The Languages of Psyche "d0e1848"

Two
Barely Touching:
A Social Perspective on Mind and Body

Roy Porter

It is a mark of the perduring Idealism of our culture that the "body" side of the mind/body relationship has been neglected, or, to put the same point another way, that the major studies of the mind/body problem have been philosophical rather than material-social. Even the direct physical anguish of the flesh, as in the experience of disease, fails to challenge our preferences. The nineteenth-century tuberculosis victim, his or her body wasting away, was somehow "spiritualized" by the process, just as in an analogous way, twentieth-century Freudianism represents a final if backhanded vindication of the ultimate sovereignty of consciousness.

Perhaps this is changing. Perhaps today's newly heightened sense of the ultimate fragility of the body, seemingly threatened with extinction from one quarter by neutron bombs, from another by AIDS, will at last engender a fundamental cultural reversal. The odds are probably against it. History suggests rather the enormous capacity of Idealism in its various forms to rise above the threats. The history of the cursed body and of mind triumphant over matter is long and involved, but ultimately clearly defined.

Back in mid-eighteenth-century Yorkshire, Dr. Slop anathematizes Obadiah:

"May he... be damn'd," (for tying these knots). "May he be cursed in eating and drinking, in being hungry, in being thirsty, in fasting, in sleeping, in slumbering, in walking, in standing, in sitting, in lying, in working, in resting, in pissing, in shitting, and in bloodletting.

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"May he (Obadiah) be cursed in all the faculties of his body.

"May he be cursed inwardly and outwardly.—May he be cursed in the hair of his head.—May he be cursed in his brains, and in the vertex," (that is a sad curse, quoth my father) "in his temples, in his forehead, in his ears, in his eye brows, in his cheeks, in his lips, in his throat, in his shoulders, in his wrists, in his arms, in his hands, in his fingers.

"May be damn'd in his mouth, in his breast, in his heart and purtenance down to the very stomach.... may there be no soundness in him.^[1]

Thus the fate of Obadiah, cursed in his body. Yet the same malediction seems to have hung over all the males in the Shandy household. Tistram's own complaint—the loss of his animal spirits, of his nose, of his name, of his foreskin, and almost of his life—

I can now scarce draw [breath] at all, for an asthma I got in skating against the wind in Flanders^[2]

merely echoes the evils heaped on the bodies of his father (a man "phthisical" and racked with a sciatica),^[3] his brother Bobby ("a lad of wonderful slow parts" who expired in his youth),^[4] his uncle Toby, wounded in the groin at the seige of Namur, alongside his faithful servant Trim (likewise "disabled for the service"),^[5] and not least Parson Yorick, victim like Sterne himself of consumption, whose death is commemorated by a double page of black humor ("Alas, poor Yorick!").^[6] It is in short a "dirty planet,"^[7] whose "strange fatalmes"^[8] curse Everyman

[1] L. Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, ed. C. Ricks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 185-187. For recent work on the body in Sterne see M. New, "At the Backside of the Door of Purgatory," in Laurence Sterne.' Riddles and Mysteries, ed. V. Grosvenor-Myer (London: Vision, 1984), 15-23; J. Berthoud, "Shandeism and Sexuality," ibid., 21-88; E. A. Bloom and L. D. Bloom, "'This Fragment of Life': From Process to Mortality," ibid., 57-74; Roy Porter, "Against the Spleen," ibid., 84-98; D. Furst, "Sterne and Physick: Images of Health and Disease in Tristram Shandy " (Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University, 1974); L. S. King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); J. Rodgers, "Ideas of Life in Tristram Shandy : Contemporary Medicine" (Ph.D. diss., University of East Anglia, 1978).

[2] Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 40.

[3] Ibid., 219

[4] Ibid., 67.

[5] Ibid., 114.

[6] Ibid., 233-234.

[7] Ibid., 40.

[8] Ibid., 136.

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the homunculus—"skin, hair, fat, flesh, veins, arteries ligaments, nerves, cartilage, bones" and all^[9]

So the bodies of the Shandy family are cursed to a man. Yet a similar blight seems to infect the study of the history of the body.^[10] Of course, the mind/body problem as such has attracted great minds, historians of philosophy have minutely scrutinized theories of consciousness—John Yolton's brace of books, Thinking Matter and Perceptual Acquaintance, are admirable recent examples—and we have glorious studies of ideologies and mentalities from The Savage Mind and The Greek Mind to The Victorian Frame of Mind.^[11] Yet with a handful of honorable exceptions— Mikhail Bakhtin is one, Norbert Elias another—the body side of the mind/body relation remains curiously neglected, perhaps echoing that late-Victorian moment when the journals Mind and Brain were founded in quick succession, but no Body^[12] Even Marxism, heeding Marx's lofty contempt for vulgar biologism—man is what he eats—has failed to generate a historical materialism of the body.^[13]

In fact, for services rendered in concentrating our minds upon the body one scholar stands out head and shoulders above the rest, Michel Foucault, who but for his desperately premature death in 1985 would surely have contributed to this series.^[14] Foucault dislodged the Cartesian

[9] Ibid., 36.

[10] There is a lively discussion on the inadequacies of histories and sociologies of the body in B. S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1984). It is less dear whether Turner's own formulations offer a way forward. There is a stimulating discussion of the neglect of the body in literature in Virginia Woolf's essay, "On Being Ill," in Collected Essays, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), 193-203. For Woolf's own problems with "embodiment" see S. Trombley, "All That Summer She Was Mad": Virginia Woolf and Her Doctors (London: Junction Books, 1981). And more generally see the discussion in G. S. Rousseau, "Science and Literature: The State of the Field," Isis 69 (1978): 583-591; idem, "Literature and Medicine: The State of the Field," Isis 72 (1981): 406-424.

[11] J. Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); idem, Perceptual Acquaintace from Descartes to Reid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); C. Levi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage, trans, as The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965); W. E. Houghton, Jr., The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

[12] M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968); N. Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1983).

[13] See the discussion in Turner, The Body and Society, 5-6, 99-101.

[14] Foucault's main relevant works are Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Tavistock, 1967); The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970); The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972); The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London: Pantheon, 1973); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979); The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (London: Penguin, 1978). See also M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. C. Gordon (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), especially the essay "Body/Power," 55-62.

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privileging of the subject, of the cogito, in arguing that the true object of the disciplines, of the exercise of savoir-pouvoir, has been the body, focal point of the clinic, asylum, school, reformatory, prison, parade ground, bed. Foucault exposed the folly of taking the bourgeois disparagement of the flesh at face value. Sexual repression was sexual expression; every technique for subduing the flesh was but another mode of empowering it.^[15]

The scale of our loss in Foucauh's death is only underlined by the crass extravagance of his epigoni. Take for example Francis Barker's The Tremulous Private Body, subtitled An Essay on Subjection, issued in 1985 Here is his verdict on Pepys, or rather, as he insists, "the Pepysian text":

the body in the Pepysian text is no more than a monstrous discourse at least in so far as the subject experiences itself as initiator of its own speech.... Disinherited and separate, the body is traduced as a rootless thing of madness and scandal and then finally, in its object-aspect, it is pressed into service.^[16]

Is this Pepys? The phrase "monstrous discourse" invites the riposte: if the cap fits. The willfulness of Barker's thesis that the triumph of the bourgeoisie involved the disappearance of the body and its replacement by the book simply brings home the need for investigation rather than sloganizing.

Indeed, study of the mind/body problem has been bedeviled all along by ax-grinders. How often have philosophers, insensitive to anachronism, invoked a Cartesian dualism—tailored after whatever mode of rationalism or dualism happened currently to be in vogue—to explain all manner of twists and turns of ideas, with scant regard for the historical Descartes or for his actual reception or reputation?^[17] But more distorting still are those moralists who would use the mind/body relation to redress the human condition or peddle new metaphysics.^[18] Writes Fritjof Capra in The Turning Point:

[15] See especially Foucault, History of Sexuality, 3-14.

[16] F. Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen, 1984).

[17] An instance of this can be found, for example, in M. D. Wilson, "Body and Mind from the Cartesian Point of View," in Body and Mind: Past, Present and Future, ed. R. W. Rieber (New York: Academic Press, 1980).

[18] E.g., M. Berman, The Re-enchantment of the World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982); F. Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (New York: Wildwood, 1982).

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The Cartesian division between mind and matter has had a profound effect on Western thought. It has enabled huge industries to sell products—especially to women that would make us owners of the "ideal body"; it has kept doctors from seriously considering the psychological dimensions of illness, and psychotherapists from dealing with their patients' bodies.^[19]

Yet this is, of course, baloney. Descartes himself never denied the utter interdependence of mind and body. As he put it:

The mind depends so much on the temperament and disposition of the bodily organs that, if it is possible to find a means of rendering men wiser and cleverer than they have hitherto been, I believe that it is in medicine that it must be sought.^[20]

Furthermore, as L. J. Rather's admirable study of Jerome Gaub has shown, post-Cartesian medicine indeed remained thoroughly psychosomatic and somato-psychic.^[21] To father Descartes with praise or blame for the "ghost in the machine" is no substitute for accurately probing what happened.

To be precise, we need thick-textured study of the body, unprejudiced by timeless philosophical dualisms or Lovejoyan unit-ideas—remember that Homer had no general term for "mind" or "body"—^[22] research which contextualizes the human frame within specific sociocultural frames of reference, sensitive to experience, representations and meaning. And in undertaking this, it will be as well to go back to banausics, and remember that in medieval and early modern Europe— that civilization of faith—the human body had a power and prominence

[19] Capra, Turning Point, 23, 44.

[20] Quoted in T. Brown, "Descartes, Dualism and Psychosomatic Medicine," in The Anatomy of Madness, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, 2 vols. (London: Tavistock, 1985), 2: 40-62. See also R. B. Carter, Descartes' Medical Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), who demonstrates the extent of Descartes's own explorations of psychosomatic interplay; see, e.g., pp. 113-114.

[21] L. J. Rather, Mind and Body in Eighteenth-Century Medicine (London: Wellcome, 1965). For discussions of medical continuity, the irrelevance of the "Cartesian" dualism, and the continuation of psychosomatic approaches to health and personality see W. F. Bynum, "Health, Disease and Medical Care," in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 211-255; G. S. Rousseau, "Psychology," ibid., 143-210; L. S. King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

[22] Bennett Simon, Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978); W. I. Matson, "Why Isn't the Mind-Body Problem Ancient?" in Mind, Matter, and Method, ed., P. K. Feyerabend and G. Maxwell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966).

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never again to be matched: it was the measure of all things. It was muscle power that tamed the animals, tilled the fields, and made what were—literally—the manufactures. It was man power that built the cathedrals and won the battles—still, in the Renaissance, spectacles of hand-to-hand combat. In what Laslett has called the face-to-face society,^[23] it was the personal stature, strength, physique, and stamina of rulers that held the balance between government and anarchy. From trial by ordeal to judicial torture, courtroom procedures put the body to the test; and justice was meted out against the flesh from whippings to the faggot and the gallows.^[24] Even after death, the corpse was not spared, often being left to hang in chains as a lesson to the living (yet felons' corpses were touched for their supposed miraculous healing properties).^[25] The elementary functions of keeping body and soul together really mattered. Here is a late-seventeenth-century child, Mary Nelthorpe, writing to her mother about the state of her health:

This is to lett my Mother know
Her Worme is well from top to toe,
Except my Bumps, they so exceed
They make me scratch untill I Bleed;
But now 1 think ont, It is fitt,
To lett you know how oft I shitt,
Two stooles a day, but sometimes none
Take one time with another one;
And that I may not one thing miss;
Bout twice as oft I goe to piss.^[26]

Standard histories tell us that Christianity was a religion of the spirit, the soul's quest for Heaven. But, as Piero Camporesi has brilliantly demonstrated, for the common flock what commanded belief was Christ's body nailed to the Cross, the mortifications of holy men, the marvels of saints' corpses that gushed blood or remained incorruptible, healing miracles, the promise of the resurrection of the body.^[27]

Bodies were pregnant with meaning. There were the symbols of the Body Politic, of the King's Two Bodies, and of the Corpus Christi, that corpus mysticum which was the Church. The Royal Touch cured scrofula,

[23] P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1978).

[24] See Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

[25] P. Linebaugh, "The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons," in Albion's Fatal Tree, ed. D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, and E. P. Thompson (London: A. Lane, 1975), 65-118.

[26] Hertford Record Office. I owe this quotation to the kindness of Dr. Linda Pollock of Churchill College, Cambridge.

[27] P. Camporesi, La came impassibile (Milan: Saggiatore, 1983).

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and aristocratic lineage spelt out the mystique of blood.^[28] And the ritual theater of the body was played out not least on the stage itself littered in Shakespeare's age with corpses, just as from Petrarch to Donne, poetry both sacred and profane pursued the paradoxes of the human clay.

Of course, to say the body was prominent is not to say it was held in good odor. In a biological ancien régime where life expectations were low and whose creed blamed original sin for bringing death and disease into the world, vile bodies drew deep disgust. "Inter urinas et faeces nascimur," pronounced St. Augustine, developing a dualism of the body seen as the prison house of the soul, echoed later by the Puritan Oliver Hayward's "Alas, the best man is two men."^[29] In his Second Anniversary, John Donne addressed his own soul:

Think further on thyself, my soul, and think
How thou at first wast made but in a sink
This curded milk, this poor unlittered whelp,
My body, could, beyond escape or help,
Infect thee with original sin and thou
Couldn't neither then refuse, nor leave it now.^[30]

Small wonder the term "body" itself became a synonym for corpse, that Swift might surmise "surely mortal man is a broomstick,"^[31] or that on his return to England, Lemuel Gulliver, his hero, "could not endure my wife or children in my presence, the very smell of them was intolerable";^[32] or, more generally, that when satirists wished to deflate the pretensions of poets, kings, or philosophers, they showed that their inflated status arose at bottom only from diseases of the guts.^[33] In Swift's classic

[28] M. Bloch, The Royal Touch (London: Routledge and Kegal Paul, 1978); R. Crawfurd, The King 's Evil (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911).

[29] The Diaries of Oliver Heywood, ed. J. H. Turner, vol. 3 (London, 1882), 304.

[30] See the discussion in J. Broadbent, "The Image of God, or Two Yards of Skin," in The Body as a Medium of Expression, ed. J. Benthall and T. Polhernus (London: A. Lane, 1975), 305-326; and J. Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), chap. 5, "Bodies."

[31] J. Swift, "A Meditation upon a Broomstick," in J. Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Satires, ed. K. Williams (London: Everyman, 1975), 191-194.

[32] See the illuminating discussion in N. O. Brown, Life against Death (London: Rout-ledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 171 f.

[33] See, for instance, C. Kerby-Miller, ed., Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), 107 ff.; and the descriptions in M. V. Deporte, "Digressions and Madness in A Tale of a Tub and Tristram Shandy," Huntington Library Quarterly 34 (1970): 43-57; R. Paulson, Theme and Structure in Swift's Tale of a Tub (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960); J. R. Clark, Form and Frenzy in Swift's Tale of a Tub (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970); D. B. Morris, "The Kinship of Madness in Pope's Dunciad," Philological Quarterly 51 (1972): 813-831; G. Rosen, "Form of Irrationality in the Eighteenth Century," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 2 (1972): 255-288.

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formula, "the Corruption of the Senses is the generation of the Spirit"; "the same Spirits which in their superior Progress would conquer a Kingdom, descending upon the Anus, conclude in a Fistula."^[34]

Yet Christianity also held the body in an esteem other sects—for example, the Gnostics—or philosophies such as the Stoic found contemptible. After all, Scripture taught man was made in God's image, God's only son became flesh, and then rose from the dead, so presaging the general resurrection of the body at the Last Judgment.^[35] How could the body be more highly honored than by the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist, which brought Christ's very blood and body to the lips of the faithful?

If man were made in God's image, his body must be almost holy. A Puritan drew the natural inference:

Whereas our bodies are God's workmanship, we must glorify him in our bodies.... yea, we must not hurt or abuse our body, but present them as holy and loving sacrifices unto God.^[36]

In the Renaissance nude, the body became a veritable emblem of the soul, just as human anatomy became incorporated in a natural theology of design. Man's body was a microcosm epitomizing the order and meaning of the cosmos; and so, too, according to the physiognomy, the outer case itself was an index of the soul.

Bodies thus carried complex and contradictory messages, and minds felt confused about embodiment. Tristram Shandy expressed his admiration for

the Pythagoreans (much more than ever I dare tell my Jenny) for their "getting out of the body, in order to think well. " No man thinks right, whilst he is in it.^[37]

[34] J. Swift, "A Tale of a Tub," in A Tale of a Tub and Other Satires, K. Williams (London: Everyman, 1975), 1-136; "A Discourse concerning the Mechanical Operations of the Spirit," ibid., 167-190.

[35] A point justly emphasized in F. Bottomley, Attitudes to the Body in Western Christendom (London: Lepus, 1979).

[36] William Perkins, quoted in A. Wear, "Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth Century England," in Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 55-100, at 63.

[37] Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 472.

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Events of course prove him right, no one does think right in his body (and yet they don't think right out of them either). But, as Tristram admits, mind cannot declare unilateral independence from the body, they are but two faces of the same coin; or rather

A man's body and his mind, with the utmost reference to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin's lining; rumple the one—you rumple the other.^[38]

So for man, Sir Thomas Browne's great "amphibian," the coexistence of body and soul was a fact of life; or rather its great mystery. For

How mind acts upon matter, will, in all probability, ever remain a secret [as Dr. William Buchan admitted]. It is sufficient for us to know that there is established a reciprocal influence betwixt the mental and corporeal parts, and that whatever disorders the one likewise hurts the other.^[39]

Theories proliferated through the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment unraveling the knot of mind and body, what Tristram Shandy termed this "junketting piece of work betwixt [our bodies] and our seven senses"—^[40] so many, in fact, that one of the choicer jokes of the Anti-Jacobin Review was to carry a mock advertisement of a forthcoming publication:

[38] Ibid., 174. Compare p. 356: "I said, 'we were not stocks and stones'—'tis very well. I should have added, nor are we angels, I wish we were,—but men cloathed with bodies, and governed by our imaginations."

[39] William Buchan, Domestic Medicine (London, 1776). CL this discussion in the correspondence of two young men in the eighteenth century:

[40] Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 356.

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The influence of Mind upon Matter, comprehending the whole question of the Existence of Mind as Independent of Matter, or as co-existent with it, and of Matter considered as an intelligent and self-dependent Essense, will make the subject of a larger poem in 127 Books, now preparing.^[41]

Such theories form the subject of John Yolton's recent Thinking Matter, and it would be illuminating to give Yolton's strictly history-of-ideas analysis an added dimension by exploring the possible social roots and ramifications of the various resolutions. Were materialists radicals? Did dualism support the social hierarchy?^[42] Yet my aim here is somewhat different. For I examine actual perceptions, experiences, and modes of mind and body, their bonds and boundaries in specific contexts of use, in order to sound their resonances—scientific, experiential, symbolic—and why these were to modulate.

I shall explore one instance in some detail, the problem of madness, melancholy, and similar forms of disturbance. Today's parlance—mental illness being wrong in the head, psychiatric disorder—instantly reveals our own cognitive map: madness is in the mind. But that was not the common perception three centuries ago. Then insanity was, or at least sprang from, a disease of the body. Insanity was not typically regarded as a condition of an "occult" faculty, such as the psyche, mind, soul, or personality, even though it was a distemper involving disordered thoughts and feelings.^[43] "Madness is as much a corporal distemper as the gout or asthma." Today we readily associate such sentiments with the aggressively "medically materialist" wing of the psychiatric profession. But these were actually the words of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, giving voice to a commonplace of Georgian culture.^[44]

Lady Mary's lay view was endorsed by physicians of every school. For their part, the medical old guard identified insanity as typically an imbalance of the humors produced in the digestive system, mania being

[41] Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin (London, 1851), 84.

[42] The anthropological speculations of Mary Douglas are intriguing here. See Natural Symbols (London: Pantheon, 1970).

[43] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965) has an important discussion: see chap. 3; and Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); M. G. Hay, "Understanding Madness: Some Approaches to Mental Illness" (Ph.D. thesis, University of York, 1979).

[44] Letters from Lady Mary Wortley Montage, ed. R. Brimley Johnson (London: Every-man edition, 1925), 465. G. S. Rousseau has drawn attention to this passage in "Psychology," in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 143-210, 206.

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a superfluity of choler, melancholy too much black bile.^[45] Newer iatrochemists, by contrast, attributed craziness to acid and sour chemical ferments, whose sharp particles scoured and inflamed the fibers. Or, more fashionably still, as George Rousseau has emphasized, physicians built on Thomas Willis's pioneer neurology to contend that disturbance lay in defective nerves: their lack of tone or elasticity due to clogging checked the flow of animal spirits, thus depressing the mood.^[46]

Rivalries between particular schools of anatomy and physiology, however, were about details. All shared a common conviction that the source was organic. As the Newtonian physician, Dr. Nicholas Robinson, put it in the 1720s:

Every change of the Mind, therefore, indicates a Change in the Bodily Organs;^[47]

His contemporary, George Cheyne, the king of the "hyp doctors," concurred:

I never saw a person labour under severe obstinate, and strong nervous complaints, but I always found at last, the stomach, guts, liver, spleen, mesentery, or some of the great and necessary organs or glands of the belly were obstructed, knotted, schirrous, spoiled or perhaps all these together.^[48]

The etiology is particularly striking for those diseases, such as hysteria or hypochondria, which later generations would come to regard primarily as psychic, as functional disorders, whose physical symptoms were but secondary somatizations. Traditional medical theory, however, regarded these as regular somatic diseases. Of course, as Sydenham and Willis were at pains to prove, medicine no longer accepted antiquity's attribu-

[45] For explication of the complexities of black bile and choler see L. Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1640 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1951); idem, Sanity in Bedlam: A Study of Robert Button's Anatomy of Melancholy (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1955).

[46] Fundamental here is G. S. Rousseau, "Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility," with a postscript, The Blue Guitar (Messina) 2 (1976): 125-153; idem, "Psychology," in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

[47] N. Robinson, A New System of the Spleen (London: Bettesworth, 1729), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Fears of Psycbiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 344.

[48] George Cheyne, The English Malady; or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds (London: Strahan and Leake, 1733), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535 -1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 184.

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tion of hysteria to the wandering womb.^[49] Yet that did not make it any the less organic, for (as Willis argued) hysteria was

chiefly and primarily convulsive, and chiefly depends on the brain, and the nervous stock being affected.^[50]

No wonder it struck women worse than men: their nervous systems were weaker.

Paralleling hysteria was hypochondria, which likewise was not classed as a disorder of the understanding (the morbid obsessions of mere malades imaginaires ) but rather as an organic distemper. There had of course been a traditional humoral etiology for it.

The primitive Doctors [Richard Blackmore stated] imagined that all Hypochondriacal Symptoms were derived from a Collection of black Dregs and Lees separated from the Blood and lodged in the Spleen, whence, as they supposed, noxious Reeks and cloudy Evaporations were always ascending to the superior Regions (the Chest, the Heart, and Head).^[51]

Yet this was ignorance, concluded Blackmore; the new anatomy could account for it much better as a defect of nervous organization.

Or take the vapors, that complaint involving fainting and fits traditionally blamed on the fumes given off by a distempered womb, rising up through the internal organs.^[52] But falsely, argued Dr. John Purcell. For in reality vapors were an organic obstruction located

[49] 1. Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); J. Boss, "The Seventeenth-Century Transformation of the Hysteric Affection," Psychological Medicine 9 (1979): 221-234.

[50] Quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535 -1800 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 190. See Jeffrey M. N. Boss, "The Seventeenth-Century Transformation of the Hysteric Affection," Psychological Medicine 9 (1979): 221-234. See also Hansruedi Isler, Thomas Willis, 1621 -1685, Doctor and Scientist (New York: Hafner, 1968); J. Spillane, The Doctrine of the Nerves (London: Oxford University Press, 1981). For important background see J. Wright, "Hysteria and Mechanical Man," Journal of the History of Ideas 41 (1980): 233-247.

[51] Sir R. Biackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours (London, 1725), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macaipine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535 -1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 320.

[52] For the spleen—both an abdominal organ and a fashionable term for melancholy—see C. Moore, Baekgrounds of English Literature 1700-1760 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963); O. Doughty, "The English Malady of the Eighteenth Century," Review of English Studies 2 (1926): 257-269; E. Fischer-Homberger, "Hypochondriasis of the Eighteenth Century—Neurosis of the Present Century," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 46 (1972): 391-401; Roy Porter, "The Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry?" Medical History 27 (1983): 35-50.

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in the Stomach and Guts; whereof the Grumbling of the one and the Heaviness and uneasiness of the other generally preceding the Paroxysm, are no small Proofs.^[53]

Noting that one of Hippocrates' greatest contributions to medicine was his recognition that epilepsy was not a divine affliction ("the sacred disease") but natural, Purcell insisted the vapors were akin to epilepsy, indeed that "an epilepsie, is Vapours arriv'd to a more violent degree,"^[54]

And—the exemplary case—melancholy too was similarly located on the etiological map. The waning of humoralism left early Georgian physicians disinclined to see it literally as the product of black bile.^[55] Rather, Willis had insisted, "Melancholy... is a complicated Distemper of the Brain and Heart."^[56]

Yet, in discarding humoralism, such physicians had no intention of setting mentalist theories in their place. Far from it. Humoralism had proved merely semantic, a will-o'-the-wisp. It was to make way for explanations grounded securely in mechanical operations. For, Dr. Nicholas Robinson insisted, insanity was not a mere matter of "imaginary Whims and Fancies, but real Affections of the Mind, arising from the real, mechanical Affections of Matter and Motion."^[57] If craziness was

[53] John Purcell, A Treatise of Vapours, or, Hysterick Fits (London: E. Place, 1707), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535 -1860 (London: Oxford University Press: 1963), 291; O. Temkin, The Falling Sickness (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

[54] Purcell, Treatise of Vapours, quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 291. See also E. Fischer-Homberger, "Hypochondriasis of the Eighteenth Century—Neurosis of the Present Century," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 46 (1972): 391-401.

[55] R. Klibansky, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964); Stanley W. Jackson, "Melancholia and the Waning of the Humoral Theory," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 33 (1978): 367-376; T. H. Jobe, "Medical Theories of Melancholia in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries," Clio Medics 19 (1976): 217-231.

[56] T. Willis, quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1863), 190. See also E. S. Clarke and C. D. O'Malley, The Human Brain and Spinal Cord (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968); E. S. Clarke and Kenneth Dewhurst, An Illustrated History of Brain Function (Oxford: Sandford Publications, 1972).

[57] N. Robinson, A New System of the Spleen (London, 1729), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psyehiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1983), 344. Robinson continued (345):

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thus fundamentally organic,^[58] physical remedies were clearly called for. That is what we find. Thomas Willis himself advocated a regime of close confinement and whippings, which probably reflected contemporary practice at Bethlehem (Bedlam), and drugs formed the staple of medication for the mad in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on old humoral medicine, Robert Burton had listed hundreds of purges, vomits, and simples for melancholy, including laurel, white hellebore, and tobacco ("divine, rare, super-excellent tobacco... a sovereign remedy to all disease")^[59] and some more exotic drug cocktails as well. Suffering from "head melancholy"?

[58] And physical causes were often held responsible. See The Private Letters of Dorothea Lieven ed. P. Quennell (London: J. Murray, 1937), 86:

[59] Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), ed. A. R. Shilleto (London: George Bell and Sons, 1898). Second partition, "The Cure of Melancholy."

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Take a Ram's head that never meddled with an Ewe, cut off at a blow, and, the horns Only taken away, boil it well skin and wool together, after it is well sod, take out the brains, and put these spices to it, Cinnamon, Ginger, Nutmeg, Mace, Cloves, in equal parts of half an ounce, mingle the powder of these spices with it, and heat them in a platter upon a chafing-dish of coals together, stirring them well, that they do not burn; take heed it be not overmuch dried, or dryer than a Calves brains ready to be eaten. Keep it so prepared, and for three days give it the patient fasting, so that he fast two hours after it. It may be eaten with bread in an egg, or broth, or any way, so it be taken.^[60]

The coming of the new mechanical philosophy changed the drugs but not the drugging.

No Man can have a tenderer, or more compassionate Concern for the Misery of Mankind than myself [argued Dr. Robinson]: yet it is Cruelty in the highest degree, not to be bold in the Administration of Medicines….. It is owing to these safe Men, that do but little good, and a great deal of real Mischief, that chronick Diseases are so rife now-a-days, and so generally incurable.... In this Case, therefore, the most violent Vomits, the strongest purging Medicines, and large Bleedings, are to be often repeated.^[61]

Nor was faith in organic remedies just a quirk of the doctors, for laymen and patients had equal faith in medicine. The nonconformist divine, Richard Baxter, advised: "neglect not physick."^[62] Despairing patients might bewail

that physick cannot Cure Souls, yet they must be perswaded or forced to it. I have known a Lady deep in Melancholy, who a long time would neither speak, nor take Physick; nor endure her Husband to go out of the Room, and with the Restraint and Grief he died, and she was cured by Physick put down her Throat, with a Pipe by Force.^[63]

Even John Wesley—a man who often challenged the organic diagnoses of madness, regarding many cases as instances of demoniacal possession—was free in recommending medical cures:

[60] Ibid.

[61] N. Robinson, A New System of the Spleen (London, 1729), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Mac. alpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1800 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 340.

[62] R. Baxter, The Signs and Causes of Melancholy, quoted in Robert Hunter and Ida Mac. alpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 340.

[63] Ibid.

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Boil the Juice of ground ivy with sweet oil and white wine into an ointment. Shave the head, anoint it therewith, and chafe it every other day for three weeks. Bruise also the leaves and bind them on the head and give three spoonsful of the juice, warm, every morning. Or, be electrified. (tried). Or, set the patient with his head under a great water-fall as long as his strength will bear, or pour cold water on his head out of a tea-kettle. Or, let him eat nothing but apples for a month.^[64]

So the spectrum of troubles ranging from raving insanity to what we should today label neurosis was typically regarded as seated in the body. Indeed, the very term "neurosis"—a coining of the great Edinburgh professor William Cullen—was originally used not, as today, to signal the perplexing no-man's-land of functional disorders, but neuropathologically, to classify physical lesions. As Cullen put it, the neuroses were

all those preternatural affections of sense and motion, which are without pyrexia as a part of the primary disease, and all those which do not depend upon a topical affection of the organs, but more upon general effection of the nervous system, and of those powers of the system upon which sense and motion more especially depend.^[65]

The conceptual geography I have been mapping may seem strange to our psychiatrically primed minds. We are familiar of course with the kind of medical imperialism today found particularly amongst neurophysiologists, which aims to incorporate all personality disturbance within somatic medicine—for how else can research and therapy be scientific? And Lain Entralgo has demonstrated how rigid was the or-ganicism that became the trademark of regular medicine from Galen onward^[66] —witness Coleridge's caustic verdict on the physicians:

They are shallow animals; having always employed their minds about Body and Gut, they imagine that in the whole system of things there is nothing but Gut and Body.^[67]

[64] J. Wesley, Primitive Physick (reprint, Santa Barbara, Calif., n.d.), 87; G. S. Rousseau, "John Wesley's Primitive Physick (1747)," Harvard Library Bulletin 16 (1968): 242-256; A. W. Hill, John Wesley among the Physicians (London: Epworth, 1958).

[65] W. Cullen, First Lines in the Practice of Physic (Edinburgh, 1784), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 473. See J. M. López Piñero, Historical Origins of the Concept of Neurosis, trans. D. Berrios (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

[66] P. Lain Entralgo, Mind and Body (London: Harvill, 1955).

[67] Coleridge to Charles Lloyd, Sr., 14 Nov. 1796, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge ed. E. L. Griggs, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 256.

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And yet it would be a great mistake to interpret the prevalent somaticism as a sort of doctors' conspiracy. Nicholas Jewson has suggested how far the traditional physician had to defer to patients' expectations—the clinical encounter was a delicate process of negotiation;^[68] and in what we would call psychiatric disorders abundant evidence suggests it was sufferers at least as much as physicians who opted for organic interpretations. As George Cheyne explained, he was often put on the spot when confronted with cases of depression because such conditions were easily jeered at by the vulgar as marks of "peevishness," "whim," "ill humour," or, amongst women, of "fantasticalness" or "coquetry."^[69] Or, more seriously, troubled spirits were all too readily taken as but a hairsbreadth away from outright insanity. Hence care was needed before advancing terms like "nervous" in consultations, and patients would expect a real disease diagnosis. Indeed, the dictates of humanity required it. For though the herd might suppose that these maladies were "nothing but the effect of Fancy, and a delusive Imagination, yet... the consequent Sufferings are without doubt real and unfeigned."^[70] Cheyne's solution was to emphasize organic origins:

Often when I have been consulted in a Case... and found it to be what is commonly call'd Nervous, I have been in the utmost Difficulty, when desir'd to define or name the Distemper, for fear of affronting them or fixing a Reproach on a Family or Person. If I call'd the Case Glandular with nervous Symptoms, they concluded I thought them pox'd, or had the King's Evil. If I said it was Vapours, Hysterick or Hypochondriacal Disorders, they thought I call'd them Mad or Fantastical.^[71]

Dr. Richard Blackmore faced the same doctor's dilemma:

This Disease, called Vapours in Women, and the Spleen in Men, is what neither Sex are pleased to own. A Man cannot ordinarily make his Court worse, than by suggesting to such patients the true Nature and Name of

[68] N. Jewson, "The Disappearance of the Sick Man from Medical Cosmology 1770-1870," Sociology 10 (1976): 225-244; idem, "Medical Knowledge and the Patronage System in Eighteenth-Century England," Sociology 8 (1974): 369-385; Roy Porter, ed., Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

[69] G. Cheyne, quoted in L. Feder, Madness in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 170

[70] Ibid.

[71] George Cheyne, The English Malady; or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of AU Kinds (London: Strahan and Leake, 1733), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 353.

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their Distemper....One great Reason why these patients are unwilling their Disease should go by its right Name, is, I imagine, this, that the Spleen and Vapours are, by those that never felt their Symptoms, looked upon as an imaginary and fantastick Sickness of the Brain, filled with odd and irregular Ideas…. This Distemper, by a great Mistake, becoming thus an Object of Derision and Contempt: the persons who feel it are unwilling to own a Disease that will expose them to Dishonour and Reproach.^[72]

In other words it reassured patients to root their troubles in the body, for that made them real while reducing responsibility. Take for example the case of the nonconformist minister Richard Baxter.^[73] Baxter experienced a Pandora's box of internal maladies, occasioning excruciating pain and still greater fears, associated with what he intuited to be large kidney stones. He tried many remedies, some from the doctors, some home brews; and consulted up to thirty-six physicians all at once, without relief or remedy. The real blow came when "divers eminent physicians agreed that my disease was the hypochondriack melancholy." What exactly the doctors meant by that we cannot be sure. For Baxter, however, the term carried unwelcome overtones of malingering, delusion, and real madness. His amour-propre had to deny it.

My distemper never went to so far as to possess me with any inordinate fancies, or damp me with sinking sadness, although the physicians call'd it the hypochondriack melancholy.

Feeling threatened by the doctors, Baxter needed to legitimate his disease and his sick role—by tracing its true body site:

I thought myself, that my disease was almost all from debility of the stomach, and extream acrimony of blood by some fault of the liver.

Baxter's autobiography makes it quite clear that the mere malade imaginaire could expect no pity from ordinary people—any more than did Molière's hero. Indeed, he would be a figure of fun. On being rumored to be hypochondriacal, Baxter reports, "I became the common talk of the city, especially the women."

[72] Sir R. Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours (London, 1725), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1555-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 320.

[73] For my discussion of Baxter, I rely on Andrew Wear, "Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England," in Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-lndustrial Society, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 55-99. The extracts that Wear cites are from Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae (London: Parkhurst, 1898), 9-10, 173.

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Hence sympathetic doctors and their patients would collude in diagnoses that realized such conditions by rooting them in the body. As even Bishop John Moore in a sermon in 1692 on Religious Melancholy stated, such troubles were truly "Distempers of the Body, rather than Faults of the Mind."^[74] Still, however, the ambiguities ran deep. When Dr. John Radcliffe told Queen Anne she was suffering from the vapors, she sacked him; it was too ambivalent a term to be applied to royalty.^[75]

There was another, even stronger reason why sufferers did not want depression to be judged "in the mind" rather than "in the body": the imputation of serious disturbance of the Reason or imagination. Renaissance minds were in no doubt as to the extraordinary cosmic powers exercised by imagination: it was the sustaining force of sympathy, astrology, magic; it engendered fascination.^[76] Physicians were of course rather ambivalently aware that imagination had great powers for curing diseases, as the successes of "faith" healers and quacks from Valentine Greatrakes through to Mesmer testified, though the faculty considered it scandalous that maladies unresponsive to the best medicines proved susceptible to mumbo jumbo and suggestion. But doctors chiefly warned of the power of imagination to do harm^[77] ." As Nehemiah Grew put it:

Phancy... also operates... in the production of Diseases. Consumptions often come with Grief. From Venereal Love, Madness, and Hysterick Fits.^[78]

Typical was the reputed capacity of the imagination in women, at conception or during pregnancy, to impress whatever preoccupied their imaginations upon their unborn child. A woman whose imagination was seized by a strange sight would indeed give birth to a monster.^[79]

[74] J. Moore, "Of Religious Melancholy," quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macal-pine, Three Hundred Years of Prychiatry, 1555-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 252.

[75] J. B. Nias, Dr. John Radcliffe: A Sketch of His Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918), 16, 18.

[76] See D. F. Bond, "'Distrust' of Imagination in English Neoclassicism," Philological Quarterly 14 (1937): 54-69, and idem, "The Neoclassical Psychology of the Imagination," ELH 1 (1937): 245-264; C. E. McMahon, "The Role of Imagination in the Disease Process: Pre-Cartesian History," Psychological Medicine 6 (1976): 179-184; I. Couliano, Eros et magie à la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1984).

[77] John Haygarth, Of the Imagination, as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body (Bath: Cadell and Davies, 1800).

[78] Nehemiah Grew, Cosmologia Sacra (London: Rogers et al., 1701), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 285.

[79] It was still part of popular medicine to believe that the mother had the power to imprint onto her conceptus whatever was in her imagination at the moment of conception. For this vision of the malign power of the imagination, see Bond, "'Distrust' of Imagination" idem, "Neoclassical Psychology"; S. Cunningham, "Bedlam and Parnassus: Eighteenth-Century Reflections," Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (1971): 35-55; and G. S. Rousseau, "Smollett, Wit and Tradition of Learning in Medicine," in Tobias Smollett: Essays of Two Decades (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 198 2), 160-183.

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Within classical humanism, imagination was thus a very mixed blessing. Slipping the reins of reason, it ran riot and became dangerous, as appears in the distrust of dreaming so frequently expressed in the Stuart and Georgian ages. If (as Goya was later to put it) the sleep of reason produces monsters, there was every reason for medical theorists to promote bodily explanations for dreams and nightmares, commonly regarded as a form of demonical possession. Nightmare, physicians typically argued, was not literally a matter of being hagridden but was due to heavy suppers or bad sleeping posture.^[80]

Thus one popular association was the slippery slope from the anarchy of imagination to out-and-out insanity. "Madness," Samuel Johnson told Fanny Burney, "is occasioned by too much indulgence of imagination." No wonder the idea that pains, perturbations, and quirks of behavior stemmed from rebellious imagination was so distressing. When Johnson confessed that his fidgets, tics, and convulsions were not organic but bad habits, or admitted he was in the grip of religious scruples, it was with the direct awareness of "the dangerous prevalence of imagination." Samuel Johnson dreaded encroaching insanity.^[81]

[80] M. Weidhorn, Dreams in Seventeenth-Century English Literaturem (The Hague: Mouton, 1970); John Bond, An Essay on the Incubus, or Night-Mare (London: Wilson and Durham, 1753); Thomas Tryon, A Treatise of Dreams and Visions (London, 1689), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 233.

[81] Roy Porter, "The Hunger of Imagination: Approaching Samuel Johnson's Melancholy," in The Anatomy of Madness, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, 2 vols. (London: Tavistock, 1985), 1:63-88. For Johnson's mental maladies see R. Macdonald Ladell, "The Neurosis of Dr. Samuel Johnson," The British Journal of Medical Psychology 9 (1929): 314-323; R. Brain, "The Great Convulsionary" and "A Post Mortem on Dr. Johnson," in Some Reflections on Genius and Other Essays (London: Pitman Medical, 1960), 92-100; K. Grange, "Dr. Samuel Johnson's Account of a Schizophrenic Illness in Rasselas (1759)." Medical History 6 (1962): 160-169; R. B. Hovey, "Dr. Samuel Johnson, Psychiatrist," Modern Language Quarterly 15 (1954): 321-355; K. T. Read, "This Tasteless Tranquillity: A Freudian Note on Johnson's Rasselas, " Literature and Psychology 19 (1969): 61-62; K. Baiderston, "Johnson's Vile Melancholy," in The Age of Johnson, ed. F. W. Hilles and W. S. Lewis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 3-14. For the wider context of Johnson's view of the interconnectedness of idleness, imagination, and madness see R. Voitle, Samuel Johnson the Moralist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961); W. B. C. Watkins, Perilous Balance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939); A. Sachs, Passionate Intelligence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); P. K. Alkon, Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967).

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Even worse, however, might be the prospect of being "possessed" not by one's own imagination but by forces from Beyond, unearthly powers. Scriptural Protestantism envisaged the drama of salvation as a literal psychomachy. If God and the Devil battled for every soul, the likelihood of being personally invaded by Satan, perhaps in disguise, may never have seemed very remote to the pious. Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century spiritual autobiographies—by definition, of course, the memoirs of survivors—commonly tell of infiltration by emissaries of the Devil, invasion being particularly dangerous at times of physical weakness, anxiety, and sickness, when resistance would be low (illness was the Devil's bath, commented Burton).^[82] Such struggles were every Christian's cross. And yet the prospects of sin, damnation, and hell must have loomed terrifyingly. Wasn't there every reason then for sufferers to blot out the fear that such were the symptoms of diabolical invasion, taking refuge instead in a comforting physical explanation, located in the diaphragm not in devils, in the spleen not in Satan?

Of course, there was also a tradition of divine madness—hearing voices, seeing visions, receiving prophecy, speaking in tongues. Once part of the Christian mainstream, by the second half of the seventeenth century it had shrunk to being the shibboleth of the sectaries.^[83] Yet their claims to be in possession of higher truth and under the direction of higher powers threatened ecclesiastical authority and scandalized Enlightenment reasonableness. Enthusiasm's sting could however be drawn by "medicalization." "Divine madness" did indeed exist, but it was not, after all, a matter of literal inspiration by otherworldly powers, higher or lower, but a species of organic madness,^[84] As Nicholas Robinson in-

[82] D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic frorn Ficino to Carnpanella (London: War-burg Institute, 1958); idem, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (London: Scolar Press, 1981); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973); Don Cameron Allen, "The Degeneration of Man and Renaissance Pessimism," Studies in Philology 35 (1938).

[83] M. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

[84] R. A. Knox, Enthusiasm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950); B. R. Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); G. Rosen, "Enthusiasm: 'A Dark Lanthorn of the Spirit,'" Bulletin of the History of Medicine 42 (1958): 393-421; G. Williamson, "The Restoration Revolt against Enthusiasm," Studies in Philology 30 (1933): 571-603; S. I. Tucker, Enthusiasm: A Stndy in Semantic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); H. Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, and That Subtile Effluvium: A Study of the Opposition to the French Prophets in England, 1706-1710 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978).

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sisted, the transports of a George Fox or of the French Prophets were nothing more than "mere madness" arising from "the stronger impulses of a warm brain."^[85]

Overall then, attributing disordered spirits to the body proved highly serviceable. It protected the sufferer from ridicule. It convinced him that his reason or soul wasn't at risk from rampant imagination or Satanic possession—but that low sectaries' religious inspirations were nothing more than hot air. Of course, the lowly origin of such disorders, seated in the bowels, might be shameful, but that was increasingly remedied by the new anatomy that rerouted the site of the lesion away from the guts and up toward the head, through those superfine, light, delicate fibers, the nerves.

Moreover, identifying melancholy as a disease of the body opened the way to a sociology of illness highly attractive to the polished elite of Georgian England. For, under George Cheyne's designation of "the English malady," depression became a life-style disorder.^[86] The pressures of hard, high, and fast living, the demands of the ton or the town, the constraints of fashion, hot rooms, rich food, fine wines, late nights, excitement, etiquette—all subjected the physical constitution to intense strain. Becoming low-spirited under such pressures was the cross of High Society, the distinguishing stigmata of those fine spirits, those sensitive souls singled out for excellence. Above all, such low-spirited ladies and gentlemen were patently not fundamentally warped in the will but deserved sympathy. As Cheyne said flatteringly:

[the English Malady] is as much a bodily Distemper as the Small-Pox or a Fever; and the Truth is, it seldom, and I think never happens or can happen, to any but those of the liveliest and quickest natural parts, whose Faculties are the brightest and most spiritual, and whose Genius is most keen and penetrating, and particularly where there is the most delicate Sensation and Taste, both of Pleasure and pain. So equally are the good and bad Things of this mortal State distributed! For I seldom ever observ'd a heavy, dull, earthy, clod-pated Clown, much troubled with nervous Disorders.^[87]

[85] N. Robinson, A New System of the Spleen (London, 1729).

[86] Roy Porter, "The Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry?" Medical History 27 (1983): 35-50; O. Doughty, "The English Malady of the Eighteenth Century," The Review of English Studies 2 (1926): 257-269.

[87] G. Cheyne, The English Malady (London, 1733), ii. Similar characterizations of the English malady continue throughout the century. Compare T. Beddoes, Hygeia, 3 vols. (Bristol, 1802-1803), 3:4.

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I have so far been exploring a pseudoparadox, the diagnostic prominence given to the body in what we now call "mental disorder." Within the larger priorities of the mind/body hierarchy, it is, of course, no paradox at all, in that the body could be safely blamed for such distempers precisely because it was so gross. But that does require us next to face a more taxing question: how, when, and why did mental disorder itself emerge? To explain this, a changing set of strategies will need to be scrutinized. But first the shift itself must be pinned down. If we examine English writings on madness after about the mid-eighteenth century, very different messages ring out. Now it is claimed that insanity and its brood are indeed of the psyche. Take in 1789 the view of Andrew Harper (who, as a surgeon, was hardly likely to be biased against somatic views):

[insanity] must depend upon some specific alteration in the essential operations and movements of the mind, independent and exclusive of every corporal, sympathetic, direct, or indirect excitement, or irritation whatever.^[88]

A few years later, William Halloran, the Irish mad-doctor, took a similar line. There was indeed a delirium that was organic; but there was also a madness genuinely seated in the mind, manifest in delusion. It was vital to attend to that distinction, since quite separate therapies were indicated. Above all, as he put it, "the malady of the mind... is, for the most part, to be treated on moral principles."^[89]

[88] Andrew Harper, A Treatise on the Real Cause and Cure of Insanity (London: Stalker and Waltes, 1789), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 522.

[89] W. S. Hallaran, An Enquiry into the Causes Producing the Extraordinary Addition to the Number of Insane (Cork: Edwards and Savage, 1810), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Mac. alpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1585-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 653. Hallaran argued:

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Indeed, this new perception of the autonomy of mental disorder spurred an epochal transformation in therapy. Back in the 1720s, Nicholas Robinson had concluded that druggings were the only answer:

It is not long ago since a very learned and ingenious Gentleman, so far started from his Reason, as to believe, that his Body was metamorphos'd into a Hobby-Horse, and nothing would serve his Turn, but that his Friend, who came to see him, must mount his Back and ride. I must confess, that all the philosophy I was Master of, could not dispossess him of this Conceit: till, by the Application of generous Medicines, I restor'd the disconcerted Nerves to their regular Motions, and, by that Means, gave him a Sight of his Error.^[90]

But by the 1750s, William Battie, who adopted a highly Lockean theory of madness viewed as deluded imagination stemming from misassociation of ideas, publicly scorned the time-honored Bethlem ancien régime of vomits and venesection, pronouncing that management could do far more than medicine.^[91]

Indeed, "management" became the therapeutic watchword of the last decades of the century. What was meant was a new intensity of person-to-person contact between physician and patient.^[92] The precise inflections of the disposition and behavior of the lunatic had to be grasped, addressed, and attacked. Deploying a rich array of tactics, the physician had to take charge, substituting his command for that of the delusional system. At its most theatrical, this might mean fixing the patient with the eye, a technique perfected by the Rev. Dr. Francis Willis, the mad-doctor brought in to treat George III.^[93] Questioned by Members of Parliament about what John Haslam was later to call "this fascinating power,"^[94] Willis offered a demonstration:

"Place the candles between us, Mr. Burke," replied the Doctor, in an equally authoritative tone—" and I'll give you an answer. There, sir! by the EYE! I should have looked at him thus, Sir— thus !" Burke instantaneously averted his head, and, making no reply, evidently acknowledged this basiliskan authority.^[95]

[90] N. Robinson, A New System of the Spleen (London, 1729).

[91] W. Battie, A Treatise on Madness (London: Brunner/Mazel, 1958), 59-81.

[92] R. Porter, "Was There a Moral Therapy in Eighteenth-Century Psychiatry?" Lychnos, 1981/2: 12-16.

[93] See I. Macalpine and R. Hunter, George III and the Mad Business (London: Allen Lane, 1969).

[94] John Haslam, Observations on Madness and Melancholy, 2d ed. (London, 1809), 271.

[95] Quoted in Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad Business (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 271-272.

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Paralleling Willis in management by spectacle was William Pargeter. Case histories show how crucial for him was the idea of gaining mental superiority over his patient:

When I was a pupil at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, as my attention was much employed on the subject of insanity, I was requested.., to visit a poor man... disordered in his mind. I went immediately to the house, and found the neighbourhood in an uproar. The maniac was locked in a room, raving and exceedingly turbulent. I took two men with me, and learning that he had no offensive weapons, I planted them at the door, with directions to be silent, and to keep out of sight, unless I should want their assistance. I then suddenly unlocked the door—rushed into the room and caught his eye in an instant. The business was then done—he became peaceable in a moment—trembled with fear, and was as governable as it was possible for a furious madman to be.^[96]

One facet of this move from medicines to management was the expectation of greater therapeutic humanity. As Dr. John Ferriar put it:

It was formerly supposed that lunatics could only be worked upon by terror. Shackles and whips, therefore, became part of the medical apparatus. A system of mildness and conciliation is now generally adopted, which, if it does not always facilitate the cure, at least tends to soften the destiny of the sufferer.^[97]

Yet management therapy certainly never advocated kindness for kindness' sake. Far from it, for the model of madness infecting the mind and not the body involved the assumption that the madman's mind was peculiarly devious, warped, intractable. Hence, William Pargeter stressed,

The government of maniacs is an art, not to be acquired without long experience, and frequent and attentive observation. As maniacs are extremely subdoious, the physician's first visit should be by surprize. He must employ every moment of his time by mildness or menaces, as circumstances direct, to gain an ascendancy over them, and to obtain their favour and prepossession. If this opportunity be lost, it will be difficult, if not impossible to effect it afterwards; and more especially, if he should betray any signs of timidity. He may be obliged at one moment, according

[96] W. Pargeter, Observations on Maniacal Disorders (Reading: for the author, 1972), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1810 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 510.

[97] John Ferriar, Medical Histories and Reflections, 3 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1795), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Mac. alpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 545.

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to the exigency of the case, to be placid and accommodating in his manners, and the next, angry and absolute.^[98]

Joseph Mason Cox, proprietor of the famous Fishponds Asylum, agreed:^[99]

The essence of management results from experience, address, and the natural endowments of the practitioners, and turns principally on making impressions on the senses. Since lunatics are artful, and their minds intensely fixed on the accomplishments of any wild purpose conjured up by the disease, physicians should be constantly on their guard: their grand object is to procure the confidence of the patient or to excite fear.... Whatever methods are adopted in order to secure either fear or confidence, deception is seldom admissible, no promise should remain unfulfilled, nor threat unexecuted.^[100]

This was because the madman's will had to be won over. Public opinion was scandalized that Francis Willis allowed George III a razor to shave himself with. Willis was firm in his own defense before the Parliamentary Committee:

It is necessary for a physician... to be able to judge, at the Moment, whether he can confide in the Professions of his Patient, and I never was disappointed in my Opinion.^[101]

Transferred to a more institutional setting, moral management mutated into moral therapy, most notably at the York Retreat, opened in 1796, run by the Quaker Tuke family.^[102] The Tukes likewise elevated mind above body, stating,

[98] W. Pargeter, Observations on Maniacal Disorders (Reading: for the author, 1792), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 539.

[99] J. M. Cox, Practical Observations on Insanity (London, 1806), 42-43. See also M. Donnelly, Managing the Mind (London: Tavistock, 1983).

[100] J. M. Cox, Practical Observations on Insanity (London, 1806), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535- 1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 596.

[101] Quoted in Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George Ill and the Mad Business (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 275.

[102] A. Digby, Madness, Morality and Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); "Moral Treatment at the York Retreat," in The Anatomy of Madness, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, 2 vols. (London: Tavistock, 1985), 2: 52-72; F. Godlee, "The Retreat and Quakerism," ibid. 2: 73-85; A. Scull, Museums of Madness (London: Allen Lane, 1979), 68; W. F. Bynum, "Rationales for Therapy in British Psychiatry 1780-1825," Medical History 18 (1974): 817-834.

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The physician plainly perceived how much was to be done by moral and how little by medical means.^[103]

But management had special connotations at the Retreat. For little value was placed on the virtuosity of the doctor. Instead the emphasis was on community. Its atmosphere was that of the family, its aim through example and the distribution of praise and disapproval to rekindle healthy rational and moral responses in the insane. As Charles Gaspard de La Rive rightly perceived:

You see, that in the moral treatment, they do not consider the patients as absolutely deprived of reason, that is to say, as inaccessible to the emotions of fear, hope, sentiment and honour. They consider them... as children who have a superfluity of strength, and who would make a dangerous use of it; their punishment and rewards must be immediate, because anything at a distance has no effect upon them. A new system of education must be adopted.^[104]

Foucault interpreted moral therapy as the imposition of radical chains. The Retreat could dispense with manacles of iron, because it caged the patients in manacles of mind; psychiatric control was so much more thorough, silent, and less scandalous.^[105] Yet Foucault's seems a peculiarly paranoid judgment, given that the Retreat did indeed succeed in restoring such a high percentage of its patients to the outside world, and (as Ann Digby's new study has shown) so many ex-patients were deeply grateful for the care they received.^[106] Yet Foucault's comment rightly draws attention to one point: the concern of the Retreat with the reform of mind. The Retreat formed part of the new psychiatric space.^[107]

It made sense to early Georgian minds to treat behavioral disorders as a matter of the body. By 1800, they had largely become affairs of the mind.

[103] S. Tuke, A Description of the Retreat at York (York, 1813), 151.

[104] Quoted in Alexander Walk, "Some Aspects of the 'Moral Treatment' of the Insane up to 1845," Journal of Mental Science 100 (1954): 817.

[105] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965).

[106] A. Digby, Madness, Morality and Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); "Moral Treatment at the York Retreat," in The Anatomy of Madness, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, 2 vols. (London: Tavistock, 1985), 2: 52-72.

[107] M. Fears, "Therapeutic Optimism and the Treatment of the Insane," in Health Care and Health Knowledge, ed. R. Dingwall (London: Croom Helm, 1977), 66-81; "The 'Moral Treatment' of Insanity: A Study in the Social Construction of Human Nature" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1978).

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Why? How did the idea of mental disorder become acceptable? How did terms like "hysteria," "hypochondria," and "neurosis" mutate into having the psychiatric meanings with which we are familiar? Indeed, how did the disciplines now known as psychiatry and psychology acquire independent existence from the early nineteenth century (the term "psychiatry" was an import from Feuchtersleben's German)?^[108] I shall hint at some developments which worked together in this direction.

For one thing, treating the mad was developing into a more specialist occupation. Mad-doctors wanted to distinguish themselves over and against general medicine. To be able to claim an expertise of the mind was a mark of independence.

Moreover, mad-doctors were increasingly operating in their own distinctive site, the asylum. From Battle through to the Tukes and Edward Long Fox, many headed small private asylums for respectable clients.^[109] The physician was entrepreneur, and personal contact was maximized. Treating the mad face-to-face, in the quasi-domestic intimacy of the small asylum, the energetic and human physician developed an unprecedented familiarity with the complex, ambivalent, defensive, self-protective preoccupations of the lunatic confined within the hothouse environment of the madhouse. They could see method in madness, and gain experience of behavior patterns that demanded explanation in terms more individual than the categories of gross pathological anatomy. The mentalization of lunacy was in large part a consequence of the institutionalization of the mad and their protracted clinical observation.

Yet it was not only the proto-psychiatrists who came to formulate the idea of mental disorder. Thus Coleridge was to insist:

Madness is not simply a bodily disease. It is the sleep of the spirit with certain conditions of wakefulness; that is to say, lucid intervals.^[110]

And this layman's opinion indicates we need to cast our explanatory net wider, exploring shifts in general social perceptions of self and society, danger and prestige, personality and propriety. So great had been the disorder of the Stuart century—that century of revolution—that the risk

[108] For some of these mutations see Roy Porter, "The Doctor and the Word," Medical Sociology News 9 (1983): 21-28; see also G. S. Rousseau, "Psychology," in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 143-210.

[109] W. Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 74 f.; Andrew Scull, "From Madness to Mental Illness: Medical Men as Moral Entrepreneurs," European Journal of Sociology 16 (1975): 219-261.

[110] Quoted in V. Skultans, Madness and Morals (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 16.

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of disorder to the soul or self was intolerable, and deviations from Right Reason were abominated as culpable lunacy. By contrast, the peace, prosperity, and civility of Georgian society relaxed the old stringent social and self controls. Waning religious zeal, secularization even, meant that for polite society the threat of diabolical possession was reduced to a ghost from the past, a gothic survival. In the consumer society—whose atmosphere was one of increasing cultural pluralism and artistic tolerance—self-expression and the cultivation of sensibilities by people of feeling found new acceptance.

Rationalized by the Lockean philosophy of liberty, individuality, and the subjective understanding, the inner world of feelings could count for more.^[111] Suspicions about imagination were disarmed, and the search for self-identity could become an engrossing activity, the avocation of the finer, nobler soul. Such quests for New Found Lands of inner space—what Thomas Gray called "the stranger within thee"—are perhaps signaled by a remark of Boswell's in his Hypochondriack column: "There is too general a propensity to consider Hypochondria as altogether a bodily disorder: mens sana —a healthful mind—quite distinct from corpore sano —a sound body."^[112]

In Boswell, whom Johnson rebuked for flirting with melancholy,^[113] and many of his refined contemporaries we detect a willingness to risk the equivocations of a free-floating mental and imaginative condition, paving the way for the Romantic credo that if Consciousness or Imagination were the supreme faculty, it must be sovereign in Madness no less than in Reason, or, more scurrilously, in Byron's vignette of Keats at work on his poetry, "f—gg—g his imagination."^[114]

Attributing madness to the body had been a resource for coping with

[111] For the eighteenth-century quest for self-identity see P. M. Spacks, Imagining a Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), especially chap. 5; J. N. Morris, Versions of the Self (New York: Basic Books, 1966); for the Lockean philosophical background to this see H. E. Allison, "Locke's Theory of Personal Identity: A Reexamination," in Locke on Human Understanding: Selected Essays, ed. 1. C. Tipton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 105-122; S. D. Cox, "The Stranger within Thee": Concepts of the Self in Late-Eighteenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980); J. O. Lyons, The Invention of the Self (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).

[112] James Boswell, Boswell's Column, introduction and notes by Margery Bailey (London: Kimber, 1951), 319.

[113] A. Ingram, Boswell's Creative Gloom (London: Macmillan, 1982).

[114] Thus Byron:

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chaos. After all, through the claims of the sectaries to direction by powers from Beyond, the real threats to order had come not from the body but from the spirit.^[115] But by the close of the eighteenth century all had changed. Enlightenment materialism had become incorporated in the French Revolution and in radical materialist sciences such as phrenology. Now it was medical materialism that jeopardized hierarchy. The mind that would now accept mental illness was the one that identified civilization's future with the supremacy of mind, indeed with the march of mind.^[116]

I have concentrated upon lunacy. Given time, intriguing parallels and contrasts could be traced in other areas of the mind/body interface. Here I can do no more than hint at a few. Take sex. The sex advice books of the late seventeenth century such as Nicolas Venette's Tableau de l'amour conjugal and Aristotle's Masterpiece present an extremely organic view of sex: it is essentially seen as a body urge, indeed a body purge, a physiological mechanism for discharging surplus passion or fluid, Nature's provision for the preservation of the race. Failures such as impotence or sterility are put down to organic causes to be set to rights by organic remedies—drugs, diet, surgery, and so forth.^[117]

Sexual discourse had changed quite remarkably however by the end of the eighteenth century.^[118] By then the dominant assumption was that

[115] See P. Fussell, The Rhetorical Worm of Augustan Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).

[116] J. Engell, The Creative Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).

[117] Roy Porter, "Spreading Carnal Knowledge or Selling Dirt Cheap? Nicolas Venette's Tableau de L'amour conjugal in Eighteenth-Century England," Journal of European Studies 14 (1984): 235-255.

[118] For the shifts see Roy Porter, "The Sexual Politics of James Graham," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 5 (1982): 109-206; P. Wagner, Eros Revived (London: Secker and Warburg, 1988); idem, "Research the Taboo: Sexuality and Eighteenth-Century English Erotica," Eighteenth-Century Life 3 (1983): 108-115; P. -G. Boucé, "Aspects of Sexual Tolerance and Intolerance in Eighteenth-Century England," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1980): 180; Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Alex Comfort, The Anxiety Makers (London: Nelson, 1967).

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sex was all in the head. On the one hand, writers on what were becoming singled out as sexual diseases, soon to be the perversions—Tissot on masturbation, Bienville on nymphomania—were increasingly arguing that the blame for sexual vices lay not with some organic lesion but in the diseased mind.^[119] For Bienville, "the imagination is the sole contriver" of self-abuse.^[120] On the other hand, a noted physician such as John Hunter had demonstrated in a famous case-study how impotence could be overcome by acknowledging that the defect lay in the mind, and so proceeding psychologically rather than physiologically.^[121] Not least, James Graham, in his notorious Lecture on Generation, urged that the key to sexual performance lay in stimulating the imagination:

How astonishing is the force of the imagination of the bodily faculties! Some of you, gentlemen, may perhaps have experienced that the imagination being intensely rivited, at certain times, on a very beautiful or much loved woman, it will make a man enjoy a plain one with almost equal ardour.^[122]

How do we explain the shifts in this field? The forces are complex and confused. As part of the movement toward heightened sensibility, sex itself was being elevated, sublimated into the ideal realm of the mental pleasures.^[123] But at the same time, as sexual abuses such as masturbation became recognized as resistant to eradication, that sad conclusion suggested that their source must be deeply hidden, in the convoluted, deviant labyrinth of the imagination.

[119] See Foucault, The History of Sexuality; F. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).

[120] See Peter Wagner, "The Veil of Science and Morality: Some Pornographic Aspects of the ONANIA," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 4 (1983): 179-184; G. S. Rousseau, "Nymphomania, Bienville and the Rise of Erotic Sensibility," in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. P. -G. Boucé (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 95-120.

[121] Quoted in R. Hunter and I, Mac. alpine, Three Hundred Years of Pschiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 494.

[122] J. Graham, A Lecture on the Generation, Increase, and Improvement of the Human Species (London, 1780?), 50.

[123] For the Enlightenment's libido-liberating claim that the erotic is the healthy see J. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Erotic Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Roy Porter, "Mixed Feelings: The Enlightenment and Sexuality in Britain," in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. P. -G. Boucé (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 1-27; idem, "The Sexual Politics of James Graham," British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 5 (1982): 199-205; P. -G. Boucé, "Some Sexual Beliefs and Myths in Eighteenth-Century Britain," in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 28-47.

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A parallel story can surely be told of drunkenness.^[124] Doctors traditionally deplored drunkenness as a constitutional malaise. Within humoral medicine, the drunken fever was a mark of a lack of moderation; the consequence of habitual intoxication was the ruin of the stomach and the inflammation of the brain, even to insanity. But in the Gin Age, as a succession of physicians gave more critical attention to hard drinking—Cheyne and Lettsom stand out—attention switched to the disposition to drunkenness—they sometimes spoke of "addiction"—taken as a malady of the will, culminating in Thomas Trotter's express statement of 1804 that habitual drunkenness was not just a disease but "a disease of the mind" (the concept of alcoholism was to follow a generation later).^[125] Here, I suggest, as in the case of sexual perversions, a growing recognition of the intractability of the habit, and its unresponsiveness to medication, helped direct the medical gaze within, into the inner space of the delinquent, recalcitrant will.

Mesmerism offers a parallel change and a similar challenge. As is well known, Franz Anton Mesmer himself was adamant that he performed his cures through the agency of a natural superfine medium, the animal magnetic fluid. That guaranteed that his technique was truly scientific. By contrast, it was his critics, especially the devastating French Commission of 1784, who insisted that Mesmer's cures were mere suggestion, were all due to transference from mind to mind. Mesmer could never come to terms with the idea of purely psychic efficacy, yet his follower Puysegur happily discarded the animal magnetic fluid and accepted a psychological explanation. He thus paved the way for hypnotism, Victorian spiritualism, and dynamic psychiatry, anticipating the course taken by the young Freud in shifting away from neurophysiology toward therapies that steadily grew less somatic: from cocaine, to hypnosis by pressure, to free associations and the talking cure.^[126]

[124] For a recent discussion of this issue see Roy Porter, "The Drinking Man's Disease: The Prehistory of Alcoholism in Georgian Britain," British Journal of Addiction 80 (1984).

[125] T. Trotter, An Essay, Medical, Philosophical and Chemical, on Drunkenness (London, 1804).

[126] For mesmerism in France see R. Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlighten-merit in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); G. Sutton, "Electric Medicine and Mesmerism," Isis 72 (1981): 375-392; V. Buranelli, The Wizard from Vienna: Franz Mesmer and the Origins of Hypnotism (London: P. Owen, 1976); F. A. Mesmer, Mesmerism: A Translation of the Original Scientific and Medical Writings of F. A. Mesmer, M.D., trans. George Bloch (Los Altos, Calif.: Kaufman, 1980); F. Rausky, Mesmer, ou la révolution thérapeutique (Paris: Payot, 1977). The early history of English mesmerism awaits its author. For contemporary accounts and attacks see J. Martin, Animal Magnetism Examined (London, 1790), and [anon.], The Wonders and Mysteries of Animal Magnetism Displayed (London, 1791). See also Jonathan Miller, "Mesmerism," The Listener, 22Nov. 1973, 685-690; Roy Porter, "Under the Influence: Mesmerism in England," History Today, September 1985, 22-29. For the hater legacy, see H. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

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Physiognomy underwent a similar psychological sublimation. Traditional physiognomy had been somatic through and through, postulating that character embossed itself directly upon the face or body. This came to seem hideously crude to eighteenth-century savants aware of hypocrisy and the mask, and subscribing to the New Philosophy's view that Nature's essence lay not in surface qualities but underneath. But Lavater was to develop a new physiognomical gaze—using what he called "an additional eye," his mind's eye, to peer behind transient, fleeting expressions and catch the hidden, secret soul.^[127]

Foucault's work is highly suggestive for grasping the meaning of shifts from attention to the body to attention to the mind. In Discipline and Punish, for example, he showed how physical torture and corporal punishment gave way to the systematic penalization of the mind ("punishment should strike the soul rather than the body," wrote Mably)—and, more importantly, in the new penology, to the goal of the reform of the criminal mind.^[128] Foucault's signal contribution was to deny that this switch should automatically be seen as liberal and humane. The emergence of disciplines such as psychiatry did not constitute "progress" but simply registered new configurations of savoir-pouvoir, inscribed in particular institutional structures—the asylum, the prison. But Foucault never ventured a more comprehensive social viewpoint, presumably fearing that the rigor of textual analysis would be sapped by the reentry of flabby social history, with all its people.

Yet surely we need that wider framework—of people, not just prison manuals and penitentials—as if we are to avoid the impression Foucault's books all too readily give that history has been one relentless encroachment of disciplines, controls, and their accompanying discourses. Indeed, his unfinished history of sexuality seems to hint that he himself was willing to broaden his approach. For there he hypothesizes in the first volume how growing bourgeois attention to health in the eighteenth

[127] See G. Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); M. Shortland, "Barthes, Lavater and the Visible Body," Economy and Society 14 (1985): 273-312; M. Shortland, "The Body in Question: Some Perceptions, Problems and Perspectives of the Body in Relation to Character, c. 1750—1850" (Ph.D. thesis, Leeds University, 1985); Roy Porter, "Making Faces: Physiognomy and Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England," Etudes anglaises 38 (1985): 385-396.

[128] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 95.

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century might be seen as a counterweight to the aristocratic concentration on blood.^[129] But he did not proceed to examine the wider class dynamics of such developments, did not explore how the growing bourgeois stress upon the mind, upon body purification, delicacy, and social distance, formed tactics for dematerialization, designed to segregate the propertied and the polite from the hoi polloi, as part of that separation of high and low life which formed such a key feature of the eighteenth century.^[130]

Mind was to be cordoned off from body, just as the polite were not to be touched by the great unwashed. As that quintessential bourgeois, Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, was to put it:

every class of society has its own glory. The poor, his physical strength; the middle, the power of mental research; the elevated, the charm of manner, the amalgam which fits them as keystones to solidify the arch of society. Then let us each rejoice in our own, and rejoice in our neighbours' gifts, but not expect to find all united in one.^[131]

Let us nudge these speculations about mind, muscles, and manners one stage further. For in other important ways, broad social changes were to bring mind to the fore. The century from the Scientific Revolution to the Industrial Revolution saw a staggering expansion of human productive powers for the mastery of Nature and the management of matter. The consequence of these scientific and material transformations had been to empty Nature of mind—what Weber called the disenchantment of the world, or Couliano has more recently termed the de-eroticization of Nature.^[132]

[129] Foucault, The History of Sexuality.

[130] For the rise of sensibility see Erik Erametsa, "A Study of the Word 'Sentimental' and of Other Linguistic Characteristics of Eighteenth-Century Sentimentalism in England" (Thesis, Helsinki, 1951); R. S. Crane, "Suggestions towards a Genealogy of the Man of Feeling," ELH 1 (1934): 205-230; G. S. Rousseau, "Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility," with a postscript, The Blue Guitar (Messina) 2 (1976): 125-153; L. Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962); S. Moravia, "The Enlightenment and the Sciences of Man," History of Science 18 (1980): 247-268; K. Figlio, "Theories of Perception and the Physiology of Mind in the Late Eighteenth Century," History of Science 13 (1975): 177-212. For the opening up of cultural divides see P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978); for the changing role of the public see R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

[131] C. C. Hankin, ed., Life of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, 2 vols. (London, 1858), 2:127.

[132] I. Couliano, Eros et magie à la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1984); W. Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York: Brazillier, 1972).

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The world soul vanished, Nature was reduced to matter, or what natural philosophers commonly called body. But while consciousness and sympathy were thus being drained from Nature, they were being concentrated in man's mind. As E. B. Tylor was later to argue:

Animism, indeed, seems to be drawing in its outposts, and concentrating itself on the first and main position, the doctrine of the human soul.^[133]

Crucially, this rise of dominion in science, discovery, and industry afforded man new experience of Mind over Matter, reinforcing that sense of the human mind as the source of power and creation so prominent in late-eighteenth-century sources from German Idealism to English Romanticism.^[134] It was but a short step to the Victorian identification of destiny with the March of Mind.

If one embodiment of this new sense of will was the entrepreneur, he was closely paralleled by the emergent intellectual. When the history of the intelligentsia is properly written, we will at last have a better appreciation of that astonishing growth in voice and authority of the thinker toward the close of the eighteenth century, of which Romanticism is one facet. The rise of the intellectuals' fourth estate went pari passu with a new magic of the mind. We all too readily regard the claims of poet-artists like Blake (who dissolved body into imagination or soul)^[135] as being at cross-purposes with those thinkers, such as Priestley, he parodied in The Philosopher in the Moon. Yet in fact they are all of a piece, as Peacock's satires show.^[136] "When I was young," wrote Théophile

[133] E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871), quoted in H. Jennings, Pandaemonium (London: A. Deutsch, 1985), 325.

[134] For different dimensions see J. Benthall, The Body Electric (London, 1976); P. A. Cantor, Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1084).

[135] Man has no Body distinct from his soul;

[136] Cf. Mr. Flosky on "the morbid anatomy of black bile" in Nightmare Abbey, in The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. D. Garnett (London: R. Hart-Davies, 1948), 376.

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Gautier, "I could not have accepted as a lyrical poet anyone weighing more than ninety-nine pounds."^[137] Yet this romanticization of consumption as the dematerializing disease only echoes Sydney Smith's complaint that a certain man "had not body enough to cover his mind decently with, his intellect is improperly exposed."^[138]

Improperly exposed intellects may come a bit near the bone. My coverage here is somewhat skimpy. I haven't touched on the countless layers of ambivalence and contradiction in representations of mind/body relations—for example, to note just one instance, the fact that the pre-Victorian rise of delicacy, when servants were being permitted less and less direct contact with their betters, occurred at precisely the time when man-midwives were being let into women's bedrooms for the first time, to touch the most private, the most delicate parts of all.^[139]

Yet what I have attempted is to suggest that in our understanding of the mind/body relation, the view from the body has been neglected. There is far more in the relationship than regular histories of faculty psychology, the philosophy of mind, or of psychiatry allow. In particular, mind/body relations must be understood within specific contexts of use determined by particular problems and cultural configurations. The detailed histories remain to be told.^[140]

[137] Quoted in S. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (London: Allen Lane, 1979); cf. S. Mcleod, The Art of Starvation (London, 1981).

[138] A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith ed. Lady Holland (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855), l: 258.

[139] John O'Neill, Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 23.

[140] See L. Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977); E. Shorter, A History of Women's Bodies (London: Allen Lane, 1983). For proto-Victorianism see P. Fryer, Mrs. Grundy: Studies in English Prudery (London: Dobson, 1963); M. Jaeger, Before Victoria (London: Chatto and Windus, 1956); E. J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1979); M. Quinlan, Victorian Prelude (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941); E. Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens (London: Heinemann, 1966). For the midwife as sexual threat see Roy Porter, "A Touch of Danger: The Man-Midwife as Sexual Predator," in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).

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Two Barely Touching: A Social Perspective on Mind and Body

Roy Porter

Two
Barely Touching:
A Social Perspective on Mind and Body