), with whom he undoubtedly studied at Edinburgh, thus absorbing the ideas of Thomas Reid (1710-1796).^[124] Their "Common Sense" approach was of course more serviceable for a physician than the more famous contemporary Scottish philosophy, the skepticism of David Hume. Nor does Crichton mention the Theory of Moral Sentimerits (1759) by another Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith (1723-1790), while a French translation of the work by the marquis de Condorcet's widow stood in Pinel's library, and he mentions it in the Introduction to his Traité.^[125]

A Scottish education and training in surgery and medicine both in Edinburgh and London did not leave an inquisitive and ambitious young gentleman with the feeling that his preparation for a career was complete: he needed to undertake a tour of the Continent. Crichton spent four years, from 1785 to 1788, traveling abroad, and for our purposes this is the most intriguing part of his intellectual biography. One month sufficed to obtain the M.D. degree at Leiden, on 29 July, 1785, with a thesis De vermibus intestinorum. It is a mere eighteen pages long and—curious for a thesis in medicine—dedicated to the surgeons Alexander Wood and William Fordyce, his teachers.^[126] The season 1785-

[122] I have used D. Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, 4th ed.,3 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 180l). The book was first published in 1749 and translated into French by the abbé R. A. C. Sicard, De l'homme, de ses facultés physiques et intellectuelles, de scs devoirs, et de ses espérances, 2 vols. (Paris: Ducauroy, 1802). There is also a French version of Hartley's earlier Various Conjectures on Perception, Motion, and Generation of Ideas, published in 1746, translated by the abbé Jurain as Explication physique des sens, des idées, et des mouvementa rant volontaires qu'involontaires, 2vols. (Reims: Delaistre-Godet, 1755).

[123] For a good overview, see Hoeldtke, "The History of Associationism."

[124] Stewart served as professor of mathematics at Edinburgh from 1775 to 1785, and as professor of philosophy from 1785 to 1810. Reid's most influential books, popular at the time of Crichton's studies, were Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), and Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788).

[125] Pinel, Traité, Introduction, xxvii.

[126] A minor indication of how blurred the boundaries between medicine and surgery had become by 1785.

Pl. 18. Title page of Sir Alexander Crichton's M.D. thesis, De vermibus intestinorum (On the worms of the intestines).

1786, spent in Paris, left no noticeable traces in Crichton's writings (nor have I found any track of his presence in France)^[127] However, soon after the publication of his Inquiry, we find "Crickton de Londres" among the foreign associates of the official Société de médecine de Paris, and on 24 February 1835 he was one of 234 foreign corresponding members elected by the Paris Academy of Medicine.^[128] Crichton does mention, in Commentaries on Some Doctrines published in 1842, that he "had the honor" of "knowing Pinel personally."^[129] (That meeting must have occurred in the winter of 1785-86, when Pinel served as editor of the Gazette de santé. Likely places for an encounter were the Jardin du roi, where Pinel studied, the Helvétius salon, the surgeon Pierre Desault's rounds at the Hôtel-Dieu, or lectures at the Collège de France or the Sorbonne.)

Then followed Crichton's three Wanderjahre, spent at Stuttgart, Vienna, Halle, Berlin, and Gtttingen. Late in 1788, he returned to England. On 7 May 1789 Crichton joined the Corporation of Surgeons in London but disfranchised himself after two years because, say his biographers, he "never liked the operative part of the profession." Rather, he joined the Royal College of Physicians as licentiate on 1 June 1791 and worked at a dispensary in Holborn where he gave clinical lectures "upon a plan similar to that of Götingen University." In 1794 he was elected physician to Westminster Hospital, where he taught "The Theory and Practice of Physic," as we learn from an advertisement in the London Times.^[130] Despite this title he actually taught a course in psychiatry since he tells us in the Preface to the Inquiry that he wrote the book for his students. One can indeed imagine each of the three parts as notes for a course: part 1, on the nature and origins of mental derangement; part 2, on the physiology and pathology of the human mind; part 3, on the passions and their effects. The volumes consist of five, eight, and six chapters respectively—each chapter could well have formed the subject matter for one classroom presentation. Crichton lectured at the Westminster throughout the 1790s: we can assume that he interviewed

[127] Contrary to the comments of Tansey, "Life and Works," Paris was not yet "in the throes of a revolution in medical teaching," nor had the Charité Hospital been, as yet, "newly established" (243).

[128] Applicants petitioned for this honor, and thus there must have been correspondence between Crichton and the academy's secretariat. That documentation lies in some of the one hundred uninventoried—and, I believe, virtually untouched—boxes stored at the Académie nationale de médecine, 16, rue Bonaparte, Paris.

[129] A. Crichton, Commentaries on some Doctrines (London: Churchill, 1842) 180.

[130] 15 April 1794, 17 September 1794, and 15 September 1797.

Pl. 19. Advertisement on the front page of The Times (London) of 17 September 1794. The advertisement reads as follows:

MEDICAL LECTURES, WESTMINSTER HOSPITAL

THE PHYSICIANS of the Westminster Hospital, propose to read CHEMICAL LECTURES on the Cases which shall come under their care in the course of the Winter.

Dr. CRICHTON will begin his Course of Lectures on the THEORY and PRACTICE of PHYSIC, at the Hospital, on Wednesday the 1st of October, at 9 o'clock in the Forenoon.

Dr. BRADLEY proposes to read a Course of Lectures to comprehend the most useful Parts of the Institutes of Medicine, Materia Medica, and PHARMACEUTICAL CHEMISTRY, to commence the first Week in October.

A Lecture, introductory to the Chemical Courses, will be given by Dr. BRADLEY, at the Hospital, on Wednesday, October 1st, at 10 o'clock in the Forenoon.

Mr. CARLISLE will give a general introductory Lecture, on Saturday, October 4th, at 11 o'clock, wherein he proposes to point out the most advantageous mode of acquiring Surgical Knowledge.

Mr. LYNN and Mr. CARLISLE will afterwards continue to give such occasional Lectures on Surgery, as may be thought most useful to the Pupils; and Chemical Lectures upon every Operation, or important Case which falls under their Care.

For Particulars of the above Courses, and of attending the Practice of the Physicians, or Surgeons, apply to the Apothecary at the Hospital.

the mentally ill patients in front of his students—for indeed these patients were regularly admitted to his hospital in small numbers—and that he drew the students' attention to the psychologic manifestations of somatic illness.^[131] Owing to his book he was asked to testify regarding the sanity of James Hadfield, the madman who attempted to assassinate King George III in 1800. The next year, Crichton became a consulting physician at the Westminster and retained that position to the end of his life.

In 1800, Crichton married and shortly thereafter was appointed physician to Adolphus Frederick, duke of Cambridge (1774-1850), the tenth child and seventh son of King George III. New family connections smoothed his path, or he may have met the young man at Gõttingen, where three of the royal princes were sent for their education in 1786. Being now a courtier, he came to the attention of emissaries from the Russian tsar, who lured him to St. Petersburg in 1804. Were one to pur sue research on Crichton, one would go to Edinburgh, as Tansey has done, but mainly to St. Petersburg, for Crichton spent fifteen years in the service of the tsar. In a pamphlet published in 1817, he describes himself as

Physician-in-ordinary to their imperial majesties the Emperor and Dow ager Empress of Russia; Physician-in-chief of the Civil Department of the Empire; Knight of the Order of St. Vladimir; Honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg.^[132]

[131] The Medical and Physical Journal published monthly admissions figures to LondonHospitals. From December 1799 to May 1800, for example, the "Diseases admitted under the care of the physicians of the Westminster" included the following cases that may will have had psychologic concomitants:

Medical and Physical Journal 3 (1800): 16, 112, 208, 303-304, 408-409, 505-506.

[132] A. Crichton, An Account of Some Experiments Made with the Vapour of Boiling Tar in the Cure of Pulmonary Consumption (Edinburhg: Manners and Miller, 1817).

He published a Pharmacopoeia pauperum while in Russia and coedited a short-lived journal, Russische Sammlung für Naturwissemchaft und Heilkunde.^[133] (The Leningrad Archives would undoubtedly reveal more publications.) Unfortunately the Sammlung contains no entries signed by Crichton, though plentiful comment by the editors collectively. This indicates much curiosity about the geology, fauna, and flora of Asiatic Russia and China, which may well reflect Crichton's avocations, and a great deal of interest in southeastern Russia, where a cholera epidemic ravaged the population. Indeed, Crichton's medals were undoubtedly rewards for his efforts in fighting this epidemic.

In connection with a subsequent typhus epidemic, Crichton established an essay prize with thoughtful guidelines. He donated a thousand rubles for the best essay on indigenous remedies, and five hundred rubles for the best description of typhus. The instructions to candidates reveal Crichton's interest in susceptibility to the disease. Candidates should take the emotions into account, and inquire

what were the forms and characteristics of the disease among the inhabitants as the enemy came ever nearer to their homes, and later, when national enthusiasm rose to great heights, and finally, when total success rewarded the efforts of the fatherland?
And how did the disease manifest itself among the enemy, first, when he was still blinded by the illusion of victory (an illusion that remained alive among prisoners), and later, when he found himself toppled from glittering heights into abject disgrace?

It might also be worth examining national differences, Crichton continues, between Europeans and Asians, with regard to typhus.

Are there observations indicating that individuals in one nation fall ill more quickly and in larger numbers? are some more resistant to damaging influences or to contagion? or did the illness among them take on special characteristics or curious symptoms?^[134]

These questions indicate an astonishing sensitivity to what we would call psychosomatic parameters of illness. Crichton's contribution of a substantial prize, and the deferential tone in which his coeditors thanked him, suggest that this personal physician to the imperial family held a well-paid and favored position at the Russian court.^[135] Though eager to

[133] 2 vols., ed. A. Crichton, J. Rehmann, and K. F. Burdach (Riga and Leipzig: Hartmann, 1815-1817).

[134] Ibid., 2:x-xi.

[135] Tansey suggests another possible motivation for the prize: Crichton had devised a new method for refining vegetable oil, together with the apothecary Konstantin Kirchoff. Their factory, on Aptekarskiy Island in St. Petersburg, produced 4,400 pounds of oil a day. Crichton's monetary benefits from this invention must have aroused considerable envy, and he may have decided to give away some of the money to allay these feelings. See Tansey, "Life and Works," 248, and Dictionary of Scientific Biography, s.v. "Kirchoff."

come home in 1809, he did not obtain the tsar's permission until 1819, and we know little about the remaining third-of-a-century in Crichton's life. He became a respected member of the medical community, with an office in Harley Street, and was a member of the Royal, Geological, and Linnaean Societies of London. Interesting as a biographic investigation might be, we must now focus on the references, ideas, attitudes, and mainly the ideas he transmitted to Pinel and Esquirol about German anthropology, natural history, physiology, and religion, as they affected mental alienation.

THE INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF MENTAL DERANGEMENT

Crichton's Inquiry consists of three books on different though related subjects and a long Appendix. Book I is entitled "Inquiry into the Physical Causes of Delirium." It deals, in turn, with irritability, sensitivity, consciousness of self, pain and pleasure, and delirium. The first two sections review contemporary physiology and pay homage to Francis Glisson, Felice Fontana, and, above all, Albrecht von Hailer.^[136] In chapters 3 and 4, Crichton turns from physiology to psychology, from muscles to nerves, from plants and animals to man. His debt to Locke is pervasive: he argues for a categorical distinction of man from animals. In chapter 3 of the first book, Crichton discusses a complex notion for which scholars had no accurate term: they variously called it consciousness of self, self-feeling, coenesthesis, Gemeingefühl.^[137] It combines awareness of perceptions from outside and inside the body, and of relevant mental rune-

[136] Francis Glisson (1597-1677) identified irritability as a property inherent in all living bodies. He made important contributions to knowledge of the liver and wrote the original treatise on rickets. His works include De rachitide (1650), De hepate (1654), Tractatus de naturae substantia energetics (1672), and De ventriculo et intestinis (1677). The abbé Felice Fontana (1790-1805) was a naturalist, physiologist, and forerunner of the cell theory. Albrecht yon Hailer (1708-1777) was one of the most productive, prestigious, and knowledgeable naturalists of the eighteenth century. He taught at Cõttingen, but mainly in his native Bern, where he founded a botanical garden and an anatomic theater. He left voluminous and important writings in anatomy, physiology, and botany.

[137] Crichton refers the reader to the inaugural dissertation of Christian Friedrich Hübner, Commentatio de coenesthesi (Halle, 1794). For a modern and critical view, see the recent artide by Francis Schiller, "Coenesthesis," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 58 (1 984): 496-515.

tions such as memory, imagination, and reason. It provides the healthy person with a consciousness of these functions and thus of him- or herself. This awareness is, of course, intact in the healthy person but impaired in the mental patient. But it is chapter 5 of book I, "On Delirium," that interests us most because Pinel translated it immediately upon its appearance in France and published his version in the new journal, the Recueil périodique de littérature médicale étrangère.^[138] Delirium is an altered state of consciousness ("lira," in Latin, means a straight furrow) where a variety of different causes can produce similar symptoms. Alcohol, poison, strong emotions, or mental illness can all cause delirium. Crichton ascribed delirium to the action of a nervous fluid, altered in quantity and quality,^[139] whereas Pinel dissented, emphasizing "vivid emotions."^[140] In another note, Pinel offered a case history of his own.^[141]

Pinel also added several translator's comments in which he argued with Crichton. Since these have gone virtually unnoticed in the vast Pinel literature,^[142] they may be worth translating here. First, Pinel criticized the British author for basing an argument on a single case history, taken from Greding. Pinel continues:

I have followed a quite different method when I decided to explore the same subject. For two consecutive years, I watched about two hundred mentally ill men in a hospice under my medical direction. I first divided them into separate classes, idiots or imbeciles, melancholics, maniacs; I kept exact records of the continuous or periodic manias. For the latter, I took special notes on the precipitating events of insanity, premonitory signs of periodic bouts, the variety of lesions in the understanding, the progressive series of the other symptoms, their termination, etc. and it is after this research that I published a memoir on periodic insanity.^[143]

In another note, Pinel criticized Crichton for generalizing too freely about delirium and failing to classify and compare the phenomena he observed. This, of course, was Crichton's weakest point: as one of four attending physicians at an all-purpose, hundred-bed hospital, Westminster, Crichton had little occasion to observe the mentally ill. Commented Pinel:

[138] P. Pinel, "Recherches sur les causes du délire, par A. Crichton," Recueil périodique de littérature médicale étrangéere 1 (An VII [1798-99]): 401-418, 463-478. On this journal, see p. 335 above.

[139] Crichton, Inquiry, 168-169.

[140] Pinei, "Recherches sur les causes du dé1ire," 466 n. 1.

[141] Ibid., 472.

[142] The one exception is Swain and Gauchet, La pratique de l'esprit, 349 n. 39.

[143] Pinel, "Recherches sur les causes du délire," 411 n. 1.

It seems to me that these general considerations of delirium caused by hypochondriasis, melancholy, mania, fevers, or narcotics yield only vague knowledge since these are very different mental states, considering their accompanying symptoms, their history, and their outcome. A surer means of gaining information on this subject is to write the specific history of the different deliria, especially of maniacs, which are the least known. It is with this goal in mind that I have published my Memoir on periodic insanity [where] I traced the distinctive characteristics of maniacal delirium.^[144]

In yet another instance, Pinel faulted Crichton for an imprecise differential diagnosis of delirium in drunkenness and insanity. If one pays attention to the other symptoms that characterize the two, what marked differences! exclaimed the French clinician. "Is one delirium adequately explained by the other? The author should have avoided this sort of digression and followed the analytic process. He should have written a history of maniacal delirium according to a long list of observed facts, and derived inductions from these facts only."^[145]

This stern rebuke pales when compared with Pinel's most energetic editorial comment, occasioned by Crichton's mention of mind, as distinct from brain. Unaware of a pitfall that may topple the translator, Pinel equates the word "mind" with " âme, " or soul. Pinel jumps to conclusions (sensitized, no doubt, by recent French Revolutonary history, and by his own, long-rejected youth, when he wore the cassock and tonsure). Pinel lectures Crichton as follows:

This opinion of a separate soul, as an immaterial principle, is too dosely associated with theology to be introduced into medicine, in our present state of knowledge. All the more reason to exclude all the explanations the author deduces, in order to present the mechanism of delirium. Purity and severity of taste demand that the functions of the human understanding be explained only through their history. This applies to the healthy state, and to the deviations of illness in insanity. That is, one must go no further than to record the predisposition to delirium, premonitory signs, accompanying psychologic and physical symptoms, outcome, and remedies proven by an enlightened experience.^[146]

Crichton would have agreed. Pinel was, in fact, being contentious, and these preliminary comments about Crichton's thoughts on delirium reveal some anxiety on his part. With his book in press, he did not relish being "scooped" by the British author. For our assessment of the two

[144] Ibid., 404 n. 1.

[145] Ibid., 408 n. 1.

[146] Ibid., 469 n. 1.

writers it is important to underline their similar approach to a differential diagnosis of mental illness: they subjected each deranged faculty to examination through the close observation of the physiologic and behavioral pathology it produced in the patient and thus derived a diagnosis from their observation of mind and body in the clinic.

Book II of Crichton's Inquiry is entitled "The Natural and Morbid History of the Mental Faculties." It contains a straightforward analysis of attention, perception, memory, judgment, imagination, volition, and, surprisingly, "Genius, and the diseases to which it is most subject." Here, Crichton praises "a faithful monitor within us" that warns us "when any exertion of the mental faculties is carried too far and ought to be discontinued."^[147] Pinel, in his synopsis, awards this part of Crichton's work no more than half a page.^[148] This was because Pinel's attention focused on the third part of the work, namely "On the Passions, Considered as Causes of Mental Derangement, and on Their Modifications and Corporeal Effects." Here, Crichton analyzed joy, grief, fear, anger, and love, and their normal and abnormal impact on psyche and soma. He explained that emotions differ according to their cause: we may view a past action with remorse, an accident with sorrow or grief; anticipation of a future event may trigger anxiety, apprehension, or terror; an aversion may evoke anger, hatred, envy, jealousy, or shame. The effects of such emotions could be expected to vary according to a person's temperament, age, occupation, sex, and so forth.

The new contribution of our author concerns the interrelationships of emotion and physiology. In the chapter on grief, for example, Crichton sensitively probed the differences among distress, sorrow, melancholy, anguish, and despair. Then he explained major physiologic effects, for example a behavior such as sighing. When sadness slows the circulation, congestion around the heart ensues. The uneasiness caused by a sense of fullness stimulates the aggrieved person to take a deep breath followed by quick exhalation. This sigh indicates that the heart has pushed blood into the lungs where it was oxygenated and expelled.^[149] Crichton favored clinical examples, even though they were rarely his own. The book has no proper ending, but peters out with an odd list of "Conclusions," a brief inventory of "Genera and Species," and the eighty-five-page Appendix of aphorisms translated from Greding's Miscellaneous Works.^[150]

[147] Crichton, Inquiry, book Il, 26.

[148] Pinel, Traité, Introduction, xl.

[149] Crichton, Inquiry, book II, 175-181, passim.

[150] See n. 105 above.

Pinel wanted to convey the gist and flavor of Crichton's work to his readers, and to achieve this he paraphrased Crichton's analyses of grief, fear, terror, anger, and joy. We shall quote two long examples because this earliest printed evidence of Pinel's and Crichton's perception of mind and body in the clinic represents seminal texts of early modern psychiatry. We begin with Pinel's version of Crichton's section on grief—twenty-two pages of text presented in two pages of condensed paraphrase: "Having indicated the origins of human passions," asks Crichton, "how can one conceive of their power to provoke mental alienation, without knowing the history of their effects on the animal economy?" In Pinel’s version, Crichton explains:

The consequences of great sorrow are among the most remarkable; they include a feeling of general listlessness, decline of muscular strength, loss of appetite, small pulse, tightening of the skin, pale face, cold extremities, very evident decline in the vital force of the heart and arteries, leading to an imaginary sense of fullness, a feeling of oppression and anxiety, labored and slow respiration with sighs and sobs; an exhaustion of irritability and sensitivity sometimes so complete as to entail a more or less total torpor, a comatose state, or even catalepsy.
In a less extreme degree there occurs a kind of apprehension ["ennui"] caused by repeated impressions on the sensory organs, a reluctance to move or exercise, sometimes an acute pain in the stomach, much reduced circulation in the blood vessels of the liver and abdominal viscera. Therefrom result marasmus and a wasting state, when sadness has become habitual, that is, has turned into melancholy. The end of both is sometimes an irresistible inclination toward suicide, or a mild delirium, or a state of rage. Prior to total derangement several disturbances may occur: temporary insanity, gloomy appearance, or rather, boorish misanthropy, altered facial expressions, furtive and fierce glances, vague and confused thought, a state resembling stupor or drunkenness, and then suddenly an explosion of the most violent madness.^[151]

An equally dramatic and revealing analysis is found in Crichton's differential diagnosis of terror and of anger. Here again, patient behavior alerts the experienced clinician to the possibility of serious complications. We again quote Pinel’s synopsis of Crichton's text:

... terror differs from fear only by its intensity and sudden onset. It has its own characteristics, namely accelerated heartbeats, spasmodic contrac-

[151] Pinel, Traité, Introduction, xxvii-xxix. This passage represents a synopsis of Crichton's Inquiry, book 111, 177-199.

tion of the arteries, especially near the skin, causing paleness and a sudden dilation of the large blood vessels and of the heart; a sudden arrest of respiration, as from a spasm in the muscles of the larynx; tremors of the body and legs, loss of movement in the arms that hang limp; the impression is sometimes so strong as to cause collapse with deprivation of feeling and speech.
May not such an upheaval, under certain conditions, produce the most serious harm, violent spasms, convulsions, epilepsy, catalepsy, mania, or even death? (Plater, Shenkius, Bonet, Pechlin, Donatus, Van Swieten). It can also lead to a special flux of blood toward certain body parts and dangerous hemorrhages, such as menorrhagia, hemoptysis, apoplexy.
When rapid alternations of hope and terror occur, the debilitating effect of terror can be compensated for and give rise to unheard acts of strength and courage. Terror mixed with amazement can be caused by loud thunderclaps, the spectacle of a raging fire, a dreadful precipice, a pounding cataract, a burning town. This produces specific expressions such as a fixed stare, an open mouth, pale skin, a sensation of cold in the whole body, relaxation of facial muscles, frequently an interruption in the usual trend of thought, and dizziness. . . .

How much harm anger can cause when considered from a medical point of view! It presents two remarkable varieties: a pale face and somewhat livid coloring, with a kind of weakness and trembling in the extremities, or else a red and heated face with flashing eyes and extreme muscular energy. In the latter case, the blood is pushed violently toward the body surface, producing burning heat and a strong and animated tone of voice, convulsive and irregular breathing. The return of the blood through the veins to the heart becomes difficult; it flows back to the muscles and gives them more energy and strength. Its reflux toward the head and other sensitive organs may produce more serious trouble: violent hemorrhages through the nose, ears, or lungs, intermittent or continuous fevers, delirium, or even apoplexy.

One of the strangest effects of anger acts on the secretion of bile, its quantity and quality, as attested to by the most authentic observations (Hoffmann, Tulpius, Pechlin). Hence violent colics, persistent diarrhoea, sometimes jaundice. The only favorable consequence of this passion is an occasional cure of paralysis; but what meager compensation for the innumerable harmful consequences, especially when anger is excessive: sudden exhaustion of muscular and vascular irritability, syncope, convulsions, or even sudden death.

Anger rarely results in permanent madness, even though it alters the rational faculties in such an obvious manner, or interrupts their free use for a short while. But how much a gust of anger resembles a bout of madness! Reddened eyes and face, a threatening and furious mien, harsh

and offensive language. Is it surprising that anger has been called a brief madness?^[152]

It is hoped that these long descriptions of grief, terror, and anger in their mental, behavioral, and bodily expressions convey the reasons why Pinel found Crichton's book so dramatically revealing. (They also exemplify Pinel's elegant style, much superior to Crichton's.) Pinel appreciated his British colleague's clinical detachment, his descriptions free from moralizing comment, and the scientific precision of his observations. He prized the ease with which Crichton moved between physiology and psychology, particularly how he deduced mental phenomena from his observation of physiologic and behavioral symptoms. One example is Crichton's analysis of paleness, which he knew to be caused by a withdrawal of blood from the capillaries but at the same time observed to have been the result of terror. Pinel was impressed by Crichton's awareness of progression in the pathogenesis of mental illness, such as the clinical signs that precede an "explosion of the most violent madness," and his differential diagnoses, as between extreme anger and madness. Many of these qualities that Pinel admired were, needless to say, the very ones he had honed in his own clinical attitude toward the mentally ill patient.

Pinel's French readers did not pay much attention to Crichton, nor was the latter's book ever translated into French. In contrast, the Germans greatly appreciated Crichton's book and translated it twice: in 1798 already, Untersuchung über die Natur und den Ursprung der Geisteszerrüttung attracted attention. This was three years before Pinel's Traité appeared in a German version. The French alienist's praise of Crichton struck the Germans as a confirmation of their own independent judgment. They were understandably pleased by the Scottish author's extensive reliance upon their scholarship in anthropology, natural history, and psychology and touched by his gratitude for the inspiration and hospitality he received from his German hosts. A second translation of Crichton's book, in 1810, contains extensive notes by Johann Christoph Hoffbauer (1766-1827), professor of law and philosophy at Halle, whose book on legal psychology Esquirol later annotated.^[153] Johann

[152] Pinel, Traité, Introduction, xxxii-xxxv, passim. This passage represents a synopsis of Crichton, Inquiry, book III, chapter 4, "On Fear, Its Modifications and Effects," and chapter 5, "On Anger and the Offensive Passions, and Their Effects."

[153] Hoffbauer was himself an expert in the nascent psychiatry, from a philosophical and legal point of view. When he commented on Crichton's book in 18l0, he had already published two works of his own on this subject: Untersuchungen über die Krankheiten der Seele and die verwandten Zustände, 3 vols. (Halle: Trampen, 1802-1807), and Die Psychologic nach ihren Hauptanwendungen auf die Rechtspflege oder die sogenannte gerichtliche Arzneiwissenschaft nach ihrem psychologischen Teile (Halle: Schimmelpfennig, 1808; 2d ed., 1823). Hoffbauer particularly appreciated the emphasis that both Pinel and Crichton placed on the patient's mental powers. He seems to have known Pinel. His last-mentioned book was translated into French, with notes by both Esquirol and Itard, as Médecine légale relative aux aliénés et aux sourds-muets; ou, Les lois appliquées aux désordres de l'intelligence, trans. A. M. Chambeyron, M.D., interne de la Salpêtriè. re (Paris: Baiilière, 1827). Esquirol's notes are rather critical in tone and emphasize his own and Pinel's clinical experience. Together with Reil, Hoffbauer coedited the influenctial, though short-lived Beyträge zur Befõrderung einer Cur-methode auf psychischem Wege, 2 vols. (Halle: Curt, 1808). It is intriguing to find, in this jourhal, the review of a thesis by Lenhossek, published in Pest in 1804, entitled Untersuchungen über die Leidenschaften und Gemütsaffecten als Ursachen und Heiimittel der Krankheiten.

Christian Reil, Hoffbauer's friend and collaborator, granted Crichton, "in passing, his highest regard."^[154]

Unlike the British, the Germans criticized Pinel because they found his book unoriginal and disorganized. Most of them saw nothing special in the case histories, since case studies now abounded in the German literature and they argued that humane treatment of the insane was nothing new, nor special to France. Reil derided Pinei's book as a "cock-and-bull story, prolific in some parts but sick in general conception, without principles or originality, even though his nationalistic illusions lead him to claim these."^[155] At the same time, Reil borrowed from the Frenchman so copiously that Schrenk calls him a plagiarist.^[156] The religiously inclined psychiatrist Johann Christian Heinroth had no patience with Pinel at all. "Pinel's descriptions are neither consistent nor complete," he commented. "First, he groups the symptoms of various illnesses under one category; then, he passes quickly over the most important manifestations…. Overall, he identifies himself as a typically French writer, who never explores anything, who abandons the most important topics as soon as he raises them, and thus he never treats any subject thoroughly."^[157] With Crichton, in contrast, the Germans felt a deep kinship, believing themselves experts in the analysis of the passions.

The British author's book appeared at a time when Pinel was still searching for the right word to represent the misery, tension, and loneliness that he witnessed in the men and women for whom he cared. He

[154] Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethoden auf Geisteszerrüttungen (Halle: Curt, 1803), 31.

[155] Ibid.

[156] Martin Schrenk, Uber den Umgang mit Geisteskranken, Introduction and passim.

[157] Johann Christian Heinroth, Lehrbueh der Stõrungen des Seelenlebens oder Seelenstõr-ungen und ihre Behandlung (Leipzig: Vogel, 1818), 117.

chose "mental alienation" to convey the separation of the patient from society (and also to create a basis for conceptualizing mental illness in terms of the law). Pinel perceived a patient who feels odd in the "normal" world, a stranger (alienus ) in the land of sanity. A sympathetic therapist might well journey into that land of "alienation," learn the language of "in-sanity," understand the "alienated," and lead the patient back into society. Pinel's excellent Austrian translator, Dr. Michael Wagner, found a pertinent equivalent that Crichton may have appreciated, namely "Geistesverirrung, " a term that conveys the image of a patient who has lost his way.^[158] Samuel Tuke liked this term; he wrote in The Retreat, An Institution near York:

I adopt this term from an opinion that the aliéné of the French conveys a more just idea of this disorder than those expressions which imply, in any degree, the "abolition of the thinking faculty."^[159]

Rather than alienation, Crichton portrayed the antagonism between the mental faculties and the other self, the passions, that gripped body and mind. This was the core problem for the nascent psychiatric specialty that Crichton brought to France from Germany.

Strange as it may sound, Crichton may not even have known of Pinel's extraordinary praise for his book. It is likely that Crichton read the Traité in its guillotined English version of 1806, without the Introduction where Pinel expressed his admiration.^[160] Ironically, though Pinel’s Introduction of 1800 formed part of the German, Spanish, and Italian versions, the English translator substituted his own! Pinel's appreciative comments on Crichton have thus remained unknown to the English reading public, including, it would seem, Alexander Crichton. Would he not have mentioned the famous Frenchman's endorsement while reminiscing about psychiatry at the age of eighty, in 1842, when he praised "two witnesses who, for long and extensive experience in the treatment of mental derangement, and for fidelity in their narrations, have not as yet been surpassed—I mean Pinel and Esquiror"?^[161] It is sig-

[158] P. Pinel, Philosophisch-mediziniache Abhandlung, trans. Michael Wagner (Vienna: Schaumburg, 1801).

[159] S. Tuke, Description of the Retreat, an Institution near York, for Insane Persons of the Society of Friends (York: W. Alexander, 1813), 137n.

[160] The English translator, Dr. D. D. Davis, substituted his own Introduction for Pinel’s. While he kept, or paraphrased, numerous parts of Pinel’s lengthy presentation, he shrank the section on Crichton to one colorless sentence that reads: "The psychological work of Dr. Crichton exhibits some curious facts illustrative of the morbid influence of the passions upon the functions of the intellectual faculties" (1).

[161] Crichton, Commentaries on some Doctrines, 179.

nificant that he should mention Esquirol in the same breath with Pinel, for it is Esquirol who provides us with evidence of Crichton's impact on French psychiatric thought.

DOMINIQUE ESQUIROL: THE PASSIONS AND THEIR MASTER

In 1805 Esquirol published his medical thesis entitled Des passions, considérées comme causes, symptômes, et moyens curatifs de l'aliénation mentale (On the passions, considered as causes, symptoms, and means of cure for mental alienation).^[162] He dedicated the essay to Pinel "in homage of my gratitude," and declared himself Pinel's disciple throughout a thesis filled with case histories, many of them his own. He derived these from the private clinic that he had established at 8, rue Buffon, across the street from the Salpêtrière, in March 1802, three and a half years before completing his thesis. This clinic began and remained under Pinel's supervision; Esquirol thus publicly committed himself to carrying out his teacher's ideas, in theory as in therapy.^[163]

In his thesis, Esquirol came quickly to the point, stressing the close interrelation of psychologic and somatic phenomena and of feelings and thought:

Few authors have studied the relationship of mental alienation to the passions. Crichton offers exact ideas on the origins and development of the passions and their effects on the organism. Professor Pinel agrees with him, regarding the passions as the most frequent cause of upset of our intellectual faculties.^[164]

Having thus declared his indebtedness to these two authors, Esquirol formulated his own version of psychologic therapy. He based this on Crichton's analysis of the effect that strong emotions could exert on the mental faculties and the organism, and on Pinel's view that the therapist can intervene in order to orchestrate the struggle within the patient—strengthen the rational powers and help them master the emotions and thus promote recovery. For the formulation of his therapeutic strategy, Esquirol also drew on Bordeu's concept of "secondary centers of sen-

[162] (Paris: Didotjeune, 1805).

[163] The 39-page manuscript register of Esquirol's small private hospital for the years 1802-1808 has recently been acquired by the History and Special Collections Division of the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library at UCLA. See D. B. Weiner, "Esquirol's Patient Register: The First Private Psychiatric Hospital in Paris, 1802-1808," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 63 (1989): 110-120.

[164] Esquirol, Des passions, 20.

sitivity" in the epigastrium and in the precordial region. He did, in fact, revive the traditional notion of hypochondriac localization, but gave it a specific formulation. Why could not a skillful therapist, asked Esquirol, provoke a strong emotion and use it for a curative purpose? In fact, he advocated a psychologic but violent assertion of medical authority and the use of the passions as means of cure. To this end he proposed emotional shocks—des secousses —"physical or psychologic, that shake and one might say threaten the machine, and forcibly redirect it toward health."^[165]

Esquirol saw two potential benefits from this shock treatment: a judicious use of certain emotions by the doctor—for example intense remorse, regret, or joy—could help the patient regain rational command over his feelings. Secondly, Esquirol argued that control over the patient is essential in the asylum, and that individually and carefully administered shock differs categorically from the indiscriminate use of "ducking" in ice-cold water, or strong cold showers on the head or abdomen that others advocated. But there is no gainsaying that awe of the director was the ruling principle in the new clinic, and Esquirol often threatened and occasionally meted out punishment: he used the straitjacket, isolation, food deprivation, and even—if rarely—cold showers. But he never permitted what he called physical violence; the patients were never beaten nor intentionally hurt. His means are mild if compared to the chamber of horrors that J. C. Reil imagined—though Reil fortunately never had occasion to carry out his ingenious strategies for stimulation, excitement, fear, horror, pain, deprivation, and slavish subjection to the asylum director.

The first step in this therapeutic process was what Esquirol called "isolation," that is, removing the patient from home and familiar surroundings, and bringing the man or woman to the clinic for treatment. "Often the first shock to the intellectual and psychologic faculties occurs in the patient's home," commented Esquirol, "among acquaintances, parents, and friends.... I could multiply the examples of the beneficial impact on the psychologic state of mental patients resulting from their experience in an unfamiliar establishment where care, attention, and services are tendered, in contrast with the tortures they had expected and feared that they would find there."^[166] All contemporary specialists agreed on this point, whether it was the Quaker William Tuke or the Savoyard Joseph Daquin or the German physiologist Reil: therapy must take place

[165] Ibid., 70.

[166] Ibid., 43, 41.

in a new and neutral place far from previous emotional ties and from objects that might remind the patient of past upsetting episodes. But it was the initial encounter with the director of the clinic, Esquirol believed, that should impress if not frighten the patient. Again he had models, notably Francis Willis, the man chiefly responsible for the management of King George III's bouts of mental illness. "A great show of force and power, and a threatening demeanor and preparations designed to terrify," commented Esquirol, "can stop the patient's most obstinate and deadly designs."^[167] He recounted the case history of a twenty-year-old surgeon. He told the patient upon his arrival:

Young man, you must stay here awhile. If you want to be comfortable, behave yourself. If you act as if you had lost your reason, you will be treated as if you were mad. You must choose. See these servants? They shall do everything that you ask for, in a reasonable and sensible way. But they obey me only.^[168]

He welcomed a depressed, suicidal young woman in a kindlier way. Recounts the versatile therapist:

I seemed so frightened by her condition, I communicated such concern about the danger of her situation, that she herself asked her parents to let her stay. One must often welcome patients in a pleasant manner, with a kindly smile, with gentle concern and empathy.^[169]

In either case, the patient acknowledged that the director now wielded sole authority. "In surveying the diverse circumstances where the passions can serve in the treatment of insanity," concluded the young psychiatrist, "one is surprised that most students of mental alienation have ignored their use. Some day, perhaps, with sufficient data and with precise records of successful therapy, we will be able to establish the principles of moral treatment."^[170]

This hope took on new dimensions when Esquirol moved to the Salpêtrière as successor to Pussin, in 1811, and faced the challenge of adapting methods used in a small private hospital to a huge public asylum. Esquirol had been watching Pussin's authoritarian ways and he now conceptualized the establishment itself as a "therapeutic tool," using the accommodations and the routines—the food, clothing, outings, work—as so many means of commendation, enticement, reward, pun-

[167] Ibid., 56.

[168] Ibid., 36.

[169] Ibid.

[170] Ibid., 78.

ishment. In a word, Esquirol aimed to achieve the socialization of patients by regulating them, and thus helping them control themselves. This strategy was based on the belief that the fear generated in the mental patient will help dominate his passions, make him conform to social rules, and become "normal." Commented Esquirol:

Those who know the power of habit in human psychology will not be surprised about the influence that new habits can exert on the mentally ill patient: the need to control oneself, to compromise with strangers, is a powerful aid in restoring reason. As establishment specializing in therapy for the insane offers more appropriate care, better trained servants, well-adapted accommodations.^[171]

These words refer to Esquirol's private hospital, but he tried to make them true for the Salpêtrière as well, and they stayed with him as medical director of the Charenton asylum in 1826 and as chief sponsor of the Law of 1838 that still regulates internment of the mentally ill in France. Swain and Gauchet have analyzed this new relationship of powerful director to hapless inmate, and, in Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault has compared this regimentation of the mental patient to other institutions that imposed uniform behavior on large groups at the beginning of the bourgeois era and of the Industrial Revolution, in the factory, the prison, or the modern hospital, which he calls a "curing machine." Klaus Dõrner has amplified the theme in Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History of Insanity.^[172] Esquirol's view of the asylum as a "therapeutic tool" can indeed be made to fit into this authoritarian and dehumanizing context. It was not until Sigmund Freud revived Pinel's concept of prolonged and private doctor-patient communication that a relationship was restored in which the patient was again encouraged to speak freely for himself.

Thus a patient-centered approach to mental illness and a focus on the passions did not predominate for long in early-nineteenth-century French psychiatry. Rather, a reductionist materialistic approach, the tradition that emphasized physical causation of mental illness, won increasing favor; it shunted the attention of clinical investigators toward the brain, even the skull, away from mind, thought, and feelings. Crucial

[171] Ibid., 49. The concept of "habit" would be well worth elaborating in this context.

[172] See Swain and Gauchet, La pratiqne de l'esprit ; M. Foucauit, Suroeiller et punir: La naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), translated into English by Alan Sheridan under the title Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1978). Foucault borrowed the phrase "curing machine," out of context, from the humane masterpiece, Mémoires sur les hôpitaux de Paris (1788), of Jacques Tenon. On Dõrner, see n. 1 above.

elements that strengthened this emphasis were the vehement attack by François Joseph Victor Broussais (1772-1834) against Pinel in Examen de la doctrine médicale généralement adoptée of 1816,^[173] and the thesis that Antoine Laurent Jessé Bayle (1799-1858) presented in 1822, where he proved a correlation between a physical phenomenon and mental illness, namely that "arachnitis," or chronic meningitis, may be accompanied by general paralysis and a progressive and ultimately fatal dementia.^[174] The primacy of the passions, in early French psychiatry, lasted only for two decades, at most.

While it lasted, Pinel and Esquirol stood at the center of French attention, but Crichton was hardly noticed in France. True, he appears in the bibliographies both men appended to their articles written for the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales,^[175] Bidault de Villiers published a synopsis of the Inquiry, and several French contemporaries mentioned his name.^[176] But otherwise he remained unknown, a puzzling fact, given Pinel's eighteen-page analysis in the Introduction to his Traité of 1800. The chief explanation is Pinel's new Introduction for the second edition of the Traité, published in 1809, in which he briefly refers to Crichton's book, and then discusses the various passions in pages where it is not

[173] Examen de la doctrine médicale généralement adoptée et des systémes modernes de nosologie dans lequel on détermine par les faits et par le raisonnement leur influence sur le traitement et sur la terminaison des maladies, suivi d'un plan d'études fondé sur l'anatomie et la physiologie pour parvenir à la connaissance du siège et des symptôraes des affections pathologiques et à la théapeutique la plus rationnelle (Paris: Moronville, 1816), amplified in Examen des doctrines médicales et des systèmes de nosologie, 4 vols (Paris: Delaunay, 1829-1834). On Broussais, see the magisterial chapter in Ackerknecht, Medicine at the Paris Hospital, and M. Valentin, François Broussais, empereur de la médecine (Dinard: Association des amis du musée du pays de Dinard, 1988).

[174] A. L. J. Bayle, Recherches sur l'arachnitis chronique, la gastrite... considérées comme causes de l'aliénation mentale (Paris: Thèse médecine, 1822).

[175] Pinel cites the Inquiry in the bibliography of the article "aliénation" (1812) and Crichton's Synoptical Table of Diseases in the article "nosographie" (1819). Esquirol cites the Inquiry in the articles "folie" (1816) and "délire" (1814) where he adds: "This article was translated by professor Pinel and appears in Crichton's book." He then gives the reference to the translation in the Receuil périodique de littérature étrangère.

[176] See n. 113 above. Swain mentions two contemporaries of Pinel, both of them involved in health care for the poor, who cite Crichton: one is Dr. Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, the physician to "Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron," who refers to psychologic treatment as "the sublime art created in England by Willis and Crichton"; the other is Louis Francois Joseph Alhoy, for a while headmaster of the National Institute for Deaf Children, and subsequently an administrator of the National Welfare Institutions (La pratique de l'esprit, 348 n. 37). The reference by Itard appears at the beginning of his first report on the wild boy, recently reprinted in T. Gineste, Victor de l'Aveyron: Dernier enfant sauvage, premier enfant fou (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1981), 225.

possible to distinguish his ideas from Crichton's and where the Scottish doctor does not appear as an important stimulator of Pinel's thought.^[177] Also, Pinel called his new introduction "Introduction to the first edition," thus presenting his faint and brief allusion to Crichton in 1809 as if it had been written in 1800.^[178]

Was it a lapse of memory to call his new Introduction the "first," or an intentional obfuscation, as some critics suggest?^[179] Friends of Crichton's may well take umbrage at Pinel's elision of his eighteen-page analysis of the Inquiry in the Introduction to the second edition of the Traité. Might he have gone to the extraordinary length of calling his second Introduction the "first" in order to wipe out all memory of his early enthusiasm for Alexander Crichton, at least in the minds of French readers? Whatever the answer, Pinel's main motivation seems clear: he wished to appear as the prime analyst of the passions, and the young Esquirol echoed his thought.

There is enough internal evidence in these French physicians' writings, however, to permit the conclusion that it was Crichton who drew their attention to recent German medical research and publications. He helped introduce them to concepts such as Blumenbach's Bildungstrieb, Reil's Lebenskraft, and Schelling's Naturphilosophie and, more generally, to contemporary German scholarship in anthropology, natural history, and psychology, with its emphasis on developmental change, instincts, drives, and irrational forces that impel man as a biologic entity and over which he has little control.

[177] Pinel, Traité, 2d ed., Introduction, xxii.

[178] Walther Riese discovered the discrepancies when he translated the Introduction of 1800 in 1969. See The Legacy of Philippe Pinel: An Inquiry into Thought on Mental Alienation (New York: Springer, 1969), 23-49. The two Introductions are conveniently printed side by side and provided with some editorial comment in J. Postel and P. H. Privat, "Les deux Introductions du 'Traité médicophilosophique' de P. Pinel," Annales médico-psychologiques 129 (1971): 14-48. The totally revised Introduction to the second edition, written in 1809, was translated by Gregory Zilboorg, who mistakenly believed it to be the first Introduction because Pinel gave it that title. See Zilboorg's A History of Medical Psychology, 329-341.

[179] P. H. Privat, Philippe Pinel: Son temps, son eruvre (Paris: Thèse médecine, 1969). What must give one pause is Pinel's lack of generosity toward other colleagues: his denigration of Chiarugi, whom he dismissed in Introduction, Traité, xli; his failure to acknowledge Joseph Daquin's feelingful dedication of the second edition of Philosophie de la folie in 1804; and his covert indebtedness to Dr. James Carmichael Smythe (1741-182l) that Othmar Keel has studied and that Jacques Postel has gleefully echoed. See O. Keel, Lénéalogie de l'histopathologie: Une révision déchirante: Philippe Pinel, lecteur discret de J. C. Smythe (Paris: Vrin, 1979), and J. Postel, "Un nouveau mensonge par omission de Philippe Pinel, déouvert par Othmar Keel, lecteur indiscret et perspicace," Information psychiatrique 57 (1981): 619-622.

In his biographic sketch of Esquirol mentioned earlier, Henri Ey points to his countryman's deep sympathy for German thought, a set of convictions whose origins puzzle Ey. He alludes to Esquirol's "probable meeting" with J. C. Heinroth in Paris and comments that "agreement in their way of thinking was so fundamental" that no actual encounter was needed because their publications express the "similarity of their human and scientific convictions."^[180] An even closer link that Ey might have mentioned exists through J. C. Hoffbauer, who annotated the second German translation of Crichton's book and whose treatise on legal psychiatry Esquirol commented on in turn, in the 1827 French edition.^[181] Heinroth and K. W. Ideler explored the relationship between religion, morality, and psychiatry—as did Esquirol, who also shared a fascination for the "passions" with J. C. Reil and a lifelong involvement in asylum administration with J. G. Langermann. There is not room here to explore the "meeting of minds" to which Ey alludes, however rewarding this exploration would be.

This essay is merely designed to underline the importance of Alexander Crichton, who drew the attention of Pinel and Esquirol to German scholarship in psychology and psychiatry at the turn of the nineteenth century. He thus helped open the French medical world to the influence of German thought and served as unwitting ambassador of German medical Romanticism, from Gtttingen to Paris.

[180] H. Ey, "J. E. D. Esquirol,' in Grosse Nerveruärzte, ed. K. Kolle, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Thieme, 1956-1963), 2:87-97.

[181] See n. 153 above.

Appendix: Biobibliographic Notes

Appended are the first complete bibliographies of the three authors'
writings, omitting only Pinel's numerous pre-Revolutionary journal
articles.

1. PHILIPPE PINEL

Piners books and papers are listed in order of appearance: Translation of William Cullen, Institutions de médecine pratique, traduites sur la quatrième et dernière édition de l'ouvrage anglais de M. Cullen, Professeur de médecine pratique dans l'Université d'Edimbourg, etc., Premier médecin du roi pour l'Ecosse, 2 vols. (Paris: Duplain, 1785).—Edition, with notes, of G. Bag-livi, Opera omnia medico-practica, 2 vols. (Paris: Duplain, 1788).—Jacques Gibelin, ed., Abrégé des Transactions de la Société royale de Londres (Paris: Buisson, 1789-1791), 12 vols. Pinel was sole editor of volumes 5-7, entitled Chimie, Anatomie et physique animale, and Médecine et chirurgie, and coedited part 2 of Matière médicale et pharmacie. — Nosographie philoso-phique; ou, Méthode de l'analyse appliquée à la médecine (Paris: Brosson, 1798; ad ed., 3 vols., 1802-1803; 3d ed., 1807; 4th ed., 1810; 5th ed., 1813; 6th ed., 1818. — Traité médico-philosophique sur l' aliénation mentale ou la manie (Paris: Caille et Ravier, 1800). Pinel published a second, much enlarged, edition entitled Traité médico-philosophique sur l'aliénation mentale (Paris: Brosson, 1809). The title page states that it is "totally revised and enlarged," and the phrase "ou la manie" has been dropped from the title. German translation by the Hungarian physician Michael Wagner, Philosophisch-medizinische Abhandlung über Geistesverirrungen oder Manie (Vienna: Schaumburg, 1801). Spanish translation by Dr. Guar-nerio y Allavena, Tratado medico-filosofico de la enagenadón del alma o mania (Madrid: Imprenta real, 1804). English translation by Dr. D. D. Davis, under the unsatisfactory title, A Treatise on Insanity (London: Cadell and

Davies, 1806). Italian translation by Dr. C. Vaghi as Trattato medico-filosofico sopra l'alienazione mentale (Lodi: Orcasi, 1830). — La médecine clinique rendue plus précise et plus exacte par l'application de l'analyse; ou, Recueil et résultat d'observations sur les maladies aigües, faites à la Salpêtrière (Paris: Brosson, Gabon et Cie., 1802; 2d ed., 1804; 3d ed., 1815).

Pinel's articles are listed here in chronologic order, omitting a large number of short pieces on mathematics, natural history, science, and politics contributed to the Encyclopédie méthodique (Médecine), to Four-croy's journal, La médecine éclairée par les sciences physiques, to the Journal de physique, the Journal gratuit de santé, and critiques of published works and work-in-progress submitted to the Académie des sciences and published in its Procès-verbaux. On the subject of Pinel's brief articles in the Gazette de santé, which he edited from 1784 to 1790, see Pedro Marset Campos, "Veinte publicaciones psiquiatricas de Pinel olvidadas: Con-tribuciòn al estudio de los origenes del Traité sur la manie," Episteme 6 (1972): 164-195.

"Mémoire sur cette question proposée pour sujet d'un prix par la Société de médecine: 'Déterminer quelle est la meilleure manière d'en-seigner la médecine pratique dans un hôpital'" (the French text was published by G. Bollotte in Information psychiatrique 47 [1971]: 105-128; an English translation is to be found in D. B. Weiner, ed. and tr., The Clinical Training of Doctors ).—"Mémoire sur la manie périodique ou in-termittente," Mémoires de la Société médicale d'èmulation 1 (An V [1796- 97]): 94-119. — "Recherches et observations sur le traitement moral des aliénés," ibid. 2 (An VI [1797-98]): 215-255. — "Observations sur les aliénés et leur division en espèces distinctes," ibid. 3 (An VII [1798-99]): 1-26. — "Recherches sur les causes du délire, par A. Crichton," Recueil périodique de littérature médicale étrangère 1 (An V I I [1798-99]): 401-418, 463-478. — "Recherches sur le traitement general des femmes aliénées dans un grand hospice, et résultats obtenus à la Salpêtrière après trois années d'expérience," Le moniteur universel, 11 Messidor, An XIII, 1158-160. — "Résultats d'observations et construction de tables pour servir à determiner le degré de probabilité de la guérison des aliénés," Mémoires de la classe des sciences mathématiques et physiques, Institut national de France, 1st ser., 8 (1807): 169—205. — "Résultats d'observations pour servir de base aux rapports juridiques dans les cas d'aliénation mentale," Mémoires de la Société médicale d'émulation 8 (1817): 675-684. — See also R. Semelaigne, "Notes inédites de Pinel, avec un 'Tableau général des fous de Bicêtre,'" Bulletin de la Société clinique de médecine mentale 6 (l 913): 221-227. Jacques Postel has published this "Tableau" in Genèse de la psy-

chiatrie: Les premiers écrits de Philippe Pinel (Paris: Sycomore, 1981), 226-229.

Even though written by J. B. Pussin, the following document pertains to the above list: "Observations du citoyen Pussin sur les fous," Archives nationales, 27 AP 8 (doc. 2). For an annotated English translation, see Weiner, "The Apprenticeship of Philippe Pinel."

Pinel contributed the following articles to the famous Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, 60 vols. (Paris: Panckoucke, 1812-1822): "âcreté," 1 (1812): 144—146; "adynamie," 1 (1812): 161—163; "agissante (méde-cine)," 1 (1812): 192—198; "aigües (maladies aigües," 1 (1812): 203-205; "aliénation," 1 (1812): 311-321; "analyse (appliquée à la médecine)," 2 (1812): 19-30; "asthénie," 2 (1812): 401—406; "ataxie," 2 (1812): 419-422; "benin" 3 (1812); 78-79; "Brownisme," 3 (1812): 320-323. "caché-xie," 3 (1812): 410-412; "chronique (maladies chroniques)," 5 (1813): 171-177; "classification (des maladies internes)," 5 (1813): 276-287; "clinique," 5 (1813): 364-371; "décomposition des maladies," 8 (1814): 169-174; "dose," 10 (1814): 15l-169; "doute philosophique,' 10 (1814): 239-242; "expectation (en médecine ou médecine expectante)," 14 (1815): 247-254; "experience (en médecine considérée d'une manière générale)," 14 (1815): 267-273; "fièvre," 15 (1815): 217-240; and, together with Bricheteau, "idéologie," 23 (1818): 473-483; "médecine," 31 (1819): 380-394; "nosographie," 36 (1819): 206-265.

The definitive biography of Pinel remains to be written: the secondary literature is huge, and only a few pertinent samples will be mentioned here. The books by Pinel's descendant René Semelaigne (the grandson of Piners nephew) have long been regarded as authoritative: Philippe Pinel et son oeuvre au point de vue de la médecine mentale (Paris: Im-primeries réunies, 1888); idem, Les grands aliénistes français (Paris: Stein-heil, 1894), 15-117; and idem, Aliénistes et philanthropes: Les Pinel et les Tuke (Paris: Steinheil, 1912). Upon investigation it appears that Seme-laigne and his family have, for over a century, been extremely protective of their famous ancestor and may well have destroyed much documentation: only a handful of letters from Pinel to his brothers survive, and all the official dossiers, at the Archives nationales, the Académie des sciences, the Académie de médecine, and the Archives de la Seine in Paris, are virtually empty. This is surprising and suggests that someone may have purged the evidence. The official eulogy at the Academy of Sciences was given by Georges Cuvier, "Eloge historique de Pinel, lu le 11 juin 1827 à l'Académie des sciences," Mémoires, Paris, Académie des sciences, 2d ser., 9 (1830): ccxxi-cclx, and the eulogy

at the Academy of Medicine was given by Etienne Pariset, "Eloge de Philippe Pinel, lu à la séance du 28 aoÛt 1827," in Histoire des membres de l'Académie royale de médecine, 2 vols. in 1 (Paris: Baillière, 1845), 1:209-259. The best brief evaluations of Pinel are P. Huard and M.J. Imbault-Huard, "Philippe Pinel, idéologue, nosologiste, et psychiatre," Gazette médicale de France 9 (1977): 161-165; M.J. Imbault-Huart, "Pinel, nos-ologiste et clinicien," ibid. 12 (1978): 33-38; and J. Delay, "Philippe Pinel à la Salpêtrière," Médecine de France 96 (1958): 10-16. The best analyses of Pinel's thought in English are W. Riese, The Legacy of Philippe Pinel: An Inquiry into Thought on Mental Alienation (New York: Springer, 1969), and idem, "Philippe Pinel, His Views on Human Nature and Disease, H is Medical Though t," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 114 (1951): 313-323; thoughtful shorter works in English are E. Woods and E. T. Carlson, "The Psychiatry of Philippe Pinel," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 35 (1961): 14-25; K. A. Grange, "Pinel and Eighteenth-Century Psychiatry," ibid. 35 (1961): 442-453. In contrast with Pinel's public professional life, his early years, until his arrival in Paris in 1778, are well documented. See W. H. Lechler, Philippe Pinel: Seine Familie, seine Jugend- und Studienjahre 1745-177. Roques, St. Paul-Cap-de-Joux, Lavaur, Toulouse, Montpellier, unter Verwendung zum Teil noch unveröffentlichter Doc-umente (Munich: The author, 2959), and especially the following papers by the late Pierre Chabbert of Castres: "Les années d'études de Philippe Pinel: Lavaur, Toulouse, Montpellier," Monspeliensis Hippocrates 3 (1960): 15-23; "L'œuvre médicale de Philippe Pinel," in Comptes-rendus du 96ème Congrès national des sociétés savantes (Paris: Bibliothèque na-tionale, 1971), 153-161; "Philippe Pinel à Paris jusqu'à sa nomination à Bicê," in Aktuelle Probleme aus der Geschichte der Medizin: Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of the History of Medicine (Basel: Karger, 1966), 589-595.

The most innovative recent work comes from the pen of Gladys Swain: Le sujet de la folie: Naissance de la psychiatrie (Toulouse: Privat, 1977). She has also coauthored a profound book on the era of Pinel: Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain, La pratique de l'esprit humain: L'institution asilaire et la révolution démocratique (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). Important is the work of Jacques Postel, a mixture of appreciation and disdain: Genèse de la psychiatrie: Les premiers écrits de Philippe Pinel (Paris: Le syco-more, 1981) and his articles "Les deux Introductions du Traité médico-philosophique de Philippe Pinel," Annales médico-psychologiques 129 (1971): 14-48; "Phillippe Pinel: 'Observations sur une espèce particulière de méancholie qui conduit au suicide,'" ibid. 54 (1978): 1237-1141; "Pages d'histoire: Philippe Pinel h Bicêtre," Psychiatrie française, n.s., 10 (1979):

173-181; "Naissance et décadence du traitement moral pendant la première moitié du 19ème siècie," L'évolution psychiatrique 44 (1979): 588-616; "Philippe Pinel et le mythe fondateur de ia psychiatrie," Psychanalyse à l'université 4 (1979): 197-244; "Un nouveau mensonge par omission de Philippe Pinel, découvert par Othmar Keel, lecteur indiscret et perspicace," Information psychiatrique 57 (1981): 619-622; "Pinel et Mesmer: Un rendez-vous manque," Magazine littéraire 175 (1981): 25-28; "Un manuscript inédit de Philippe Pinel sur les guéisons opérées dans le 7ème emploi de Bicêtre, en 1794," Revue internationale d'histoire de la psychiatrie 1 (1983): 79-88; "Les premieres experiences psychi-atriques de Pinel à la maison de santé Belhomme," Revue canadienne de psychiatrie 28 (1983): 571-576.

See also D. B. Weiner, "Health and Mental Health in the Thought of Philippe Pinel: The Emergence of Psychiatry during the French Revolution" in Healing and History: Essays for George Rosen, ed. Charles E. Rosen-berg (New York: Science History Publication, 1979), 59-85; idem, "The Apprenticeship of Philippe Pinel: A New Document, 'Observations of Citizen Pussin on the Insane,'" American Journal of Psychiatry 136 (1979): 1128-1134; idem, "Trois moments-clés dans la vie de Philippe Pinel," in Comptes-rendus du 27ème Congrès international d'histoire de la médecine (Barcelona: Academia de Ciencies Mèdiques de Catalunya i Balears, 1981), l: 154-161; idem, "The Origins of Psychiatry: Pinel or the Zeitgeist?" in Zusammenhang: Festschrift für Marielene Putscher, eds. O. Baur and O. Glandien, 2 vols. (Cologne: Wienand, 1984), 2:617-631; idem, "Philippe Pinel, père: Deux générations en conflit," Perspectives psychia-triques 96 (1984): 100-103; idem, "Philippe Pinel, Linguist," Gesnerus 42 (1985): 499-509; idem, "The Madman in the Light of Reason, Part II: Alienists, Asylums, and the Psychologic Approach," in Handbook of the History of Psychiatry, eds. E. R. Wallace, IV, and J. Gach (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).

2. SIR ALEXANDER CRICHTON

Crichton's books, in chronologic order, consist of: De vermibus intesti-norum (Leiden: Medical thesis, 1785). — A translation of J. F. Biumen-bach, Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäft (Göttingen: Diet-erich, 1791), under the title An Essay on Generation (London: Cadell, 1792).—An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement, Comprehending a Concise System of the Physiology and Pathology of the Human Mind, and a History of the Passions and their Effects (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798). German translation (Leipzig, 1798; ad ed., Leipzig, 18l0,

with notes and additions by Johann Christoph Hoffbauer). Dutch translation by L. Bicker (Rotterdam and Leiden, 180l, 2d ed., 1804). The library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London owns a 62-page manuscript synopsis of Crichton's book in French, by Dr. F. R. Bidault de Villiers (1775-1824). He undertook this for his friend A. A. Royer-Collard, the medical director of Charenton hospice, Es-quirol's predecessor. This translation is not included in Bidault's Recueil des oeuvres posthumes (Paris: Veret, 1828), but he published a synopsis in Bibliothèque médicale 53 (1816): 30-67; 54 (1816): 289-324; 55 (1817): 289-331 —A synoptical Table of Diseases, exhibiting their Arrangement in Classes, Orders, Genera, and Species, designed for the Use of Students (London: h.p., 1805).—Russische Sammlung fiir Naturwissenschaft und Heilkunde, eds. Drs. A. Crichton, J. Rehmann, and K. F. Burdach, 2 vols. (Riga and Leipzig: Hartmann, 1815-1817).—Pharmacopoeia pauperum (St. Petersburg: n.p., 1807). — An Account of Some Experiments Made with the Vapour of Boiling Tar in the Cure of Pulmonary Consumption (Edinburgh: Manners and Miller, 1817), 62 pp. French translation (St. Petersburg, 1817). German translation (Braunschweig, 1819). — Practical Observations on the Treatment and Cure of Several Varieties of Pulmonary Consumption, and on the Effects of the Vapour of Boiling Tar in that Disease (London: Lloyd, 1823), 228 pp. Crichton dedicated this enlarged version to the Dowager Empress of all the Russias, in recognition of"the great confidence which was placed in me during my long residence at the court of Russia by His Majesty the Emperor and Your Imperial Majesty, and your august Family." — Commentaries on some Doctrines of a dangerous Tendency in Medicine, and on the general Principles of safe Practice (London: Churchill, 1842).

In addition to these books, Crichton wrote the following papers: "Some Observations on the Medicinal Effects of the lichen islandicns and Arnica montana," London Medical Journal 10 (1789): 229-241. — "A Case of Oedema fugax and a Case of an hitherto undescribed Cause of Jaundice," Medical Physical Journal 6 (1802): 25-31. — "The Means by which Vitality is Supplied to the Living System," read to the Royal Society on 17 March 1814 (Crichton was still in Russia), London Medical, Surgical, and Pharmacological Repertory 1 (1814): 439. — "On the Climate of the Antediluvian World, and its Independence of Solar Influence; and on the Formation of Granite," Annals of Philosophy 9 (1825): 97-108, 207-217. This essay is cast in the shape of a letter to the editor and is sent from "Harley Street, Cavendish Square." — Crichton read three short papers to the Geological Society, namely: "On the Taunus and other

Mountains of Nassau, in Explanation of Specimens presented to the Geological Society of London," Geological Society Transactions 2 (1826): 265-272. This was the year when Crichton put his collection of minerals up for sale. — "On the Geological Structure of the Crimea," Geological Society Proceedings 1 (1832): 342-343· — "An Account of Fossil Vegetables Found in the Sandstone which underlies the Lowest Bed of the Carboniferous Limestone near Ballisadiere, in the County of Sligo, Ireland," ibid. 11 (1838): 394-395. Tansey tells us that Crichton's interest in Ireland stemmed from some lands inherited by his wife. See also his Reflections on the Policy of Making an Ample and Independent Provision for the Roman Catholic Clergy of lreland (London : Ridgeway, 1834).

There are only two scholarly studies of Crichton: H. Hopf, Leben und Werk Alexander Crichtons (1765-1856) (Munich: Medical thesis, 1962), and E. M. Tansey, "The Life and Works of Sir Alexander Crichton, F.R.S. (1763-1856): A Scottish Physician to the Imperial Russian Court," Royal Society of London: Records and Proceedings 38 (1983): 241-259. A number of scholars devote passages of varying lengths to an analysis of Crichton's contribution to the prehistory of psychiatry, namely: A. Boldt, Über die Stellung und Bedeutung der "Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttung" von Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813) in der Geschichte der Psychiatrie, Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften, Heft 12 (Berlin: Ebering, 1936), 45-51; Hunter and Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, especially 559-564; R. Hoeldtke, "The History of Association-ism and British Medical Psychology," Medical History 11 (1967): 46-65; M. Schrenk, "Pathologie der Passionen: Zur Erinnerung an J. E. D. Esquirol, geboren 1772," Nervenarzt 44 (1973): 195-198; and idem, Über den Umgang mit Geisteskranken, 123-124.

There is a substantial entry in A. Hirsch et al., Biographisches Lexikon der hervorragenden Arzte aller Zeiten und Völker, s.v. "Crichton," and a full obituary in Proceedings of the Geological Society of London 13 (1857): lxiv-lxvi, most of which is copied by the authors of the obituaries in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 3 (1856): 269-272; W. Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London, 2d ed. (London: The College, 1878), vol. 2 (1701-1800 ), 416-418, and Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 5 (1908), s.v. "Crichton." D. Leigh, in The Historical Development of British Psychiatry (Oxford: Pergamon, 1961), devotes almost all his attention to Crichton's nosology (44-47, 161), which is heavily indebted to Cullen, as we would expect. See also N. H. Schuster, "English Doctors in Russia in the Early Nineteenth Century," Proceedings of the Royal Society

of Medicine 61 (1968): 185-190, and John Appleby, "British Doctors in Russia, 1657-1807" (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1979), 243, 341, 357, 364: these passages deal with seeds obtained for Kew Gardens from Russia. One passage reads: "In 1818, Sir Joseph Banks informed the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew that he had received a parcel of seeds on 18 August from Dr. Alexander Crichton of St. Petersburg. He believed them to be Siberian, but was uncertain as he had not received an accompanying letter" (364). A cursory treatment of Crichton is found in Ekbert Faas, Retreat into the Mind: Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 36, 52-53, 58-59, 61, 100.

3. JEAN ETIENNE DOMINIQUE ESQUIROL

Esquirol's entire oeuvre consists of essays: twelve of these, first written for the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, constitute his major book, Des maladies mentales of 1838, some are new definitions from the point of view of psychiatry or the law (for example "illusion," "hallucination," "homicidal monomania"), some are of a political and administrative nature (for example "maisons d'aliénés"), some were read to the Academic royale de médecine, of which he was a member, some to the Academic des sciences, to which he did not belong. Sometimes there only subsist synopses in contemporary journals of papers that no longer exist. Es-quirol's papers are here listed in the order of their appearance in each journal, to indicate the growth and change of his interests.

Esquirol published almost exclusively in the following journals: Annales d'hygiène publique et de médecine légale, 1829-1923 (henceforth AHP ), Archives générales de médecine, 1823-1914 (henceforth AGM ), Bibliothèque médicale; ou, Recueil périodique d'extraits des meilleurs ouvrages de médecine et de chirurgie, 1803-1822 (henceforth BMRP ), Journal général de médecine, de chirurgie et de pharmacie; ou, Receuil périodique de la Société de médecine de Paris, 1796-1830 (henceforth JGM ), Revue médicale française et ét-rangère, 1820-1880 (henceforth RMFE ).

The AHP contain the following articles by Esquirol: "Rapport statis-tique sur la maison royale de Charenton pendant les années 1826, 1827, et 1828," 1 (1829): 100-151; "Sur deux homicides commis par un homme atteint de monomanie avec hallucinations," 2 (1829): 392-405; "Monomanie érotique méconnue par des personnes étrangéres à l'observation des alien,s," 3 (1830): 198-220 (with Marc, Ferrus, and Leuret); "Sur la statistique des alien,s et sur le rapport du nombre des alien,s h la population: Analyse de la statistique des aliénés de la Norvège," 4

(1830): 332-359; "Consultation médico-légale: Sur l'état mental d'un testateur, jugé d'après les actes de ses dernières volontés," 5 (1831): 370-385; "Consultation médico-légale: Sur la validité du testament d'un homme atteint d'hémiplégie, avec affaiblissement de l'intelligence," 7 (1832): 203-207; "Question médico-légale: Sur l'isolement des aliénés," 9 (1833): 131-191; "Mémoire historique et statistique sur ia maison royale de Charenton," 13 (1835): 5-192; "Consultation médico-légale sur l'état mental de Pierre Rivière," 15 (1836): 202-205 (with Orfila, Marc, Pariset, Rostan, Mitivié, and Leuret); "Consultation sur un cas de suspicion de folie, chez une femme inculpée de vol," 20 (1838): 435-460; "Observations médico-légales sur la monomanie homicide," 23 (1840): 204-215; "Rapport sur un cas de bigamie," 24 (1840): 402-406 (with F. L. Leuret); "Monomanie homicide: Rapport sur l'état mental du nommé B," 24 (1840): 350-359.

In Annuaire médico-chirurgical des hôpitaux (Paris: Crochard, 1819), Es-quirol published "Mémoire sur la folie à la suite des couches," 600-632 (see also abstract of this paper in BMRP 60 [1818]: 390-392.

The AGM contain the following articles by Esquirol: "Remarques sur les signes donnés par les auteurs comme propres à faire connaître si le corps d'une personne, trouvé pendu, l'a été apres la mort ou pendant qu'elle vivait encore," 1 (1823): 1-13 (see similar article in JGM ); "Note sur le mode de traitement employé à l'hôpital des aliénés de Moscou par le Dr. Kibaltiez," 3 (1823): 374-377; "Tumeur considerable développée dans l'intérieur du crâne," 3 (1823): 594-597; "Note sur l'institution des aliénés à St. Pétersbourg 4 0824): 143-145; abstract, "Existe-t-il de nos jours un plus grand nombre de fous qu'il n'en existait il y a quarante ans?" 6 (1824): 290-293; abstract, "Etranglement interne de l'intestin grêle," 7 (1825): 461; "Altérations du système cérébro-spinal," report on essays submitted for a prize offered by the Académie de médecine, public meeting 5 November, 9 (1825): 598; "Note statistique sur la maison des insensés de Matti à Aversa, dans le royaume de Naples," 12 (1826): 195-202; abstract, "Des illusions chez les alien,s," 30 (1832): 275-277.

The BMRP contains the following articles by Esquiroh "Notice sur M. Nysten," 1818, 61: 248-250, "Sur les déplacements du colon transverse dans l'aliénation mentale," 1818, 60:392-396, 61: 388-389.

The JGM contains the following articles by Esquirol: "Observations sur rapplication du traitement moral à la manie, par M. Esquirol, méde-cin d'une maison de traitement d'aliénés, située vis-à-vis la Salpêtrière," 17 (7th year) (Thermidor, An XI [August 1803]): 281-294; "Observations pour servir à l'histoire du traitement de la manie; par M. Esquirol, médecin de ia maison de traitement des aliénés, vis-à-vis la Salpêtrière,

No. 8," 19 (An XII [February 1804]):, 29-147; review of Traité de matière médicale by C. J. A. Schwilgué, 2d ed., ed. P. H. Nysten, 37 (1810): 106-109; "Sur les terminaisons critiques de la manie," 50 (1814): 3-85; "Observations sur l'aliénation mentale à la suite de couches," 62 (1818): 148-164; "De l'aliénation mentale à la suite des couches, pendant et après l'allaitement: Lu à la Société de médecine le 17 mars 1818," 62 (1818): 337-340; "Ouverture de corps d'aliénés qui présentent le colon transverse dans une direction perpendiculaire, et son extrémité splénique descendue derrière le pubis," 62 (1818): 341-358; 63 (1818): 176-184; "Obervation de fracture d'une vertèbre dorsale, suite d'une chute sur les lombes," 64 (1818): 80 (from a case report in Biblio-thèque médicale ); "Fragment d'os introduit dans les bronches, sans aucun symptôme de suffocation," 64 (1818): 235-236 (a case report); "Epanche-ment sanguin entre la face interne de la dure-mère et la face externe de I'arachnoide correspondante," 64 (1818): 243-244 (an unsigned case report attributed to Esquirol); "Apoplexie suivie de paralysie et de démence, par épanchement considérable de sang entre la dure-mère et I'arachnoïde," 64 (1818): 350-352 (fatal outcome of previous case); "Observations d'hallucinations," 66 (1819): 289-305; "Extrait du rapport de MM. Esquirol et Chantourelle sur l'observation précédente," 81 (1822): 168-174 (refers to a "paralysie à l'extrémité supérieure droite, guérie par l'emploi de la noix vomique," same vol., p. 160); "Remarques sur les signes donnés par les auteurs de médecine légale, comme propres à faire connaître si le corps d'une personne trouvée pendue l'a été après la mort ou pendant qu'elle vivait encore," 83 (1823): 103-107 (see similar article in AGM ).

The RMFE contains the following articles by Esquirol: "Introduction h I'étude des alienations mentales," 8 (1828): 31-38; "De l'influence de I'épilepsie sur les fonctions du cerveau et par consequent sur l'intelligence," 9 (1822): 5-10 (read to the Académie de médecine); "Notice sur le village de Geel," 7 (1822): 137-155 (read to the Académie de médecine on 22 January 1822.)

The Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, 60 vols. (Paris: Panckoucke, 1812-1822) contains the following articles by Esquirol: "dé1ire," 8 (1814): 251-259; "démence," 8 (1814): 280-294; "démonomanie," 8 (1814): 294-318; "érotomanie," 13 (1815); 186-192; "folie," 16 (1816): 151-240; "hallucinations," 20 (1817): 64-71 (read to the Acad6mie des sciences, 31 March 1817; reported on by commission headed by Philippe Pinel on 16 June 1817: Comptes-rendus et rapports, Institut de France, Académie des sciences, 6:196-199, MS in archives, Académie des sciences); "idiotisme," 23 (1818): 507-524; "manie," 30 (1818): 437-472;

"maisons d'aliénés," 30 (1818): 47-95 (Italian translation by S. Riva, Delle case dei pazzi [Parma: Ducale, 1927]); "mélancholie," 39 (1819): 147-181; "monomanie," 34 (1819): 114-125; "suicide," 53 (1821): 213-283.

In addition to these articles, Esquirol published the following monographs, several of which were translated into German or English: Des passions, considérées comme causes, symptômes, et moyens curatifs de l'aliénation mentale (Paris: Didotjeune, 1805). — Des établissements des aliénés en France et des moyens d'améliorer le sort de ces infortunés: Mémoire présenté à S. E. le ministre de l'intérieur en septembre 1818 (Paris: Huzard, 1819). — Note médico-légale sur la monomanie homicide (Paris: Bailliére, 1827). German translation, Esquirol's Beobachtungen über Mord-Monomanie, mit Zusätzen von Mathias Joseph Bluff (Nuremberg: Stein, 1831).—Des illusions chez les aliénés: Question médico-légale sur l'isolement des aliénés (Paris: Crochard, 1832). English translation by William Liddell, Observations on the Illusions of the Insane and on the Medico-Legal Questions of their Confinement (London: Renshaw and Rush, 1833). — Esquirol's major work is Des maladies men-tales considérées sous les rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-légal, 2 vols. (Paris: Bailliére, 1838). English translation by E. K. Hunt, Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845). German translation by K. Ch. Hille, Allgemeine und spezielle Pathologie und Therapie der Seelenstörungen, nebst einem Anhange Kritischer und Erläuternder Zusätze von J. C. A. Heinroth (Leipzig: Hartmann, 1827) (this collection appeared before Des maladies mentales but groups many of the same articles that Esquirol originally wrote for the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales and which constitute his own book of 1838). German translation of Es-quirol's text of 1838 by W. Bernhard, Die Geisteskrankheiten in Beziehung zur Medizin und Staatsarzneikunde vollständig dargestellt (Berlin: Voss, 1838). German translation by E. H. Ackerknecht (Bern: Huber, 1968). Italian translation by L. Calvetti, Dell' alienazione mentale; o, Della pazzia in genere ed in specie, 2 vols. (Milan: Rusconi, 1827-1829). Spanish translation by R. de Monasterio y Correa, Tratado completo de las enagenaciones mentales, 2d rev. ed. by P. Mata (Madrid: León de Pablo Villaverde, 1858). — Examen du projet de loi sur les aliénés (Paris: Bailliére, 1838).

Further, Esquiroi annotated the French translations of two important foreign works: W. C. Ellis, Traité de l'aliénation mentale; ou, De la nature, des causes, des symptômes et du traitement de la folie, comprenant des observations sur les établissements des ali<A0233nés, ouvrage traduit de l'anglais par Th. Archam-bault avec des notes et une introduction historique et statistique; enrichi de notes par M. Esquirol (Paris: Rouvier, 1840); and J. C. Hoffbauer, Médecine légale relative aux aliénés et aux sourds-muets; ou, Les lois appliquées aux dé-

sordres de l'intelligence, avec notes par MM. Esquirol et Itard (Paris: Baillière, 1827). Several of his medicolegal consultations appear in C. C. H. Marc, De la folie considérée dans les rapports avec les questions médico-judiciaires, 2 vols. (Paris: Bailliére, 1840). He took a prominent part in elaborating the law of 1838 that still regulates the hospitalization and treatment of the mentally ill in France: see Examen du projet de loi sur les aliénés (Paris: Baillière, 1838).

While Esquirol figures in every history of psychiatry, the mono-graphic literature is modest. See especially L. Danner, Etude sur Esquirol: Son influence sur la marche de la pathologie mentale (Paris: Thèse médecine, 1858); H. Ey, "J. E. D. Esquirol," in Grosse Nervenärzte, ed. K. Kolle, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Thieme, 1956-1963), 2:87-97; M. Dumas, Etienne Esquirol: Sa famille, ses origines, ses années de formation (Toulouse: Thèse médecine, 1971); G. Legée, "Evolution de l'étude clinique, sociale et juridique de l'aliénation mentale sous l'impulsion de Jean Etienne Dominique Esquirol, médecin aliéniste d'origine toulousaine," in Compte-rendus du 96ème Congrès national des sociétés savantes, Toulouse, 197 l, Sciences, 1:63-81; F. Leuret, "M. Esquirol," Gazette médicale de Paris, 2d ser., 9 (2 January 1841): 1-6; G. Mora, "On the Bicentenary of the Birth of Esquirol, the First Complete Psychiatrist," American Journal of Psychiatry 129 (1972): 74-79; E. Pariset, "Eloge de J. E. D. Esquiroi, lu dans la séance publique annuelle du 17 décembre 1844," Histoire des membres de l'Acaddmie de médecine, 2 vols. (Paris; Baillière, 1845), 2:425-482; R. Semelaigne, "Esquirol," in Les grands aliénistes franfais (Paris: Stein-heil, 1894)