Hysteria Beyond Freud "nsd0e6122"

Two— "A Strange Pathology": Hysteria in the Early Modern World, 1500-1800

1. This raises the philosophical question about medical categories as distinct from others; some discussion of the subject is found in Lester King, The Philosophy of Medicine: The Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 49-50, in the context of Greek philosophy and medicine. Throughout this chapter the question of medical categories never lies far from my imagination. What can a "medical malady" or "medical condition" be if it can embrace almost every type of symptom? [BACK]

2. This fact should not cause students such as those of us who contribute to this book to become positivists and think we can know everything about hysteria as a philosophical, medical, and representational category; for hysteria and representation see below in this section and in section XIV; for the dangers of such belief see Edward Davenport, "The Devils of Positivism," in Literature and Science: Theory and Practice , ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 17-31. The "is" and "as is" of hysteria is a double-headed hydra. [BACK]

3. The generalization must be qualified: For the intimate connection between hysteria and psychoanalysis, pre- and post-Lacanian, see Alan Krohn, "Hysteria: The Elusive Neurosis," in Psychological Issues (New York: International Universities Press, 1978); Monique David-Ménard, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); and the important bibliographical detective work of Mark Micale, "On the 'Disappearance' of Hysteria: A Study in the Clinical Deconstruction of a Diagnosis," unpublished paper delivered to the Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, London (1988), and "Hysteria and Its Historiography: A Review of Past and Present Writings," History of Science 27 (1989): 223-260, 317-351. [BACK]

4. Discussions of the strange disappearance of hysteria include: Mark Micale's works (n. 3); Krohn, "Hysteria"; and, from a literary point of view, the fiction of Marguerite Duras (see sections II and III). For conversion syndrome, see M. I. Weintraub, Hysterical Conversion Reactions: A Clinical Guide to Diagnosis and Treatment (Lancaster: MTP Press, 1983); David-Ménard, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan . [BACK]

5. Female sexuality is not, of course, synonymous with feminism or any other political women's movement; what I designate by the threat of female sexuality in history is eloquently discussed in Caroline Bynum, ed., Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986); Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980 (London: Virago, 1987); Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). [BACK]

6. Such vigilance paid to the linguistic aspects of scientific and medical discourse has been at the top of my own agenda for two decades; see G. S. Rousseau, Enlightenment Borders: Scientific—Medical: Pre- and Postmodern Discourses (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). I use the term "emplot" (i.e., emplotted, emplotment, emplotments) to denote the way cultural practices and material conditions are encoded in a discourse, and throughout this chapter I particularly want to understand how various medical theories of hysteria assume a particular vision of culture and then emplot that vision into a text. Questions of further representation, genre, and rhetoric are another matter. [BACK]

7. For the claim and its limits, see G. S. Rousseau, "Medicine and the Muses: An Approach to Literature and Medicine," in Medicine and Literature , ed. Marie Roberts and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 23-57. For numbness and headache among hysterical types, see Oliver Sacks, Migraine: The Evolution of a Common Disorder (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1985), 196-207. See also section IX for Willis's model of hysteria in relation to migraine. [BACK]

8. See sections III and IX for detailed discussion of Sydenham's theories and therapies. [BACK]

9. See Krohn, "Hysteria," 343. [BACK]

10. Even the most theoretical and philosophically advanced of medical theorists has avoided this matter of category, and Micale's various bibliographical studies (n. 3) do not address the issue. [BACK]

11. I take this to be a main point of David Morris's chapter on hysteria in his fine study of The Languages of Pain (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1992). [BACK]

12. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Riverside Shakespeare , ed. G. B. Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974), l.ii. 82. The standard work is by R. Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964). For the relation of eros and ecstasy see Arthur Evans, The God of Ecstasy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), and M. Screech, Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly (London: Duck-worth, 1980). For Lacan biographically and in relation to hysteria, see: Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987); Catherine Clement, The Life and Legend of Jacques Lacan , trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). [BACK]

13. This remains one of the main points, collectively speaking, of the ten authors writing in G. S. Rousseau, ed., The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1990). [BACK]

14. See Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), and idem, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). The trope of hysteria and melancholy is pervasive in her writing, as her best commentators have recognized: see, for example, J. Fletcher and A. Benjamin, eds., Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva (London: Routledge, 1989). [BACK]

15. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction (London: Penguin, 1978), 104. [BACK]

16. "Numbing" was not a term commonly used in any language in the period preeminently discussed in this chapter, although for a contemporary use in a medical context see M. Liger, M.D., "A Treatise on the Gout: From the French of M. Charles Luis Liger," Critical Review (April 1760): 283-288. Nevertheless, I continue to invoke it fully aware of its somewhat anachronistic usage and based on its common appearance in twentieth-century parlance and printed writing, especially in the works of such "nervous writers" as Virginia Woolf, Simon de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, and Samuel Beckett. In English, the word had acquired several usages by 1800, especially in physiological and medical contexts, but was not regularly used in the vocabulary of the nerves. For the standard definitions in English ca. 1750, see Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language , 2 vols. (London, 1755). [BACK]

17. The extended quarrel of the ancients and moderns, which is seminal for any understanding of the period covered by this chapter, taught its contestants as much, and we do well to learn from the intellectual ravages of three centuries; see R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1936), and Joseph Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987). [BACK]

18. See George Lincoln Burr, "The Literature of Witchcraft," Papers of the American Historical Association 4 (1890): 37-66; Henry Charles Lea, "Materials toward a History of Witchcraft" (Philadelphia, 1939; reprint, New York and London: T. Yoseloff, 1957); Russell Hope Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (New York: Crown, 1959); and the several books by William Monter, the acknowledged expert on European witchcraft. [BACK]

19. The literature is reviewed in J. Dall'Ava Santucci, Des sorciè aux mandarines: Histoire des femmes médecins (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1989). [BACK]

20. It is found in and has its own curious provenance, having been quoted by many writers in the last century, and by some who figure in this chapter, having often been cited by Marguerite Duras and, most recently, by David Morris; see Marguerite Duras, Writing on the Body (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), and David Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), chap. 5. Curiously, Monter does not discuss the account in his many books on witchcraft. [BACK]

21. Jules Michelet, Satanism and Witchcraft: A Study in Medieval Superstition (New York: Citadel Press, 1939), 23, 39, 41, 79, 327-329. [BACK]

22. See Kristeva, Desire in Language , and David-Ménard, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan , who extends Kristeva's jouissance to the whole field of knowledge but without relating it to hysteria in the way I attempt here. [BACK]

23. T. F. Graham, Medieval Minds: Mental Health in the Middle Ages (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967); T. K. Oesterreich, Possession: Demoniacal and Other (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1930); Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology ; John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). [BACK]

24. For mass hysteria see Bryan Wilson, Magic and the Millennium: A Sociological Study of Religious Movements of Protest among Tribal and Third-World Peoples (London: Heinemann, 1973); Michael J. Colligan et al., eds., Mass Psychogenic Illness: A Social Psychological Analysis (Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Assoc., 1982). As late as 1989, several hundred musical performers became violently ill in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in California. A team of UCLA psychiatrists investigated the case and published their findings in the American Journal of Psychiatry , reporting that this was a classic case of "group psychogenic illness." See J. Scott, "1989 Santa Monica Illness That Struck 247 called Mass Hysteria," Los Angeles Times , September 4, 1991 (B1, 3). The Los Angeles riots of April 1992, may in time receive a similar diagnosis. [BACK]

25. An early work making this point is Albertus Krantz's De passionibus mulierum (1544); see also Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, A History of Women in Medicine, from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (Haddam, Conn.: Haddam Press, 1938); Michael MacDonald, "Women and Madness in Tudor and Stuart England," Social Research 53, no. 2 (1986): 261-281; Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1987); Alexander Walker, Woman Physiologically Considered, as to Mind, Morals, Marriage, Matrimonial Slavery, Infidelity and Divorce (Hartford, Conn., 1851); D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London : Warburg Institute, 1958); idem, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (London: Scholar Press, 1981); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1973); Brian Easlea, Witch Hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1980), esp. chap. 4. [BACK]

26. For further evidence see Graham, Medieval Minds ; B. L. Gordon, Medieval and Renaissance Medicine (London: Peter Owen, 1959); Richard Neugebauer, "Treatment of the Mentally Ill in Medieval and Early Modern England: A Reappraisal," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 14 (1978): 158-169; Beryl Rowland, Medieval Woman's Guide to Health (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981); Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), the most useful of these works for hysteria, especially for her commentary on Bona For-tuna's fourteenth-century Treatise on the Viaticum ; see Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages , 131, 174-179, 290-291. [BACK]

27. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages , 175. The classic work is, of course, Jacques Ferrand's 1623 Treatise on Lovesickness , ed. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1989). [BACK]

28. Examples are found in S. Anglo, The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). Comparison of these images with modern ones of the hypnotic prove useful; see Leon Chertok and Isabelle Stengers, Le coeur et la raison: L'hypnose en question de Lavoisier a Lacan (Paris: Editions Payot, 1989). [BACK]

29. Oesterreich's Possession: Demoniacal and Other is still useful, but also see A. Rodewyk, Die dämonische Besessenheit in der Sicht des Rituale Romanum (Aschaffenburg: Paul Pattloch Verlag, 1963). [BACK]

30. See these works by Marguerite Duras: The Lover (New York: Grove Press, 1976); The Malady of Death (New York: Grove Press, 1986); and Writing on the Body . [BACK]

31. This example assumes upper-class hysterics; hysteria in relation to poverty and poor nerves is discussed in sections IX and XIV. [BACK]

32. The point has been eloquently made by Morris in The Languages of Pain , chap. 5. The locales also provide surfeits of pleasure; this point about pleasure must be stressed. [BACK]

33. Easlea, Witch Hunting , esp. chap. 4; Demos, Entertaining Satan . [BACK]

34. P. Janet, L'état mental des hystériques , 2d ed. (Paris: F. Alcan, 1911), 708. [BACK]

35. See Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); R. Satow, "Where Has All the Hysteria Gone?" Psychoanalytic Review 66 (1979-80): 463-477; Patricia Fedikew, "Marguerite Duras: Feminine Field of Hysteria," Enclitic 6 (1982):78-86. This form of analysis has been developed with regard to Kristeva and Lacan in David-Ménard, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan , and in William Holsz, Sexual Subversions (London: Allen & Unwin, 1989). [BACK]

36. Such numbness, however, does not figure into recent medical analyses: see Gilbert H. Glaser, "Epilepsy, Hysteria and 'Possession,'" Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 166, no. 4 (1978): 268-274; S. B. Guze, "The Diagnosis of Hysteria: What Are We Trying to Do?" American Journal of Psychiatry 124 (1967): 491-498. For comparison between the nineteenth century and earlier periods and the broad cultural factors involved, see J. Goldstein, "The Hysteria Diagnosis and the Politics of Anticlericalism in Late Nineteenth Century France," Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 209-239, and idem, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). [BACK]

37. See William B. Ober, "Margery Kempe: Hysteria and Mysticism Reconciled," in Bottoms Up! A Pathologist's Essays on Medicine and the Humanities (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 203-220; C. M. Bache, "A Reappraisal of Teresa of Avila's Supposed Hysteria," Journal of Religion and Health 24 (1985): 300-315. [BACK]

38. Not surprisingly, there is no male equivalent containing an ideology even remotely similar to the one found in the feminist agenda. What indeed do contemporary feminists say about male hysteria? For a start, see Micale above. [BACK]

39. For the philosophical problem of representation, at least since the advent of the Cartesian revolution in thought, see Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity , Cambridge Studies in French, ed. Malcolm Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and, for more recent times, James L. Larson, Reason and Experience: The Representation of Natural Order in the Worm of Carl yon Linné (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1971), and Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); idem, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton , N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). [BACK]

40. Sources for Sydenham are provided in n. 41 and in Sections V-VII. [BACK]

41. For Sydenham, see especially Kenneth Dewhurst, Dr. Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689): His Life and Original Writings (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966). Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the brilliant aristocrat, world traveler, and friend of poet Alexander Pope, was deeply impressed by Sydenham's ability to describe the real condition of hysteria: ''I have seen so much of hysterical complaints, tho' Heaven be praised I never felt them, I know it is an obstinate and very uneasy distemper, tho' never fatal unless when Quacks undertake to cure it. I have even observed that those who are troubled with it commonly live to old age. Lady Stair is one instance; I remember her screaming and crying when Miss Primrose, my selfe, and other girls were dancing 2 rooms distant. Lady Fanny has but a slight touch of this distemper: read Dr. Sydenham; you will find the analyse of that and many other diseases, with a candor I never found in any other author. I confess I never had faith in any other physician, living or dead. Mr. Locke places him in the same rank with Sir Isaac Newton, and the Italians call him the English Hippocrates. I own I am charmed with his taking off the reproach which you men so saucily throw on our sex, as if we alone were subject to vapours. He clearly proves that your wise honourable spleen is the same disorder and arises from the same cause; but you vile usurpers do not only engross learning, power, and authority to yourselves, but will be our superiors even in constitution of mind, and fancy you are incapable of the woman's weakness of fear and tenderness" ( The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , ed. Robert Halsband [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965], 3:171). Dr. Thomas Trotter, the influential early nineteenth-century English physician, thought that Sydenham and Cheyne had been the two most influential physicians of the last hundred years barring none; see Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad Business (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), 290. [BACK]

42. For the word "nervous" set into its cultural context and a history of this development, see G. S. Rousseau, "The Language of the Nerves: A Chapter in Social and Linguistic History," in Language, Self, and Society: A Social History of Language , 2d ed., ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), 213-275. [BACK]

43. Good surveys of this science and Sydenham's role in it are found in Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); idem, The Royal Society and Its Fellows, 1660-1700: The Morphology of an Early Scientific Institution (Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks: British Society for the History of Science, 1982). [BACK]

44. Sydenham's notion of imitation ( imitatio ) was the traditional Aristotelian one described in the Poetics ; for textual examples see Thomas Sydenham, "Processes Integri: Chap. 1: On the Affection Called Hysteria in Women; and Hypochondriasis in Men," in The Works of Thomas Sydenham, M.D ., trans. R. G. Latham, 2 vols. (London: Sydenham Society, 1848-1850), 1: 281-286, and idem, The Whole Works of That Excellent Practical Physician (London, 1705). [BACK]

45. A synchronic view of hysteria evaluates all its theories at once by comparative and dialectical means; a diachronic view allows them to evolve chronologically, decade by decade. The difficulty with the latter is that narrators generating the diachronic story pretend in one decade (e.g., the 1730s) that they do not know its influence on the next (e.g., the 1740s), which they of course do, and this entails a myth about diachronic method they themselves never believe. The linguistic theorists of the period covered in this chapter were often searching for synchronic structures in the development of languages. [BACK]

46. See sections IX and XIV.

47. Ibid. See n. 174 below. [BACK]

46. See sections IX and XIV.

47. Ibid. See n. 174 below. [BACK]

48. The hysteria of Duras's women continues to be narrated by others as well. For example, in Jim Harrison's 1990 short story "The Woman Lit by Fireflies," the protagonist suffers from the same agonies; see The New Yorker , July 23, 1990, pp. 26-55. [BACK]

49. This point remains the thrust of Krohn's work in "Hysteria" (n. 3), in which the author lays equal emphasis on psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalysis. For the psychosomatic connection in the English Enlightenment, see John Midriff's marvelously satirical and humorous Observations on the Spleen and Vapours: Containing Remarkable Cases of Persons of both Sexes, and all Ranks, from the aspiring Directors to the Humble Bubbler, who have been miserably afflicted with these Melancholy Disorders since the Fall of the South-sea, and other publick Stocks; with the proper Method for their Recovery, according to the new and uncommon Circumstances of each Case (London, 1720), and W. F. Brown, "Descartes, Dualism and Psycho-somatic Medicine," in The Anatomy of Madness , ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (London: Tavistock Publications, 1985), 2: 40-62. [BACK]

50. For the background see A. E. Taylor, A Commentary on Plato's Timaeus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), 638-640; G. E. R. Lloyd, Science, Folklore, and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). [BACK]

51. Plato's view, as I have suggested, was that of the womb as living animal; see D. F. Krell, "Female Parts in Timaeus," Arion 2 (1975): 400-421. For phallo-cratic discourse and the role of women, see Eva C. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Greece (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). For the Renaissance modification of this view, see Krant, De passionibus mulierum (1544); Edward Shorter, A History of Women's Bodies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983); idem, Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspective (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986); Mary Beth Rose, Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspective (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986); I. MacLean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Joan Kelly-Gadol, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" in Becoming Visible: Women in European History , ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1967). [BACK]

52. Nowhere is this better seen than in the historiography of hysteria provided by Micale in his various works; see n. 3. [BACK]

53. See especially the contemporary testimonies in J. De Valmont, Dissertation sur les Maléfices et les Sorciers selon les principes de la théologie et de la physique, où l'on examine en particulier l'état de la fille de Tourcoing (Tourcoing, 1752); A. Galopin, Les hystériques des couvents, des églises, des temples, des theatres, des synagogues, et de l'amour (Paris, 1886); Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy (n. 12); Catherine-Laurence Maire, Les convulsionnaires de Saint-Médard: Miracles, convulsions et propéties Paris au XVIIIe siécle , Collection Archives (Paris: Gallimard Julliard, 1985). [BACK]

54. Krohn, "Hysteria," all the more evident because hysteria is so "real" and afflicts patients suffering ''real" symptoms. [BACK]

55. Looking ahead, this will be one of Sydenham's main points about hysteria in relation to all other medical conditions, despite the neglect of it by medical historians; see, for example, Dewhurst, Dr. Thomas Sydenham ; Jeffrey M. N. Boss, "The Seventeenth-Century Transformation of the Hysteric Affection, and Sydenham's Baconian Medicine," Psychological Medicine 9 (1979): 221-234. [BACK]

56. Reflection through power and marginaliation had been one of Foucault's main points about hysteria in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965); see also David Armstrong, Political Anatomy of the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). [BACK]

57. For these debates see the valuable work of Ian Hacking, Nancy Cartwright, Mary Hesse (her late works; she experienced a conversion from her earlier more internalist position), Larry Laudan, Ernan McMullin, Arthur Fine, and Ronald Giere. [BACK]

58. Valuable information is found in Colligan, Mass Psychogenic Illness (n. 24), and Wilson, Magic and the Millennium . [BACK]

59. As emphasized by Krell, "Female Parts in Timaeus "; see also Shorter, History of Women's Bodies .

60. Ibid. [BACK]

59. As emphasized by Krell, "Female Parts in Timaeus "; see also Shorter, History of Women's Bodies .

60. Ibid. [BACK]

61. See the discussion of Shakespeare and Rabelais in section VI. [BACK]

62. Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); MacLean, Renaissance Notion of Woman ; Carroll Camden, The Elizabethan Woman (New York: Elsevier Press, 1952). [BACK]

63. For the psychophysiological implications of this turning point as they affect hysteria, see Richard B. Carter, Descartes' Medical Philosophy: The Organic Solution to the Mind-Body Problem (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Brown, "Descartes, Dualism and Psychosomatic Medicine." [BACK]

64. For Sydenham's relation to Cartesianism see Dewhurst, Dr. Thomas Sydenham . [BACK]

65. As he traveled through the Levant in the 1590s, William Richard searched for Oriental equivalents; see his History of Turkey (London, 1603). [BACK]

66. See Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Random House, 1979). The defect for gout will soon be remedied in a book in preparation by G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, Gout: The Patrician Malady (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). [BACK]

67. A point discussed by Henry Siegerist, Civilization and Disease (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1944); Frederick F. Cartwright, Disease and History (London: Hart-Davis, 1972); Leon Edel, "Disease and the Novel," TLS , 30 May 1986:591. [BACK]

68. Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989). [BACK]

69. Juliet Mitchell, Woman: The Longest Revolution (London, 1984), 288-290. [BACK]

70. For some of the socioeconomic causes see Dall'Ava Santucci, Des sorcieres aux mandarines ; Bridget Hill, Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Oxford University Press); Rita Goldberg, Sex and Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). [BACK]

71. Rose, Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance ; Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent ; less astute is Camden, Elizabethan Woman . [BACK]

72. Not even the tradition of the "good surgeon" in the Renaissance and Enlightenment changes this situation; in this sense Jonathan Swift's Lemuel Gulliver, the "good surgeon" of Swift's exotic travels, comes at the end of a tradition rather than the beginning of a new one. [BACK]

73. See n. 34 for Janet. [BACK]

74. See Stephen Wilson, Saints and Their Cults (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); H. R. Lemay, "Human Sexuality in Twelfth- through Fifteenth-Century Scientific Writings," in Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church , ed. Vern Bullough and James Brundage (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1982), 187-206. Here philology is also instructive: the word "hysteria" did not enter Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, or the Romance languages until the sixteenth century, but "melancholia" (as black bile) was already being used by the medical doctors in the thirteenth, often as a synonym of " chlorosis .'' The appearance of " furor uterinus " begins in the thirteenth century, but "nymphomania" (the word) had not yet been invented; its first use, as a condition, is found as late as 1775 in M. D. T. Bienville, Nymphomania; or A Dissertation concerning the Furor Uterinus (London, 1775); see G. S. Rousseau, "The Invention of Nymphomania," in Perilous Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 44-64. No work brings these traditions—verbal and visual, philological and scientific—so well together as Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy . [BACK]

75. A brief account is found in Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages (n. 26). The classic source for melancholy as both male and female remains Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). See also T. S. Soufas, Melancholy and the Secular Mind in Spanish Golden Age Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), who considers melancholy the key to the transition between medieval and Renaissance mentalities but who is rather silent on its genderization in the Renaissance. In Melancholy and Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), Wolf Lepenies expands on the intersection of melancholy and secularism in its utopian and political dimensions. [BACK]

76. Soufas, Melancholy and the Secular Mind , 131.

77. Ibid. [BACK]

76. Soufas, Melancholy and the Secular Mind , 131.

77. Ibid. [BACK]

78. It is surely anachronistic to imagine that the objection was then made, or could have been made, among the midwives and their patients in the name of lesbianism: that was never a concern; if there was concern, it was on grounds that the midwives (the obstetrices ) as well as patients were becoming sexually aroused and carnally sacrificed; see B. Ehrenreich, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973); Jacques Gelis, La sage-femme ou le médecin: Une nouvelle conception de la vie (Paris: Fayard, 1988). [BACK]

79. For the early genderization and pathologization of the soul see Joseph Schumacher, Die seelischen Volkskrankheiten im deutschen Mittelalter (Berlin: Neue Deutsche Forschungen, 1937); R. B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951); and an early work, Johann Ambrosius Hillig, Anatomie der Seelen (Leipzig, 1737). For hysteria and possession, see Oesterreich, Possession: Demoniacal and Other ; Glaser, "Epilepsy, Hysteria and 'Possession'" (n. 36); and a modern philosophical approach, J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Inquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (London: Cape, 1970). The milieu of these early hysterics was a culture of ecstasy marked by a gap between first- and third-person discourse. The first-person narratives (confessions of hysterics) were almost never written; they include the diaries of mad women and other convulsionaries, neither of whom had any public authority. [BACK]

80. Ferrand's Treatise of Lovesickness has been astutely discussed by Foucault and now magnificently edited (n. 27); for Platterus (Platter) and his works as they relate to the traditions of hysteria see Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), and Platterus, Beloved Son: The Journal of Felix Platter, a Medical Student in Montpellier in the Sixteenth Century (London: Frederick Muller, 1961). Ferrand makes the important observation that males, whom he viewed generically as homo publicus , suffered many other disappointments than love, but that even among amorous males there is no greater loss or cause for unhappiness and despair. [BACK]

81. Ideas adumbrated by the influential Binswangers in Freud's Vienna. See the writings of Freud's contemporary, Austrian psychiatrist Otto Ludwig Binswanger, esp. Die hysterie (Vienna , 1904), a work of almost one thousand pages, and the important book of his son Ludwig, Melancholie und Manie (Pfullingen, 1960), a study of anger in relation to hysteria. The elder Binswanger wrote studies of hysteria, neurasthenia, epilepsy, and madness. From the early modern period (ca. 1500 forward), anger was associated with possession and demonism; later, in the seventeenth century, with war and attention; yet the modern social history of anger awaits its student. [BACK]

82. See A. Luyendijk, "Of Masks and Mills: The Enlightened Doctor and His Frightened Patient," in The Languages of Psyche , ed. Rousseau (n. 13), 186-231; the classic eighteenth-century statement is by John Bond, An Essay on the Incubus, or Night-Mare (London: Wilson & Durham, 1753); a theoretical approach to the spectatorial nighttime world that glances at the early period is found in Terry Castle, "Phantasmagoria," Critical Inquiry 15 (1988): 26-61. [BACK]

83. For the opposite view, that it was pure possession, see Graham, Medieval Minds , 99-101. [BACK]

84. Veith, Hysteria , 59-66, and chap. 6, "The Non-conformists."

85. Ibid., 61.

86. Ibid., 110. [BACK]

84. Veith, Hysteria , 59-66, and chap. 6, "The Non-conformists."

85. Ibid., 61.

86. Ibid., 110. [BACK]

84. Veith, Hysteria , 59-66, and chap. 6, "The Non-conformists."

85. Ibid., 61.

86. Ibid., 110. [BACK]

87. Bodin, the author of De la démonomanie des sorciers (Paris: Jacques du Pays, 1581) and other works on magic, reasoned that "madwomen are never burned . . . and Hippocrates whom you [Weyer] should know, teaches you on his part that those women who have their menses, are not subject to melancholy, madness, epilepsy" (quoted in Veith, Hysteria , 111). For Weyer see Graham, Medieval Minds ; J. J. Cobben, Jan Wier, Devils, Witches and Magic (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1976); Carl Binz, Doctor Johann Weyer: Ein rheinischer Arzt, der 1. Bekaempfer des Hexenwahns: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Aufklaerung und der Heilkunde (Weisbaden: Dr. Martin Saendig, 1969). [BACK]

88. See also Baldinus Ronsseus, De humanae vitae primordiis hystericis affectibus (Leiden, 1594), for a similar point. [BACK]

89. For one approach to Weyer's life see Cobben, Jan Wier, Devils, Witches and Magic . See also the apparatus in Johannes Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance: Johannes Weyer's De Praestigiis Daemonum , ed. George Mora, M.D. (Binghamton, N.Y.: University Center at Binghamton, 1990; originally published 1583). [BACK]

90. Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie. Containing the Causes thereof, & reasons of the strange effects it worketh in our minds and bodies: with the physicke cure, and spirituall consolation for such as haue thereto adioyned an afflicted conscience. The difference betwixt it, and melancholie with diuerse philosophicall discourses touching actions, and affections of soule, spirit, and body: the particulars whereof are to be seene before the booke (London, 1586; reprint, Amsterdam and New York: Da Capo Press, 1969). For Bright see also Jackson, Melancholia and Depression . [BACK]

91. The text has now been edited with useful commentary by Michael MacDonald in Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case—Tavistock Classic Reprints in the History of Psychiatry (London: Routledge, 1990). [BACK]

92. During the period 1550-1650 the nomenclature was variable, some authors preferring one term over another, and it is almost impossible to differentiate among these terms in the medical literature. All three are used in John Sadler, The Sicke Womans Private Looking-Glasse, wherein Methodically are handled at uterine affects, or diseases arising from the wombe; enabling Women to informe the Physician about the cause of their griefe (London: Anne Griffin, 1636), 130. [BACK]

93. For the cultural milieu of the devil see Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic (n. 25); Brian Vickers, Scientific and Occult Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1972); A. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970); and for the connection with erotic life and sexuality, Ioan P. Culianu, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). [BACK]

94. Edward Jorden, A Brief Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (London: John Windet, 1603), B3 2. [BACK]

95. See A. E. Taylor (n. 50) for the Platonic sources. [BACK]

96. The politics of Jorden's " furor uterinus " is discussed in D. H. Bart Scully et al., "The Politics of Hysteria: The Case of the Wandering Womb," in Gender and Disordered Behavior: Sex Differences in Psychopathology , ed. E. S. Gomberg and V. Franks (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1979), 354-380. For models of the uterus in the previous few centuries, especially the seven-cell uterus, see Robert Reisert, Der seibenkammerige uterus (Hanover: Würzburger medizinshistorische Forschungen, 1986). [BACK]

97. Along the line of Scully's "politics of hysteria," one wonders why the female could not masturbate to provide the much-needed moisture. Was male sperm alone capable of providing the moisture, or was masturbation too delicate a topic to address? For the politics and ideology of masturbation in history see Jean Paul and Roger Kempf Aron, Le pénis et la démoralisation de l' Occident (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1978). [BACK]

98. Jorden, Suffocation of the Mother , G2 2. [BACK]

99. Nor will the genderization cease with the innovative Jorden. Throughout the seventeenth century, the "mother" will become increasingly associated with nature; see James Winn, " When Beauty Fires the Blood": Love and Arts in the Age of Dryden (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). Likewise, its metaphors attach to anatomy, then consistently said to be the "mother of science"; see A. J. Luyendijk, ''Anatomy, Mother of Art and Science: Controversies between English and Dutch Scientists, 1690-1725," a talk delivered at the Well-come Institute Symposium on the History of Medicine, 1988. By the eighteenth century, anatomical preoccupation with the "suffocation of the mother" will have moved anatomically and gynecologically from the womb to "the mother's imagination," now said by doctors to be the most important aspect of fetal marking during the act of reproduction; see G. S. Rousseau, "Pineapples, Pregnancy, Pica, and Peregrine Pickle ," in Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays Presented to Lewis M. Knapp , ed. G. S. Rousseau and P. G. Boucé (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 79-110. And by the early nineteenth, the "mother" becomes the key to the mystery of androgyny; see D. L. Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny: The Woman Within (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990). While a study of the medicalization of the imagination in the Renaissance and Enlightenment is badly needed, a study of the transformations of the image of "the mother," construed literally and metaphorically, visually and iconographically also remains a desideratum. [BACK]

100. The jungle of rhetoric is so dense in these treatises, especially in Jorden's, that it is worthwhile to construe these works as medical romances designed to sway a particular male audience in a predictable direction. Within these dense tropics of discourse (to borrow a phrase again from Hayden White's Tropics of Discourse [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982]), one trope alone stands out over and over again: analogy. Analogy, common in the medical literature of the time, is everywhere present in this construction of hysteria, as in this important passage by Jorden about the "affections of the mind": "the perturbations of the minde are oftentimes to blame for this [i.e., hysteria] and many other diseases. For feeling we are not masters of our owne affections, wee are like battered Cities without walles, or shippes tossed in the Sea, exposed to all manner of assaults and daungers, even to the overthrow of our owne bodies" (Jorden, Suffocation of the Mother , G2 2). [BACK]

101. See Veith, Hysteria , 122-123. [BACK]

102. C. E. McMahon, "The Role of Imagination in the Disease Process in Pre-Cartesian History," Psychological Medicine 6 (1976): 179-184. [BACK]

103. Veith, Hysteria , 122.

104. Ibid., 123. [BACK]

103. Veith, Hysteria , 122.

104. Ibid., 123. [BACK]

105. Jorden, Suffocation of the Mother , B3 3.

106. Ibid., B3.

107. Ibid., 25.

108. Ibid., G3 3.

109. Ibid.

110. Ibid., A3.

111. Ibid.

112. Ibid., A4. Epilepsies and convulsions were considered important signs throughout the seventeenth century; see Jean Chastelain, Traité des convulsions (Lyon, 1691). [BACK]

105. Jorden, Suffocation of the Mother , B3 3.

106. Ibid., B3.

107. Ibid., 25.

108. Ibid., G3 3.

109. Ibid.

110. Ibid., A3.

111. Ibid.

112. Ibid., A4. Epilepsies and convulsions were considered important signs throughout the seventeenth century; see Jean Chastelain, Traité des convulsions (Lyon, 1691). [BACK]

105. Jorden, Suffocation of the Mother , B3 3.

106. Ibid., B3.

107. Ibid., 25.

108. Ibid., G3 3.

109. Ibid.

110. Ibid., A3.

111. Ibid.

112. Ibid., A4. Epilepsies and convulsions were considered important signs throughout the seventeenth century; see Jean Chastelain, Traité des convulsions (Lyon, 1691). [BACK]

105. Jorden, Suffocation of the Mother , B3 3.

106. Ibid., B3.

107. Ibid., 25.

108. Ibid., G3 3.

109. Ibid.

110. Ibid., A3.

111. Ibid.

112. Ibid., A4. Epilepsies and convulsions were considered important signs throughout the seventeenth century; see Jean Chastelain, Traité des convulsions (Lyon, 1691). [BACK]

105. Jorden, Suffocation of the Mother , B3 3.

106. Ibid., B3.

107. Ibid., 25.

108. Ibid., G3 3.

109. Ibid.

110. Ibid., A3.

111. Ibid.

112. Ibid., A4. Epilepsies and convulsions were considered important signs throughout the seventeenth century; see Jean Chastelain, Traité des convulsions (Lyon, 1691). [BACK]

105. Jorden, Suffocation of the Mother , B3 3.

106. Ibid., B3.

107. Ibid., 25.

108. Ibid., G3 3.

109. Ibid.

110. Ibid., A3.

111. Ibid.

112. Ibid., A4. Epilepsies and convulsions were considered important signs throughout the seventeenth century; see Jean Chastelain, Traité des convulsions (Lyon, 1691). [BACK]

105. Jorden, Suffocation of the Mother , B3 3.

106. Ibid., B3.

107. Ibid., 25.

108. Ibid., G3 3.

109. Ibid.

110. Ibid., A3.

111. Ibid.

112. Ibid., A4. Epilepsies and convulsions were considered important signs throughout the seventeenth century; see Jean Chastelain, Traité des convulsions (Lyon, 1691). [BACK]

105. Jorden, Suffocation of the Mother , B3 3.

106. Ibid., B3.

107. Ibid., 25.

108. Ibid., G3 3.

109. Ibid.

110. Ibid., A3.

111. Ibid.

112. Ibid., A4. Epilepsies and convulsions were considered important signs throughout the seventeenth century; see Jean Chastelain, Traité des convulsions (Lyon, 1691). [BACK]

113. Joubert was an esteemed physician and contemporary of Rabelais; see his Erreurs populaires et propos vulgaires touchant la médecine et le régime de santé (Bordeaux, 1579). Bakhtin was fascinated by him for his literary contributions to the "Hippocratic novel" and to the semiotics of laughter: "The famous physician Laurent Joubert, published in 1560 a special work under the characteristic rifle: Traité du Ris, contenant son essence, ses causes et ses mervelheus effeis, curieusement recherchès, raisonnés et observés par M. Laur. Joubert . In 1579 Joubert published another treatise in Bordeaux, La cause morale du Ris, de l'excellent et tres renommé Démocrite, expliquée et temoignée par ce devin Hippocrate en ses épîtres (The moral cause of laughter of the eminent and very famous Democritus explained and witnessed by the divine Hippocrates in his epistles). This work was actually a French version of the last part of the "Hippocratic novel" (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968], 68). [BACK]

114. Georges Lote, La vie et l'oeuvre de François Rabelais (Paris: Droz, 1938), 163: "Medicine became the science of the sixteenth century; it exercised a great influence and inspired confidence which it no longer retained in the seventeenth century." [BACK]

115. See R. Antonioli, Rabelais et la médecine (Geneva: Dros, 1976); Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); Graham, Medieval Minds ; and Bakhtin, Rabelais and His Worm , esp. 316-317, 355-363; Bakhtin, always sensitive to the Hippocratic tradition for its glorious narrative legacy, raises the fascinating possibility of a "grotesque hysteria": "These two areas [the bowels and the phallus] play the leading role in the grotesque image, and it is precisely for this reason that they are predominantly subject to positive exaggeration, to hyperbolization; they can even detach themselves from the body and lead an independent life, for they hide the rest of the body, as something secondary" (317)—so too the grotesque image of the "wandering womb" and the suggestion of its "independent life." [BACK]

116. Samuel Putnam, ed., The Portable Rabelais (New York: Viking Press, 1946), 477-479, especially the passage in Pantagruel beginning "I call it an 'animal,' in accordance with the doctrine of the Academics. . ." [BACK]

117. Joseph Lieutaud, Historia anatomico-medica , 2 vols. (Paris, 1767). [BACK]

118. See L. J. Rather, "Thomas Fienus (1567-1631): Dialectical Investigation of the Imagination as Cause and Cure of Bodily Disease," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 41 (1967): 349-367. [BACK]

119. Useful here is K. E. Williams, "Hysteria in Seventeenth Century Primary Sources," History of Psychiatry 1 (1990): 383-402. [BACK]

120. Supplemental to the works on women in the Renaissance mentioned in nn. 51 and 62 are Barbara and Henri van der Zee, 1688: Revolution in the Family (London: Penguin Books, 1988); Bonnie S. Anderson, A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); K. M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966). [BACK]

121. The diligent historian wants to know, of course, what does remain, and the reply is little. What is clear is that voices are being silenced: those of hysterics trying to find their own first-person voices and identities when all those insistent on generating third-person discourse did not want to hear them. For the dire psychological consequences of such silencing within a patriarchal Western culture in which female sexuality has been the source of terrific male terror, see Wolfgang Lederer, Gynophobia ou la peur des femmes (Paris: Nizet, 1967), translated as The Fear of Women (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1968); Jardine, Gynesis (n. 35); E. Fischer-Homberger, Krankheit, Frau und andere Arbeite zur Medizingeschichte der Frau (Bern, Stuttgart, Vienna: Hans Huber, 1979). [BACK]

122. MacDonald, "Women and Madness in Tudor and Stuart England" (n. 25). [BACK]

123. For the ritual of the danse macabre in relation to malingerers see chap. 5 (Sander Gilman), and Harold Speert, Iconographia Gyniatrica: A Pictorial History of Gynecology and Obstetrics (New York: Macmillan, 1973). [BACK]

124. G. Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1970), 47-53. [BACK]

125. See esp. Galopin, Les hystériques des couvents (n. 53), but also Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (n. 25); I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); Michel Feher et al., eds., Fragments for a History of the Human Body (New York: Zone, 1989), vol. 1; Bynum, Gender and Religion (n. 5). [BACK]

126. Although the ideological view of women continued to alter during the seventeenth century, the belief that their hysteria was primarily the result of a rampaging menarche continued to be strong, and doctors did what they could to assuage the effects of the paroxysm and genital upheaval. The menses provided doctors and patients alike with a paradoxical situation: on the one hand, they could not be suppressed; on the other, once rampaging, they wreaked vast physiological damage. Pharmacologically, juleps and apozems were administered with hops to induce the menses, on the theory that hops produced nocturnal dreams and would calm the hysterically ill when under the spell of a fever to sleep. This preparation continued to be used into the eighteenth century; see Johann Delaeus, Upon the Cure of the Gout by Milk Diet: & An Essay upon Diet by William Stephens (London: Smith & Bruce, 1732). [BACK]

127. It may also be that homophobia (in our modern sense a problematic word that has come to be a metonymy denoting fear of the excessively male ) has a place in this history and its linguistic configurations. See Katherine Cummings, Telling Tales: The Hysteric's Seduction in Fiction and Theory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991). In "Freud and Fliess: Homophobia and Seduction," in Seduction and Theory: Readings of Gender, Representation, and Rhetoric , ed. Dianne Hunter (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 86-109, S. N. Garner studies the language of Freud's hysterical women in the light of their fear of same-sex relations. Furthermore, one wonders if there is any connection between the so-called demise of hysteria in our century and the monumental growth of homophobia. [BACK]

128. J. W. Hebel, ed., The Works of Michael Drayton (Oxford: Shakespeare Head, Blackwell, 1961), "Poly-Olbion," p. 128, Song VII, lines 19-28. [BACK]

129. Marie E. Addyman, "The Character of Hysteria in Shakespeare's England," doctoral dissertation, University of York, York, England, 1988. Janet Adelman appears to agree but embroiders the idea from a psychoanalytic perspective in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays Hamlet to The Tempest (London: Routledge, 1990). [BACK]

130. Adelman, Suffering Mothers , 3. For further background, see F. D. Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992). [BACK]

131. Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare, 2 .

132. Ibid., 137. [BACK]

131. Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare, 2 .

132. Ibid., 137. [BACK]

133. The point seems to be buttressed by Micale's studies on the history of male hysteria; see n. 3. [BACK]

134. The belief of G. S. Rousseau, "Literature and Medicine: The State of the Field," Isis 72 (1981): 406-424, and Peter B. Medawar, The Hope of Progress: A Scientist Looks at Problems in Philosophy, Literature and Science (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1973). [BACK]

135. Devon Hodges, Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985); B. G. Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: Studies of Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), who is particularly useful in describing Burton's rhetorical strategies and devices of persuasion in the "Perturbations of the Minde"; see esp. pp. 132-134. [BACK]

136. This transformation of knowledge is discussed by Joscelyn Godwin, Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); C. C. Camden, "The Golden Age and the Renaissance," Literary Views (1988): 1-14; in the contexts of the body in F. Bottomley, Attitudes to the Body in Western Christendom (London, 1979); in the carnivalization of knowledge in Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World . [BACK]

137. Compare the nineteenth-century medicalization of homosexuality. Work on positivism for periods before 1800 seems to be virtually nonexistent. One wonders whether the principle was also operative in the late nineteenth century when the winds of positivism were blowing so strongly. [BACK]

138. One obvious place to start with is Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

139. Ibid., 98-132; P. Hoffmann, La femme dans la pensée des Lumières (Paris: Ophrys, 1977); R. Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears (London: Macmillan, 1979). [BACK]

138. One obvious place to start with is Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

139. Ibid., 98-132; P. Hoffmann, La femme dans la pensée des Lumières (Paris: Ophrys, 1977); R. Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears (London: Macmillan, 1979). [BACK]

140. Laqueur, Making Sex (n. 138), 70-98; idem, "Orgasm, Generation and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," Representations 14 (1986): 1-14; idem, "Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Apperatur," in Fragments for a History of the Human Body , ed. Feher (see n. 125), 3:90-131. [BACK]

141. (London: Anne Griffin, 1636). The astrological, herbal, and Hebrew signs on the frontispiece are worth considering in the light of Sadler's approach to hysteria. Chap. 13, "Of the generation of monsters," considers the "Divine" or "Naturall'' Generation of Monsters in relation to the health of the mother's womb and the state of her imagination, which "workes on the child after conception" (139). The period produced other works similar to Sadler's, many of which refer to the "mother's fits" as a common expression representing the "green-sickness," now endemic among pubescent virgins. But Robert Pierce, Bath memoirs: or, Observations in Three and Forty Years Practice, at the Bath, what Cures have been there wrought (Bristol: Hammond, 1697), 34-37, cautioned that "Women's Diseases could affect women at all times in their lives: they are subject to when they are young, or when more adult; when marry'd or when unmarry'd; when Childless, or when they have had Children." Pierce claims that "the Hysterick Passion, or Fits of the Mother," often arose out of the green sickness, i.e., the condition of pubescent teenage girls. Thus Mrs. Elizabeth Eyles, from the Devizes, in the County of Wilts, age 16, being very far gone in the "green-sickness," developed "Mother-fits withal." [BACK]

142. The quotations from Harvey in this paragraph are found in William Harvey, "On Parturition," in his Works (London: Sydenham Society, 1847), 528-529, 542-543; idem, Exercitationes de generatione animalium (London, 1651), 542. See also R. Brain, "The Concept of Hysteria in the Time of Harvey," Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 56 (1963): 317-324. Along similar lines Jane Sharp warned that retention of seed (putrefied menstruum) was harmful, and hence advised lusty maids to marry; see her Midwife's Book, or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered Directing Childbearing Women How to Behave Themselves in Their Conception, Breeding, Bearing and Nursing Children (London, 1671), 52. [BACK]

143. In his Nymphomania (n. 74), Bienville writes as if the term had been perennially used, predating the Elizabethan world of Jorden and Bright. [BACK]

144. Such had been the alleged politics in paradise: see J. G. Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Tradition had it that hysteria was nonexistent among the pre-Adamites, the sect of men and women who ran about the primordial garden naked and in a state of perfect nature; for the neo-Adamite sects of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, see Michael Mullett, Radical Religious Movements in Early Modern Europe (Boston: Routledge, 1980). [BACK]

145. See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Lemay, "Human Sexuality in Twelfth- through Fifteenth-Century Scientific Writings" (n. 74); for a more esoteric version of the debates, Maire, Les convulsionnaires de Saint-Médard (n. 53). [BACK]

146. Sharp, Midwife's Book , 52. It was not uncommon in the period for male quacks to assume female pseudonyms, especially one as common as "Jane Sharp." Sharp claimed that his book was based on "vast knowledge" and that he wrote primarily for women in simple language they could understand. [BACK]

147. See William Harvey, Exercitationes de generatione animalium (n. 142), 543. For comparison in the sexual domain, see the views of Nicolas Venette, The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Revealed , 3d ed. (London, 1712), and Roy Porter, "Love, Sex and Medicine: Nicolas Venette and his Tableau de l'Amour Conjugal ," in Erotica and the Enlightenment , ed. P. Wagner (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990), 90-122. [BACK]

148. Harvey, Exercitationes , 542. See also Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation and the Politics of Reproductive Biology" (n. 140). [BACK]

149. See L. Jordanova, Sexual Visions, Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and the Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); MacLean, Renaissance Notion of Woman (n. 51); for the social construction of womanhood and gender in history, L. Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women and the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). [BACK]

150. The point was made in the eighteenth century especially; see Henry Burdon, The Fountain of Health: or a View of Nature (London, 1734); James MacKenzie, The History of Health and the Art of Preserving It , 2d ed. (Edinburgh, 1759); for the history of the notion, Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter, In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience, 1650-1850 (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), chap. 10. [BACK]

151. These are ideological matters au fond and could not be politely put until this century; see Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent (n. 62). The sermonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often alluded to it but in the language of ellision; for both realms, physiological and religious, see P. Zacchia, De affectionibus hypochondriacis libri tres. Nunc in Latinum sermonem translati ab Alphonso Khonn (Augsburg, 1671). [BACK]

152. See Hill, Women and Work , who accepts Lawrence Stone's marriage statistics in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England: 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1977) as reliable. [BACK]

153. Also suggested by contemporary social commentators such as Peter Annet in Social Bliss considered in marriage and divorce: cohabiting unmarried, and public whoring. Containing things necessary to be known by all that seek mutual felicity, and are ripe for the enjoyment of it (London, 1749). Examples of the prescription of sexual intercourse are found in Adalheid Giedke, Die Liebeskrankheit in der Geschichte der Medizin , University of Düsseldorf, Ph.D. thesis, 1983. [BACK]

154. For anger in relation to melancholy in early modern history, see L. Binswanger, Melancholie und Manie (n. 81). [BACK]

155. For the sexes see J. H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Turner, One Flesh (n. 144); for sex, gender, with a glance at hysteria in Milton see Annabelle Patterson, "No meer amatorius novel?" in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose , ed. D. Loewenstein and J. G. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 85-101, esp. 101, n. 18. [BACK]

156. The most important of the many works on this topic is Richard Baxter's The Cure of Melancholy and over much Sorrow by Faith and Physick (London, 1682); see also Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae , part iii, sec. 184 (London, 1696). [BACK]

157. As was apparent in the development of the Theophrastan character in the late seventeenth century, as well as in the arrangement of the genders; see first its history and relation to the traditions of hysteria in Chester Noyes Greenough, A Bibliography of the Theophrastan Character in English with Several Portrait Characters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947), and two important studies: Benjamin Boyce, The Theophrastan Character in England to 1642 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947); J. W. Smeed, The Theophrastan "Character": The History of a Literary Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). [BACK]

158. See H. M. Weber, The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth Century England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), and Turner, One Flesh (n. 144). For the broader philosophical issues involved in the construction of sexuality, see A. I. Davidson, "Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality," Critical Inquiry 11 (1987): 16-48. [BACK]

159. Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage in England: 1500-1700 (n. 152), and R. Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family (New York: New York University Press, 1978). [BACK]

160. See R. Trumbach, "Sodomy Transformed: Aristocratic Libertinage, Public Reputation and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century," in Love Letters between a Certain Late Nobleman and the Famous Mr. Wilson , ed. M. S. Kimmel (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1990), 106. [BACK]

161. See Hill's hypothesis about female mobility in relation to the rise of prostitution in Women and Work . [BACK]

162. For the transformation of these gender relations in the period see R. Trumbach, "The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660-1750," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past , ed. M. Duberman, M. Vicinus, and G. Chauncey, Jr. (New York: NAL Books, 1989), 45-60, whose thesis deserves consideration. [BACK]

163. See Sydenham (n. 44), 282-283. [BACK]

164. For medical theory before Sydenham (i.e., in the period 1600-1680), advocating the position that the patient may be afflicted with the one or the other, see G. S. Rousseau, "Towards a Semiotics of the Nerve: The Social History of Language in a New Key," in The Social History of Language II , ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), 76-81 (Appendix); some discussion of the subject is also found in P. E. A. Roy, "De l'hypochondrie," Archives de Neurologie 20 (1905): 166-183. [BACK]

165. The hypochondrium was, anatomically speaking, located within the intercostal cavity, yet little differentiation was made at this time, from what I can gather, between male and female intercostal cavities; perhaps it was one more aspect of Thomas Laqueur's "one sex" theory; see Laqueur, Making Sex (n. 138). In Sex and Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), Richard Posner sees deeply into the biological and legal dimensions of these differences but practices a flawed method by virtue of ignoring local sociohistorical practices, as in the now remote Restoration ethos of sexuality. [BACK]

166. See Dewhurst, Dr. Thomas Sydenham (n. 41), and Boss, "Seventeenth-Century Transformation of the Hysteric Affection" (n. 55). [BACK]

167. For "psyche-ologia" as a neologism, and for its linguistic ramifications in both medicine and rhetoric at this time, see G. S. Rousseau, "Psychology," in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Science , ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 167-172. [BACK]

168. See his important treatise on the gout, originally published in 1683 as a Treatise on Gout and Dropsy and reprinted in 1705. Some of Sydenham's ideas on gout also appeared in Of the Four Constitutions (an undated manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford [MS Locke, c. 19, ff. 170-176]) and in his Theologia Rationalis (which exists in four manuscript versions). [BACK]

169. For Sydenham's medical practice see Dewhurst, Dr. Thomas Sydenham (n. 41); J. F. Payne, A Biography of Dr. Thomas Sydenham (London: Longman's, 1900); L. M. F. Picard, Thomas Sydenham (Dijon, 1889). [BACK]

170. Locke served as Sydenham's assistant and amanuensis, later as his co-practitioner and collaborator. Discussion of the Locke-Sydenham relation is found in Dewhurst, Dr. Thomas Sydenham (n. 41), 39-41, 55-56, 73-76, 164-169, and H. Isler, Thomas Willis, 1621-1685, Doctor and Scientist (New York: Hafner, 1968). [BACK]

171. No evidence indicates whether or not Sydenham read Lepois on hysteria, and Sydenham's most authoritative biographer (Dewhurst) is silent on the matter; Boerhaave comments on the importance of Lepois's theories of hysteria in his 1714 preface to Lepois's select observations ( Selectiorum observationum . . .). For Lepois and hysteria, see Jackson, Melancholia and Depression (n. 80). [BACK]

172. For Lepois see Veith, Hysteria , 129; the translation provided here is Veith's.

173. Ibid., 129.

174. Sydenham's published medical works are few; for a list see Dewhurst, Dr. Thomas Sydenham (n. 41), 190; there are even fewer that survive in manuscript (ibid., 190). Comments on his significance within the history of medicine are found in C. D. Martin, "A Treatise on the Gout," Critical Review (March, 1759): 281-282, as well as in the 1753 edition of some of his works published by John Swan. A study of his style in the Epistolary Dissertation in relation to the language of the time would repay the effort and might shed further light on his theory of hysteria. [BACK]

172. For Lepois see Veith, Hysteria , 129; the translation provided here is Veith's.

173. Ibid., 129.

172. For Lepois see Veith, Hysteria , 129; the translation provided here is Veith's.

173. Ibid., 129.

175. Veith, Hysteria , 140. Sydenham pronounced here clearly and succinctly, as in everything else he wrote. His main points are that hysteria has been misunderstood in its most fundamental principles (i.e., as the most transformative of all conditions); in its affliction among the genders and social rank; and, after affliction, in its physical and mental manifestations. [BACK]

176. It is worth emphasizing, at the cost of belaboring the obvious, that all seventeenth- and eighteenth-century physicians claimed to treat patients for the "hysterical passion," or the many other names by which it was known. There was nothing unusual about this at all. The only difference was the degree to which the particular physician specialized in these cases. Doctors like Willis and Sydenham, and later on Cheyne and Adair, were known as "nerve doctors," or specialists in hysterical passions, and patients with these complaints accordingly flocked to them. [BACK]

177. Lepois did not emphasize the animal spirits but wrote of "a collection of liquid accumulated in the hind part of the head and here collected with the effect that it swells and distends the beginnings of the nerves"; see Henri Cesbron, These pour le doctorat en medecine: Histoire critique de l'hystériae (Paris: Asselin et Houzeau, Libraires de la Faculté de Medecine, 1909), who quotes and translates this passage in French; Veith, Hysteria , 129. The liquid existed without regard to gender, and this is precisely why Lepois could justify a view that women are not naturally predisposed to hysteria any more than men. But Lepois's view was not known in England, his works were never translated into English, and I have found no evidence in the writings of English-speaking doctors that they were aware of Lepois's theory. [BACK]

178. For Willis's primary medical works, brain theory, beliefs about the interface of brain and nervous system, and view of hysteria in the light of these basic theories, see G. S. Rousseau, "Nerves, Spirits and Fibres: Toward the Origins of Sensibility," in Studies in the Eighteenth Century , ed. R. F. Brissenden (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1975), 137-157; for Willis and hysteria exclusively see Boss, "Transformation of the Hysteric Affection" (n. 55). [BACK]

179. The best treatment of Willis's medical theory is R. Frank, "Thomas Willis and His Circle: Brain and Mind in Seventeenth-Century Medicine," in Languages of Psyche , ed. G. S. Rousseau (n. 13), esp. pp. 131-141. Frank comments on Willis's important clinical observation that "postmortems showed the wombs of hysterical women to be perfectly normal" (p. 134). Willis's Affectionum . . . hystericae (1672) has never been translated into English, despite its status as one of the most important neurological works of the early modern period. But Willis's salient point about the etiology of hysteria was the blood-brain connection: essentially, that any "derangements within the blood'' were conveyed to the brain and the nerves, and hence the neural trajectory of the condition rather than any other transmission. The mid-twentieth-century historian of physiology, Professor John Fulton of Yale University, viewed Willis as a hybrid English Freud cum physiologist, noting that Willis's Cerebre anatome (1664) was one of the "six cornerstones of modern neurology," together with books by Hitzig, Ferrier, and Sherrington, and that in the sphere of the relation of the cerebellum and involuntary action, so important to any scientific or secular theory of hysteria, "there was little further advance after Willis until 1809"; see J. Fulton, Physiology of the Nervous System , 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1943), 463. [BACK]

180. Willis himself had coined such words as "neuro-logia" and "psyche-logia" but never used the term psychological malady or hysteria or any other condition; see Rousseau, Ferment of Knowledge (n. 167), 146-148. [BACK]

181. T. Laqueur, Making Sex (n. 138). [BACK]

182. The emotions were undergoing a paradigmatic shift at this time; see G. Rosen, "Emotion and Sensibility in Ages of Anxiety: A Comparative Historical Review," American Journal of Psychiatry 124 (1967): 771-783; L. J. Rather, "Old and New Views of the Emotions and Bodily Changes," Clio Medica 1 (1965): 1-25; for a summary of their changes in the moral and philosophical realms, F. Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions (London: J. Knapton, 1730). [BACK]

183. Latham, Works of Thomas Sydenham (n. 44), vol. 2, 85. For a contrasting condition to the sedentary life, see the effects of "the glass delusion"; Gill Speak, "An Odd Kind of Melancholy: Reflections on the Glass Delusion of Europe (1440-1680)," History of Psychiatry 1 (1990): 191-206. For these violent mood swings and outbursts of unexpected behavior see John Ball, The Modern Practice of Physic , 2 vols. (London, 1760), 2:229. [BACK]

184. See G. S. Rousseau, "Science and the Discovery of the Imagination in Enlightened England," Eighteenth-Century Studies III (1969): 108-135. [BACK]

185. By the mid-eighteenth century the "nervous system" had become entrenched, in medical theory as well as diagnosis, and in anatomy and physiology as well; see D. Smith, A Dissertation upon the Nervous System to show its influence upon the Soul (London, 1768); A Monro, Experiments on the nervous system, with opium and mealline [sic] substances; made chiefly with the view of determining the nature and effects of animal electricity (Edinburgh: A. Neill & Co. for Bell & Bradfute, 1793). For its development, see E. T. Carlson and M. Simpson, "Models of the Nervous System in Eighteenth-Century Psychiatry," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 43 (1969): 101-115. C. Lawrence has studied the cultural ramifications in "The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment," in Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Enlightenment , ed. Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1979), 19-40; for the early nineteenth-century view, see C. Bell, The Nervous System of the Human Body (London, 1824, reprinted 1830). [BACK]

186. Today, viewed from our feminist and pro-abortion ideologies, the idea would be ridiculed as preposterous despite the strong vestiges of it that remain everywhere in the civilized world, but viewed from the perspective of the sciences of man, which relied so heavily on anatomy and physiology for their underpinnings, it was easy to make a case for it. No one should think these two last subjects—anatomy and physiology—were free of the politics and ideologies that intervene in all science. [BACK]

187. See n. 182. [BACK]

188. See G. S. Rousseau, "Cultural History in a New Key: Towards a Semiotics of the Nerve," in Interpretation and Cultural History , ed. J. H. Pittock and A. Wear (London: Macmillan, 1991), 25-81. [BACK]

189. The passage appears in Latham, Works of Thomas Sydenham (n. 44), vol. 2, 85. [BACK]

190. Beliefs about hysteria were still drawn almost exclusively from Western models, and despite the expansionism and discoveries of the last century, geographical insulation still served to produce disease according to climatic and national characteristics; see W. Falconer, Remarks on the Influence of Climate, Situation, etc on the disposition and temper. . . of mankind (London: C. Dilly, 1781). [BACK]

191. Latham, Works of Thomas Sydenham (n. 44), vol. 2, 85. [BACK]

192. As early as 1943, Henry Siegerist wrote about disease within history from a broad perspective, and claimed that there had always been an intimate connection between disease and art (i.e., literature, painting, poetry, drama, etc.), a view that seems not to have had much influence on Veith. Had Siegerist gazed further back than to Charcot in his discussion of hysteria, he would have seen how true his intuition was for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; see H. Siegerist, Civilization and Disease (n. 67), 184-185, 191-194. [BACK]

193. For the nervous constitution by 1900, see J. Goldstein, Console and Classify (n. 36), and J. Oppenheim, " Shattered Nerves": Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). [BACK]

194. Latham, Works of Thomas Sydenham (n. 44), vol. 2, 85.

195. Ibid.

196. Ibid., vol. 2, 54.

197. Ibid. [BACK]

194. Latham, Works of Thomas Sydenham (n. 44), vol. 2, 85.

195. Ibid.

196. Ibid., vol. 2, 54.

197. Ibid. [BACK]

194. Latham, Works of Thomas Sydenham (n. 44), vol. 2, 85.

195. Ibid.

196. Ibid., vol. 2, 54.

197. Ibid. [BACK]

194. Latham, Works of Thomas Sydenham (n. 44), vol. 2, 85.

195. Ibid.

196. Ibid., vol. 2, 54.

197. Ibid. [BACK]

198. Highmore espoused his theory of hysteria in three works primarily: Excercitationes duae, quarum prior de passione hysterica, altera de affectione hypochondriaca (Amsterdam: C. Commelin, 1660); Hysteria (Oxford: A. Lichfield and R. Davis, 1660); De hysterica et hypochondriaca passione: Responsio epistolaris ad Doctorem Willis (London, 1670). [BACK]

199. Quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). See also Boss, Seventeenth-Century Transformation of the Hysteric Affection (n. 55); Isler, Thomas Willis (n. 170). [BACK]

200. T. Willis, An Essay on the Pathology of the Brain (London, 1684), 71. [BACK]

201. Beliefs about the effeminacy of men antedate the Restoration, of course, but the idea acquired altogether different currency then. For some of the reasons see Trumbach, "The Birth of the Queen" (n. 162); J. Turner, "The School of Men: Libertine Texts in the Subculture of Restoration London" (a talk given at UCLA, 1989); for a remarkably detailed case history of male effeminacy of the playwright Richard Cumberland in the eighteenth century, see K. C. Balderston, ed., Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Thrale 1776-1809 , 2, vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942; rev. ed. 1951), 2: 436-440. [BACK]

202. The term category as I have been using it in this chapter should not suggest philosophical so much as medical category. Disease was then understood almost entirely within the terms of categories and classifications, as the wide taxonomic tendencies of the era had doctors compiling and classifying every disease in terms of its major symptoms, anatomic presentations, organic involvements, and so forth. See D. Knight, Ordering the World: A History of Classifying the World (London: Macmillan, 1980). [BACK]

203. Baglivi held a chair of medical theory in the Collegio della Sapienza in Rome, having been elected to it by Pope Clement XI. His book De praxi medicina (1699; English trans. 1723) was written with a knowledge of Sydenham's theories. He believed that hysteria was a mental disease caused by passions of the troubled mind; in this sense, he is less accurate and intuitive than Sydenham but nevertheless important. For Italian hysteria and hypochondria see Oscar Giacchi, L'isterismo e l'ipochondria avvero il malo nervosa . . . Giudizii fisioclinici-sociali (Milan, 1875). [BACK]

204. See B. Mandeville, A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions (London, 1711; reprinted 1715; 3d ed. 1730). [BACK]

205. Willis's anatomical "explosions" are discussed by R. G. Frank, "Thomas Willis and His Circle: Brain and Mind in Seventeenth-Century Medicine," in The Languages of Psyche , ed. Rousseau (n. 13), 107-147; Sacks, Migraine (n. 7), 26-27; for Willis's rhetoric and language see D. Davie, Science and Literature 1700-1740 (London: Sheed & Ward, 1964). [BACK]

206. For these shifts in knowledge at large see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970; rev. ed.); Rom Harré, "Philosophy and Ideas: Knowledge," in Ferment of Knowledge , ed. Rousseau and Porter (n. 167), 11-55. [BACK]

207. Even Veith's survey in Hysteria makes this fact abundantly clear. [BACK]

208. The evidence for entrenchment is provided in the remaining portion of this chapter and remains a central theme of this essay, as it does in J. Wright, "Hysteria and Mechanical Man," Journal History of Ideas 41 (1980): 233-247, and for numbers of medical historians such as A. Luyendijk. [BACK]

209. For some of the evidence of the opposite view see P. Hoffmann, La femme dans la pensée des Lumiéres (Paris: Ophrys, 1977); Hill, Women and Work . [BACK]

210. So much has now been written about this relatively small group that one hardly knows where to direct the curious reader; a good place is J. Todd, Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660-1800 (London: Virago, 1988), and for one case history, written in depth, R. Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). [BACK]

211. A thorough linguistic study of these words ("spleen," "vapors," "hysterics") reconstructed in their local contexts would reveal shades of difference, but there are an equal number of examples of overlap and interchangeability; see also section XIII. For the witch trials, see K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1973); for the famous 1736 case of the witch of Endor, B. Stock, The Holy and the Demonic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983). [BACK]

212. John Purcell, A Treatise of Vapours, or, Hysterick Fits (London: J. Johnson, 1707), 91. [BACK]

213. Radcliffe had a large and established practice of wealthy aristocratic clients, many of whom suffered from hysteria, but he wrote little; his famed repertoire of remedies continued to be published during and after his lifetime and was edited by apothecary Edward Strother; see J. Radcliffe, Pharmacopoeia Radcliffeana (London , 1716). [BACK]

214. A good discussion of the scene is found in John Sena, "Belinda's Hysteria: The Medical Context of The Rape of the Lock," Eighteenth-Century Life 5, no. 4 (1979): 29-42. [BACK]

215. J. Butt, ed., The Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), 234. [BACK]

216. For the post-Popean iconography of Belinda as hysteric see C. Tracy, The Rape Observ'd (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 81, especially D. Guernier's illustration of Belinda swooning. [BACK]

217. An interesting pharmaceutical study could be written compiling these remedies in the eighteenth century. For example, the Gentlemen's Magazine regularly printed "receipts" for female hysteria and "male lovesickness"; see the June 1733 issue, p. 321. prescribing the tying of a woman's head in a noose next to a cricket allegedly stung by the noise! Domestic vade mecums such as W. Buchan, Domestic Medicine (London, 1776), and standard pharmacopeias such as J. Quincy, The Dispensatory of the Royal College of Physicians (London, 1721, many editions), also prescribed. Hysteria was a virtual industry for apothecaries for the entire period, especially in cordials to prevent miscarrying. [BACK]

218. For the all-important iatromechanism of the period at large see T. M. Brown, "From Mechanism to Vitalism in Eighteenth-Century English Physiology," Journal of the History of Biology 7 (1974): 179-216; Rousseau, "Nerves, Spirits and Fibres" (n. 178); G. Bowles, "Physical, Human and Divine Attraction in the Life and Thought of George Cheyne," Annals of Science 41 (1974): 473-488; H. Metzger, Attraction Universelle et Religion Naturelle chez quelques Commentateurs Anglais de Newton (Paris: Nizet, 1938); more recently for iatromechanism in the work of Dr. Cheyne, see G. S. Rousseau, ''Medicine and Millenarianism: 'Immortal Doctor Cheyne,'" in Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modem Europe , ed. Ingrid Merkel and Allen Debus (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988), 192-230, and for the roles of rhetoric and language in Cheyne's writings, see Rousseau, "Language of the Nerves," in Social History of Language , ed. Burke and Porter (n. 42). I consider Cheyne's Essay of the True Nature and Due Method of Treating the Gout (London: G. Strahan, 1722) among his most important works for layihg out his theory of iatromechanism and post-Newtonian application. [BACK]

219. The Dutch were important in the development of a mechanical theory of hysteria, the great and influential Dr. Boerhaave himself having identified hysteria as the most baffling of all female maladies. Boerhaave's writings set hysteria on a firm mechanical basis on the continent; for his theory of hysteria and its adoption by his followers, especially Anton de Haen in Holland, Gerard van Swieten in Austria, and Robert Whytt in Scotland, see A. M. Luyendijk, "Het hysterie-begrip in de 18de eeuw," in Ongeregeld zenuwleven , ed. L. de Goei (Utrecht: NcGv, 189), 30-41, a volume rich in the bibliography of hysteria and dealing exclusively with the modern history of female uterine maladies. Luyendijk is right to claim that throughout the eighteenth century every aspect of "the sick woman" was sexually charged and sexually liminal; see A. M. Luyendijk, "De Zieke Vrouw in de Achttiende Eeuw," Natuurkundige Voordrachten 66 (1988): 129-136. [BACK]

220. See Rousseau on Cheyne ("Medicine and Millinarianism," n. 218). By 1750 hysteria had become "nationalized" (i.e., Dutch hysteria, Scottish hysteria, etc.) and a study of its nationalistic idiosyncrasies would make for fascinating reading. [BACK]

221. It undid his psychologizing and cultural determination, neglected his primary point about hysteria as a disease of imitation (see n. 44), and replaced it with a radical anatomizing and mechanizing of the nervous system capable of accounting for rises and falls of hysteria in both genders. Indeed, after Sydenham the theory of imitation virtually went under, finding no place in Cheyne's system, where the word never appears. It may be more than coincidental that Sydenhamian hysteria as a disease of imitation declines concomitantly with the larger aesthetic and philosophical theory of imitation in the same period; see F. Boyd, Mimesis: The Decline of a Doctrine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973). [BACK]

222. For Robinson see A New System of the Spleen (London, 1729), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry (n. 199); Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy (n. 12); Jackson, Melancholia and Depression (n. 80), 291-294; T. H. Jobe, "Medical Theories of Melancholia in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries," Clio Medica 19 (1976): 217-231. [BACK]

223. G. Cheyne, The English Malady: or, a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds (London: Strahan & Leake, 1733), 184; see also O. Doughty, "The English Malady of the Eighteenth Century," Review of English Studies 2 (1926): 257-269; E. Fischer-Homberger, "On the Medical History of the Doctrine of the Imagination," Psychological Medicine 4 (1979): 619-628, which discusses the medicalization of the imagination in relation to the hysteric affection, and, most important, R. Porter, "The Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry," Medical History 27 (1983): 35-50. [BACK]

224. Cheyne, English Malady , 14. Samuel Richardson, the novelist and printer, had printed the book for his friend and claimed that Cheyne chose the title ("English") because he held the squalor and polluted air responsible for London's being "the greatest, most capacious, close and populous City of the Globe"—and also called it the " English malady" because hysteria was so called in derision by continental writers ( English Malady , 55; C. F. Mullett, ed., The Letters of Doctor George Cheyne to Samuel Richardson 1733-1743 [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1943, 15]). [BACK]

225. R. James, A Medicinal Dictionary; Including Physics, Surgery, Anatomy, Chemistry, and Botany, in All Their Branches. Together with a History of Drugs . . . (London: T. Osborne, 1743-1745), article entitled "hysteria." [BACK]

226. Curiously, no systematic study has been undertaken despite the large amount of recent feminist scholarship in the field of eighteenth-century studies; it awaits its avid student, for whom the sheer amount of material between 1700 and 1800 will make for a field day of scholarship. Some material for the nineteenth century is found in Y. Ripa, La ronde des folles: Femme folie et enfermement au XIXe siecle (Paris: Aubier, 1986). Müller, who became a leading anthropologist in Germany, wrote his medical thesis at the University of Paris in 1813 on "le spasme et l'affection vaporeuse"; as late as the 1840s some French doctors still considered "spleen" a valid category of the hysteria-hypochondria syndrome; see D. Montallegry, Hypochondrie-spleen ou névroses trisplanchniques. Observations relative à ces maladies et leur traitement radical (Paris, 1841). [BACK]

227. For Swift and hysteria see Christopher Fox, ed., Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (New York: AMS Press, 1988), 236—237. [BACK]

228. M. DePorte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift, Sterne, and Augustan Ideas of Madness (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library Press, 1974), 125 ff. [BACK]

229. For evidence of the linguistic confusion in the primary medical literature, see W. Stukeley, Of the Spleen (London, 1723); J. Midriff, Observations on the Spleen and Vapours; Containing Remarkable Cases of Persons of both Sexes, and all Ranks, from the aspiring Directors to the Humble Bubbler, who have been miserably afflicted with these Melancholy Disorders since the Fall of the South-sea, and other publick Stocks; with the proper Method for their Recovery, according to the new and uncommon Circumstances of each Case (London, 1720); J. Raulin, Traité des affections vaporeuses du sexe (Paris, 1758). There is also a wide literature of spleen and vapors, as in Matthew Green, The Spleen, and Other Poems . . . with a Prefatory Essay by John Aikin, M.D . (London: Cadell, 1796). For comparison of this early eighteenth-century outbreak of spleen with outbursts in America at the end of the nineteenth century, see T. Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), a study of the "neurasthenia plague" of 1903 that gave rise to hundreds of cures and potions. Midriff wondered if certain types of "spleen" appeared in particular types of wars and not others. [BACK]

230. See Purcell, Treatise of Vapours (n. 212); some discussion of these matters is found in O. Temkin, The Falling Sickness (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). [BACK]

231. For the extensiveness of this Newtonianism in medical theory, see N. Robinson, M.D., A new theory of physick and diseases, founded on the principles of the Newtonian philosophy (London, 1725), with much emphasis on hysteria; in theology and cosmic thought, J. Craig, Theologia . . . Mathematica (London, 1699); more generally, I. Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984). James Thomson the poet and author of The Seasons , the most widely read English poem of the eighteenth century, also reflects this pervasiveness; see A. D. McKillop, The Background of Thomson's Seasons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1942). For Newtonianism and the popular imagination, M. H. Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946). [BACK]

232. Roy Porter has chronicled aspects of this development in Mind-Forged Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London: Penguin, 1987); see also for madness in this period and its relation to current scientific movements: V. Skultans, English Madness: Ideas on Insanity 1580-1890 (London: Routledge, 1979); M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 120-132. Dr. Charles Perry, a mechanist and contemporary of Cheyne, Robinson, and Purcell, makes perceptive points about madness in relation to hysteria in his treatise On the Causes and Nature of Madness (London, 1723). [BACK]

233. For the humanitarianism of madness, see D. Weiner, "Mind and Body in the Clinic: Philippe Pinel, Alexander Crichton, Dominique Esquirol, and the Birth of Psychiatry," in Rousseau, Languages of Psyche (n. 13), 332-340. [BACK]

234. See Rousseau, "Medicine and Millenarianism" (n. 218). [BACK]

235. G. Cheyne, quoted in L. Feder, Madness in Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 170. Cheyne's prose abounds with weird syntax, ungrammatical constructions, and neologisms; "fantastical" rather than the simpler word strange is just the sort of word found in his vocabulary. [BACK]

236. The English Malady (1733), 353.

237. Ibid., 354. [BACK]

236. The English Malady (1733), 353.

237. Ibid., 354. [BACK]

238. Sir Richard Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours (London, 1725), 320. In a rather similar prose, William Buchan in his Domestic Medicine (Edinburgh, 1769), 561, discussing "hysteric and hypochondriacal affections," noted that these nervous disorders were "diseases which nobody chuses to own." It is important to insist on the yoking of hysteria and hypochondria ever since Sydenham undercut (except in name) hysteria as a gendered disease . Blackmore argued from the perspective of one who had lived through the revolution in nomenclature as well as gender: "Most Physicians have looked upon Hysteric Affections as a distinct Disease from Hypochondriacal, and therefore have treated some of them under different Heads; but though in Conformity to that Custom I do the same, yet . . . I take them to be the same Malady." Blackmore admitted that women suffered worse, ''the Reason of which is, a more volatile, dissipable [sic], and weak Constitution of the Spirits, and a more soft, tender, and delicate Texture of the Nerves." Yet, he insisted, "this proves no Difference in their Nature and essential Properties, but only a higher or lower Degree of the Symptoms common to both." This more "delicate Texture of the Nerves" was the fulcrum on which the theory of nervous diseases, including hysteria, was to be pegged for the next century and remains a crucial development in the history of medicine in the Enlightenment. For some of its cultural resonances, see Rousseau, "Cultural History in a New Key," in Interpretation and Cultural History , ed. Pittock and Wear (n. 188), 25-81. [BACK]

239. Blackmore, Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours (n. 238), 319. It is important to reiterate Sydenham's consistent use of this nomenclature for males, which fell under his gender collapse of the disease and which was generally adopted by his students and followers into the time of Blackmore and Robinson: men were always "hypochondriacal," while women remained "hysterical," and no amount of anatomical similitude between the genders could account for the linguist disparity; for some discussion, see E. Fischer-Homberger, "Hypochondriasis of the Eighteenth Century—Neurosis of the Present Century," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 46 (1972): 391-401. [BACK]

240. Nicholas Robinson, A new system of the spleen, vapours, and hypochondriack melancholy; wherein all the decays of the nerves, and lownesses of the spirits are mechanically accounted for. To which is subjoined, a discourse upon the nature, cause, and cure of melancholy, madness, and lunacy (London, 1729), 144.

241. Ibid., 345. More generally for this "physiological psychology" see DePorte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses (n. 228); Rather, "Old and New Views of the Emotions and Bodily Changes" (n. 182); Jobe, "Melancholia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries" (n. 222). [BACK]

242. Looking ahead, these factors will coalesce later on in the century, in the world of Adair, Heberden, Cullen—Cheyne's followers. For the medical profession in the eighteenth century in relation to the development of other professions, see Geoffrey S. Holmes, The Professions and Social Change in England 1680-1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), and idem, Augustan England: Professions, State and Society, 1680-1730 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982). [BACK]

243. For the role of quacks in this milieu see R. Porter, Health for Sale: Quackery in England 1650-1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), and "Female Quacks in the Consumer Society," The History of Nursing Society Journal 3 (1990): 1-25. [BACK]

244. Veith, Hysteria , 155. [BACK]

245. I.e., the essentially anti-vitalistic principle that all is brain and body, nothing mind. Twentieth-century science has spelled the death knell of scientific vitalism despite its many vestiges in the biological and neurological realms. For the anti-vitalistic strains and what I am calling the triumph of the neurophysiological approach of contemporary twentieth-century science, see J. D. Spillane, The Doctrine of the Nerves: Chapters in the History of Neurology (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); W. Riese, A History of Neurology (New York: MD Publications, 1959); for the linguistic implications, M. Jeannerod, The Brain Machine: The Development of Neurophysiological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); H. A. Whitaker, On the Representation of Language in the Human Brain: Problems in the Neurology of Language (Los Angeles: UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics, 1969). [BACK]

246. Cheyne, English Malady , 271 ff. [BACK]

247. For nymphomania, see n. 74. [BACK]

248. The animal spirits continued to prove troublesome for experimenters and theorists until the middle of the eighteenth century; for this complicated chapter in the history of science and medicine, see E. Clarke, "The Doctrine of the Hollow Nerve in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in Medicine, Science, and Culture: Historical Essays in Honor of Owsei Temkin , ed. L. G. Stevenson and Robert P. Multhauf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 123-141; for its linguistic representations and diverse metaphorical uses, Rousseau, "Discovery of the Imagination" (n. 184); the interchanges between the rhetorical and empirical (or scientific) domains here would make a fascinating study that has not been undertaken on a broad canvas. [BACK]

249. See Laqueur, Making Sex (n. 138); Feher, History of the Human Body (n. 125). [BACK]

250. Cheyne, English Malady , ii (preface). [BACK]

251. For nightmares and hysteria, see A. M. Luyendijk-Elshout, "Mechanism contra vitalisme: De school van Herman Boerhaave en de beginselen van het leven," T. Gesch. Geneesk. Natuurw. Wisk. Techn . 5 (1982): 16-26; idem, "Of Masks and Mills" (n. 82); and, more generally, Castle, "Phantasmagoria" (n. 82). [BACK]

252. Two generations after Pope, Hannah Webster Foster (1759-1840) thought that the nerves of the coquette distinguished her from other types; see The coquette; or, The history of Eliza Wharton. Reproduced from the original edition of 1797 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), as did David Garrick in his play of the same name, but a century earlier there was no such notion in Philippe Quinault's La mére coquette (written as Sydenham was composing his essay on hysteria) or in the State Poems on court coquettes written during Swift's period. [BACK]

253. S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), whose use of self-fashioning must be credited. [BACK]

254. P. M. Spacks, The Female Imagination (London: Methuen, 1976); idem, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1976); K. O. Lyons, The Invention of the Self (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978); J. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and literary criticism dealing with the literature of sensibility. [BACK]

255. G. S. Rousseau, "Nerves, Spirits and Fibres" (n. 178); for the scientific dimension in mid-eighteenth century, see Haller's physiological revolution; for the popular cults, see an anonymous "Descant on Sensibility," London Magazine (May 1776); for the literary dimension, Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility (n. 155); and L. I. Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962). [BACK]

256. I tried to document this point about the semiology of disease then in " 'Sowing the Wind and Reaping the Whirlwind': Aspects of Change in Eighteenth-Century Medicine," in Studies in Change and Revolution: Aspects of English Intellectual History 1640-1800 , ed. Paul J. Korshin (London: Scholar Press, 1972), 129-159. [BACK]

257. The new code is not evident in John Playford's seventeenth-century treatises, but begins to be apparent in the drama (Wycherly's Love in a Wood ) and in treatises by dancing masters written after ca. 1740. [BACK]

258. This complex and largely nonverbal code remains to be deciphered; it is something as yet not understood about the Augustan "self-fashioning" (to invoke Greenblatt's fine term) of the nerves. [BACK]

259. The new role of consumption of every type cannot be minimized in this period: see N. J. McKendrick et al., The Birth of Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa Publications Limited, 1982); J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); for the reaction, M. Caldwell, The Last Crusade: The War on Consumption (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1988); for the medical diagnosis and its economic implications see such contemporary medical works as C. Bennet, Treatise of Consumptions (London, 1720); for drink and its relation to nervous sensibility, compare T. Trotter, An Essay, Medical, Philosophical and Chemical on Drunkenness (London: Longmans, 1804). [BACK]

260. I tried to explain the chain of reasons from medical and philosophical, to social and popular, in "Nerves, Spirits and Fibres" (n. 178) and "Cultural History in a New Key" (n. 188), but much work remains to be done—I have barely scratched the surface of the Enlightenment cults of sensibility. [BACK]

261. See M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 132. My own thought has been influenced as much on the semiotic domain by Tzvetan Todorov in The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other Translated from the French by Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). [BACK]

262. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). [BACK]

263. It could not have elevated sensibility and the conditions (hysteria) that depended on it, without a prior theory of the "sciences of man." There are fine studies of this subject, but they usually omit the medical dimension entirely; for the best, see Sergio Moravia, Filosofia e scienze umane nell'eta dei lumi (Florence: Sansoni, 1982). The point needs to be related to the development of the science of man; Moravia saw much but did not make the important connections; he saw narrowly only the new science of man but not its implication for self-fashioning. [BACK]

264. Even Peter Gay had made this seminal point about Hailer in the opening pages of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation , 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966-69), 1:30, in "The Spirit of the Age" and "The Recovery of Nerve," as did Henry Steele Commager in The Empire of Reason (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1977), 8-10, in the famous paean to Hailer who "took all knowledge for his province" (p. 8) and who "in the breadth and depth of his knowledge was perhaps unique'' (p. 10). However, Haller's shrewd fusion of a medical and literary language of sexual sensibility ( sensibilität ) has been less well understood by historians forever bent on merely assessing his contribution to the history of European science, the Swiss Enlightenment, or the intellectual development of Göttingen. [BACK]

265. Elsewhere I have tried to make the argument that the medical and scientific revolutions of the Enlightenment have still not been integrated into the culture at large, nor into the developing medical profession; Goldstein's Console and Classify (n. 36) is an exemplary book for this type of work carried out for the next century. For the legacy of the "nervous revolution" in medicine in the next century see also Oppenheim, " Shattered Nerves " (n. 193). [BACK]

266. See Rousseau, Languages of Psyche (n. 13). [BACK]

267. Mechanical philosophy had been applied to every other domain, including painting, diet, health, government, so why not to manners? For a list of applications, see Rousseau, "Language of the Nerves" (n. 42), 60-61; for an example in music, R. Browne, Medicina musica: Or a Mechanical Essay on the Effects of Singing, Musick, and Dancing, on Human Bodies (London, 1729). As late as 1757, manners are still being described in mechanical metaphors; see J. Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London: L. Davis & C. Reymers, 1757). [BACK]

268. William Heberden, Medical Commentaries (London: T. Payne, 1802), 227.

269. Ibid., 235. Heberden did insist, however, that "their force will be very different, according to the patient's choosing to indulge and give way to them." [BACK]

268. William Heberden, Medical Commentaries (London: T. Payne, 1802), 227.

269. Ibid., 235. Heberden did insist, however, that "their force will be very different, according to the patient's choosing to indulge and give way to them." [BACK]

270. The role of medical schools was also great in this; see section X. [BACK]

271. See F. J. McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1989). [BACK]

272. For the evidence see Wright, "Hysteria and Mechanical Man" (n. 208). Servants often aped these affectations of spleen and vapors to other servants, but rarely would they do so with their mistresses, who usually saw through the pretense. In Gay's The Beggar's Opera , Lucy explains her unacceptable behavior to the rivalrous Polly in terms of the vapors, but without recalling (if she ever knew it) that "Affectation" had been one of the handmaidens in Pope's "Cave of Spleen" in The Rape of the Lock . [BACK]

273. For his life and works, see Rousseau, "Cultural History in a New Key" (n. 188); Philip Gosse, Dr. Viper: The Querulous Life of Philip Thicknesse (London: Cassell, 1952); A. Brunschwig, Enlightenment and Romanticism in Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). For Whytt, see R. K. French, Robert Whytt, the Soul, and Medicine (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1969). [BACK]

274. James Makittrick Adair, Essays on Fashionable Diseases (N.P., 1786), 4-7. [BACK]

275. The phrase is usually quoted from An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot , line 132; see also Marjorie Hope Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau, This Long Disease My Life: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968). But Pope had used it earlier in a letter to Aaron Hill, March 14, 1731 ( Correspondence , III. 182), commenting on his chronic infirmities, which he thought had predisposed his "manly temperament" to certain "softer activities." [BACK]

276. For Pinel and hysteria see D. Weiner, "Mind and Body in the Clinic," in Rousseau, The Languages of Psyche (n. 13), 391-395. [BACK]

277. For a list of many of these medical dissertations see G. S. Rousseau, "Discourses of the Nerve," in Literature and Science as Modes of Expression , ed. F. Amrine (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 56-60. [BACK]

278. M. Micale, "A Review Essay of Male Hysteria," Medical History (1988). [BACK]

279. For some examples see Boss, "Transformation of the Hysteric Affection" (n. 55). [BACK]

280. Biographical material is found in Thomas Guidott, The Lives and Characters of the Physicians of Bath (London, 1676-77; reprint of 1724-25 is edition referred to here) and Some Particulars of the Author's [i.e., Guidott] Life in Guidott's ed. of Edward Jorden's Discourse of Natural Bathes and Mineral Waters (London, 1669, 3d ed.). Guidott dedicated his books to Maplet and in 1694 saw through the press Maplet's treatise on the effects of bathing. [BACK]

281. Guidott, Lives and Characters of Physicians of Bath , 128-142. Subsequent passages are found on these pages. [BACK]

282. Throughout my reading I wondered if Guidott had read Sydenham on hysteria, but have been unable to make a case for or against. The larger point, however, is that one would not have to read a particular text to know, and even espouse, the fundamental aspects of the paradigm. [BACK]

283. Elsewhere I shall demonstrate that it was this paradigm that informed, in part, theoretical explanations of all-male friendship (on grounds that sensitivity gravitated to like sensitivity), and that became the substratum of later discussions about effeminacy and sodomy. [BACK]

284. For example, Gideon's Fleece; or the Sieur de Frisk. An Heroic Poem . . . by Philo-Musus, a Friend to the Muses (London, 1684). [BACK]

285. Philippe Hecquet, Le naturalisme des convulsions dans les maladies de l'épi-démie convulsionnaire (Soleure, 1733); Hillel Schwartz, The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1980); idem, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, and that Subtile Effluvium: A Study of the Opposition to the French Prophets in England, 1706-1710 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978). [BACK]

286. Edith Sitwell, The English Eccentrics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1933). [BACK]

287. Hugh Farmer, An Essay on the Demoniacs of the New Testament (London: G. Robinson, 1775). For Farmer's interest in miracles, demons, spirits, and hysterics, as well as his medical case history and life, see Michael Dodson, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late Reverend and Learned Hugh Farmer (London: Longman & Rees, 1804). This work differs from physician Richard Mead's Treatise concerning the Influence of the Sun and the Moon upon Human Bodies, and the Diseases Thereby Produced (London, 1748). In Mead, male hysteria is explained according to external phenomena (for example moon, waves, tides) acting through Hartleyan vibrations and magnetism upon the human Nerves and then the imagination. In this sense Mead, like Farmer, different though their professions were, should both be considered kindred in the mindset of counter-nerve. For counter-nerve see Rousseau, "Cultural History in a New Key" (n. 188), 70-75, and Richard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976). [BACK]

288. Loneliness was an element of their alienation as securely as any other factors, as has been noticed by John Sitter in his Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982). [BACK]

289. For a very limited study in one hospital during the 1780s see G. B. Risse, "Hysteria at the Edinburgh Infirmary: The Construction and Treatment of a Disease, 1770-1800," Medical History 32 (1988): 1-22. Risse has suggested that the organic diagnosis rather than any remotely psychogenic etiology enhanced the bedside discourse shared between these Edinburgh professors and their pupils. Men were not taken in at Edinburgh, but they were in Paris and Vienna. Highborn and low, female and male: all were treated and eventually admitted without regard to gender. [BACK]

290. The Adventures of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), Bk. XVI. Smollett, a physician-novelist who knew medical theory more intimately than Fielding, portrays many more hysterics, male as well as female, especially in his "psychiatric novel" The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762). Karl Miller believes that Greaves's "weakness of the nerves," the malady his quack doctor assigns, is a foreshadowing of modern, almost Beckettian, "nervousness," and ''the more nervous people there are, the more we may need spitting images, a comedy of hurt." See his provocative chapter entitled "Andante Capriccioso," in his Authors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). [BACK]

291. Bienville, Nymphomania (n. 74). Works had been written before 1775 on the behavior or activity we would now, anachronistically, call nymphomania, but Bienville was the first to write an entire treatise using the word and concept. [BACK]

292. G. Miller, ed., Letters of Edward Jenner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). [BACK]

293. This fact surfaces repeatedly in the study of female maladies in Barbara Duden, The Woman beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). [BACK]

294. Those who think "hordes" is excessive to describe the proliferation of hysteria theory should consult the bibliographical evidence; see J. Sena, A Bibliography of Melancholy (London: Nether Press, 1970) and Rousseau, "Cultural History in a New Key" (n. 188), 76-81, which are themselves but the tip of the iceberg. [BACK]

295. Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine Hunter, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry (n. 41); William Battie, A Treatise on Madness (London: Dawsons, 1962); William Perfect, Cases of Insanity . . . Hypochondriacal Affection . . . (London, 1781); William Pargeter, Observations on Maniacal Disorders (Reading, 1792; reprint, London: Routledge, 1989). [BACK]

296. The classic works remain Klaus Doerner's Madmen and the Bourgeoisie (Oxford: Basil Blackworth, 1981; originally published in German in 1969), which appeared before Foucault's insightful Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). [BACK]

297. Cited above at the end of Section X. [BACK]

298. For some of the evidence related to rank and class in Edinburgh see Risse, "Hysteria at the Edinburgh Infirmary" (n. 289). [BACK]

299. And yet this opposition remains one of the most persistent contrasts in the history of hysteria in the early modern period surveyed in this chapter; as I worked my way through the massive amounts of material available from over two centuries (1600-1800), I was struck to what massive degree the body-mind model kept reifying itself in the discourses of hysteria. [BACK]

300. See Andrew Wilson, Medical Researches: Being an inquiry into the nature and origin of hysterics in the female constitution, and into the distinction between that disease and hypochondriac or nervous disorders (London: C. Nourse, 1776), and William Rowley, A treatise on female, nervous, hysterical, hypochondriacial, bilious, convulsive disease; apoplexy & palsy with thoughts on madness & suicide, etc . (London: C. Nourse, 1788). [BACK]

301. The point about Cullen and taxonomy in medical theory has been well made by C. Lawrence, "Nervous System and Society" (n. 185). See also John Thomson, An Account of the Life, Lectures and Writings of William Cullen , 2 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1859). [BACK]

302. See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 175. [BACK]

303. K. Cave, ed., The Diary of Joseph Farington , 16 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982- ), 10:3705. [BACK]

304. Traité des Affections Vaporeuses de deux sexes, ou Maladies Nerveuses vulgairement appelés de nerfs (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1782). [BACK]

305. W. Falconer, A Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon Disorders of the Body (London: C. Dilly, 1788). [BACK]

306. London: Rivington, 1800. [BACK]

307. Bath: R. Crutwell, 1800. [BACK]

308. John Haslam, Observations on Insanity (London: Rivington, 1798), reissued in 1809 as Observations on Madness & Melancholy: Including practical remarks on those diseases; together with cases: and an account of the morbid appearances of dissection ; idem, Illustrations of Madness (London: Routledge, 1810). [BACK]

309. See n. 1 above. For madness from Renaissance to Enlightenment more generally, see Anatomy of Madness , ed. Bynum, Porter, and Shepherd. [BACK]

310. See section XIII and n. 273. [BACK]

311. It is not accidental, for example, that Battie's Treatise on Madness (1757) appeared only a few years after the appearance of Julien Offray de La Mettrie's seminal announcement of materialism; see his Man a machine. Wherein the several systems of philosophers, in respect to the soul of man, are examined . . . Translated from the French of Mons, de La Mettrie (London: G. Smith, 1750) and E. Callot, La philosophie de la vie au XVIIIe siècle, étudiee chez Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Maupertuis, La Mettrie, Diderot, d'Holbach, Linné (Paris: M. Rivière, 1965). Also, as a parallel here are the nonmedical writings of women of the period, who also retain mystery as an essence of the then modern secularized woman. [BACK]

312. Pinel's versions of hysteria have not been studied in any detail, but see nn. 233 and 276. [BACK]

313. The imitative aspect extends, of course, beyond the theory of hysteria. For different approaches to it, see Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). [BACK]

314. Italics mine; see Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2986), 201; and Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Body/Politics: Women in the Discourses of Science (London: Routledge, 1990). [BACK]

315. See n. 300 and for Cullen and neurosis, J. M. Lopez Piñero, Historical Origins of the Concept of Neurosis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Echoes of Robert James's, Medicinal Dictionary (2 vols. [London, 1745]) article on "Hysteria" are found in Cullen's works. [BACK]

316. A recent social critic has noted that the main reason twentieth-century homosexuals build up their muscles in gyms is their misogynist contempt of weak "inner spaces"—a materialist hypothesis at least. [BACK]

317. There are fundamental ways in which the history of hysteria resembles that of gender and sex itself, and it is wrong to believe that hysteria resides in a class entirely apart from these. For the social construction of all of these see Peter Wright and Andrew Treacher Wright, eds., The Problem of Medical Knowledge: Examining the Social Construction of Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982); Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Celia Kitzinger, The Social Construction of Lesbianism (London: Sage Publications, 1987); David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Thomas Laqueur, "Onanism, Sociability, and Imagination: Medicine and Fiction in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century," a talk delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, 1991. [BACK]

318. R. B. Carter, On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria (London: John Churchill, 1853). [BACK]

319. Veith, Hysteria , 221-228. For this view in another key see L. Chertok and R. de Sausurre Chertok, The Therapeutic Revolution: From Mesmer to Freud (New York: Brunner Mazel, 1979), but for sounder approaches to the Mesmeric phenomenon see V. Buranelli, The Wizard from Vienna: Franz Mesmer and the Origins of Hypnotism (London: Routledge, 1976); R. Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). [BACK]

320. For Mesmer's Newtonianism see R. Cooter, "The History of Mesmerism in England," in Mesmer und die Geschichte des Mesmerismus , ed. H. Schott (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1985), 152-162. [BACK]

321. Some have seen the evidence of these misogynistic outbursts in the debates about female reproductivity; see Pierre Darmon, The Myth of Procreation in the Baroque Period (London: Routledge, 1982); Damning the Innocent: A History of Persecution in Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Viking Press, 1986). [BACK]

322. I owe the phrase to David Morris; see D. Morris, "The Marquis of Sade and the Discourses of Pain: Literature and Medicine at the Revolution," in The Languages of Psyche , ed. Rousseau (n. 13), 291-331. [BACK]

323. Roy Porter provides the scholarship, but see also G. Didi-Huberman, Invention de l'Hysterie: Charcot et l'Iconographie Photographique (Paris: Macula, 1982). [BACK]

324. F. Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). [BACK]