The Age of Hypochondria: Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

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Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print will feature work that does not fit comfortably within established boundaries – whether between periods or between disciplines. Uniquely, it will combine efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with explorations of gender, race, and class. By attending as well to intersections of literature with the visual arts, medicine, law, and science, the series will enable a large-scale rethinking of the origins of modernity. Titles include: Scott Black OF ESSAYS AND READING IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN Claire Brock THE FEMINIZATION OF FAME, 1750–1830 Brycchan Carey BRITISH ABOLITIONISM AND THE RHETORIC OF SENSIBILITY Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 E. J. Clery THE FEMINIZATION DEBATE IN 18TH–CENTURY ENGLAND Literature, Commerce and Luxury Adriana Craciun BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Citizens of the World Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask and David Simpson (editors) LAND, NATION AND CULTURE, 1740–1840 Thinking the Republic of Taste Elizabeth Eger BLUESTOCKINGS Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (editors) BOOKISH HISTORIES Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900 George C. Grinnell THE AGE OF HYPOCHONDRIA Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness Ian Haywood BLOODY ROMANTICISM Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776–1832

10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell

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Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print General Editors: Professor Anne K. Mellor and Professor Clifford Siskin Editorial Board: Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck; John Bender, Stanford; Alan Bewell, Toronto; Peter de Bolla, Cambridge; Robert Miles, Stirling; Claudia L. Johnson, Princeton; Saree Makdisi, UCLA; Felicity Nussbaum, UCLA; Mary Poovey, NYU; Janet Todd, Glasgow

Michelle Levy FAMILY AUTHORSHIP AND ROMANTIC PRINT CULTURE Robert Miles ROMANTIC MISFITS Tom Mole BYRON’S ROMANTIC CELEBRITY Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy Nicola Parsons READING GOSSIP IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Erik Simpson LITERARY MINSTRELSY, 1770–1830 Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish and American Literature Anne H. Stevens BRITISH HISTORICAL FICTION BEFORE SCOTT Mary Waters BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE PROFESSION OF LITERARY CRITICISM, 1789–1832 Esther Wohlgemut ROMANTIC COSMOPOLITANISM David Worrall THE POLITICS OF ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY, 1787–1832 The Road to the Stage

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–4039–3408-6 hardback 978–1–4039–3409–3 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England



Anthony S. Jarrells BRITAIN’S BLOODLESS REVOLUTIONS 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature

The Age of Hypochondria George C. Grinnell



Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness

© George Grinnell 2010

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–23145–0

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


To Joanna and Sam




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List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgments

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction: Interpreting Romantic Hypochondria

1

1 Occupational Hazard: Beddoes and the ‘Great Dark Threat’ of Romantic Medicine

28

2 Body Dysmorphic Disorder: The Self-Anatomy of Coleridge’s Aesthetics

57

3 Phantom Memory: Nation and the Absent Body of Idealism in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

85

4 Multiple Personality: De Quincey’s Political Economies of Infirmity

120

5 Performance Anxiety: Illness and The History of Mary Prince

149

Coda: Anatomy: We ‘Other Hypochondriacs’

170

Notes

178

Bibliography

191

Index

199

vii



Contents

1 Thomas Rowlandson, The Hypochondriac (1788) © The Trustees of the British Museum 2 Washington Allston, The Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha (1811–13) courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Pennsylvania Academy purchase, by subscription

viii


2 77


Illustrations

This book has taught me much about academic labor, and I would like to acknowledge the many individuals whose contributions to this work have enabled me to appreciate the profoundly social way in which intellectual thought arrives in the form of a book. David L. Clark has been an unparalleled mentor to me, and it was a sincere pleasure to craft the initial version of this text under his generous and insightful supervision. I am inspired by his continued support, intellectual spirit, and his rigorous responsibility to thought and I warmly thank him for his encouragement and all of the incidental conversations, emails, and ways of being in the world that model his limitless commitment to teaching. I received support and criticism from Don Goellnicht, Mary O’Connor, and Reeve Parker, each at various stages, and I thank them heartily for it. For reading and commenting upon an early stage of this project and for insisting that Romanticism has always been a complicated synonym of theory, I would like to thank Tilottama Rajan. Thanks to Peter Melville for generous professional advice and hospitable friendship. I would also like to acknowledge the intellectual generosity of the NASSR community, particularly Joel Faflak, James Allard, Michelle Faubert, and Tristanne Connolly. Jodey Castricano welcomed me to the Okanagan and her scholarship and intellectual vitality have made me feel at home at UBC. Sean Lawrence, Margaret Reeves, and Michael Treschow have been gracious and supportive colleagues. At Palgrave Macmillan, Paula Kennedy, Steven Hall, and Benjamin Doyle have been superb, and this book has benefited from the efforts of two anonymous readers whose interest in improving the original manuscript I sincerely appreciate. Thanks are due to Monica Kendall who copy-edited with a very keen eye, and to Rebekka Augustine of Mercury Works who ably prepared the index. Significant thanks as well to Anne K. Mellor and Clifford Siskin for welcoming the book into the Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print series. Much of the composition of this book has been supported by the generous financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, whose doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships gave me time to write and revise. Portions of this work have appeared in print previously and I would like to thank those editors and publishers ix



Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

who have given me permission to reprint them in altered form here. Part of Chapter 1 was first published in Studies in Romanticism (45, 2) and it appears here courtesy of The Trustees of Boston University. Glen Colburn included an earlier version of Chapter 2 in The English Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions and it is published here with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Thomas Rowlandson’s The Hypochondriac is © The Trustees of the British Museum and I gratefully acknowledge the permission of The British Museum to reproduce it here. Thanks as well to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for its permission to reproduce Washington Allston’s The Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha. Personally, I would like to thank my parents, Karen and George, for their support as I pursued a life so different from theirs. Thanks to Lynda Grinnell for reminding me that family knows no distance. Deni Béchard has been a friend and a welcome voice of impatience with all that is unjust in the world. Joanna Cockerline deserves special mention for several reasons. She has taught me a great deal about writing a book, and as my partner, her belief in this project has sustained me. For inspiring me to understand well-being otherwise, I thank her. Finally, thanks to my son Sam who has always known when to break my concentration and for emphasizing the importance of imaginative acts.



x

The following abbreviations are used for works by Coleridge. BE

Biographia Epistolaris, ed. A. Turnbull, vol. 1 (Charleston: Bibliolife, 2008)

BL

The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, vol. 1 (Princeton University Press, 1983)

CL

Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1956–71)

F

The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, vol. 1 (Princeton University Press, 1969)

Lectures 1795 The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Lectures 1795 On Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (Princeton University Press, 1971) Lectures 1808 The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Lectures 1808–1818 On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, vol. 2 (Princeton University Press, 1987) Notebooks III

Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn, vol. 3 (Princeton University Press, 1973)

SW

The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, vol. 1 (Princeton University Press, 1995)

Watchman

The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton (Princeton University Press, 1970)

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Abbreviations



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Interpreting Romantic Hypochondria

Does not nature keep secret from him most things, even about his body, e.g., the convolutions of the intestines, the quick flow of the blood-currents, the intricate vibrations of the fibers, so as to banish and lock him up in proud delusive knowledge? – Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a grim-faced man despairs that his health is lost. He sits dejected, plagued by phantasms menacing his well-being. An attending physician has tried and failed to exorcize substantial specters, but he is already too preoccupied with his impending infirmities to pay him any heed. He is inconsolable and thoroughly engrossed in his own perceived disorders. Why should the well-respected artist and anatomist of his age, Thomas Rowlandson, have etched such a portrait of a hypochondriac? The answer is as plain as it is perplexing. Hypochondria had become pervasive in British culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. This disorder of imagined infirmity haunted individuals such as this one, but it also afflicted society in general. To be more precise, the malady became a somatic expression of a culture fascinated by well-being like never before as it increasingly targeted the healthy body as an object of regulation. Rowlandson’s print (Figure 1), which he produced for the Piccadilly print-seller S. W. Fores and which would have hung in their store-front beside other works of social and political satire, provides a portrait of the Romantic period’s ongoing fascination with this malady and the concerns hypochondria represents – concerns which range from the medical to the philosophical, and from the economic to the literary.1 Invited to gaze into the well-appointed home of the bourgeois 1



Introduction

The Age of Hypochondria

Figure 1 Thomas Rowlandson, The Hypochondriac (1788)

hypochondriac and look, as if through a window, into his perturbed mind, we encounter him wrapped in a dressing-gown, as he looks down in melancholy distraction, unaware of anything but his phantom disorders. Behind him is a servant and a physician, figures whose attending presence serves in part to indicate the wealth of the hypochondriac. The illustration is divided between the physician on one side and the hypochondriac and his specters of infirmity and suicide on the other. As a work of social satire, the etching posits a sympathetic and ironic perspective in which viewers are invited to feel for the poor wretch who suffers hypochondria and shake their heads at these people who are foolish enough to suffer at the hands of extortionate physicians. The hypochondriac at the center of the image fears he is unwell and is haunted by several distinct threats to his body. A dagger floats ominously nearby. A corpse-like old woman offers the hypochondriac a rope and a pistol as an alternative to the physician’s pharmaceutical bolus. Beneath the grisly hearse that rumbles past with five heads stuck on spikes above the coffins it transports, a disembodied hand draws a sword against the hypochondriac and next to that a torso appears to be falling to its demise while a goblin-like creature offers the



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hypochondriac a poisonous concoction. A man who bears a likeness to the hypochondriac is about to slit his own throat, while the skeletal form of death appears ready to hurl a spear. All of these visions represent to the viewer the myriad forms of impending death that menace the mind of the hypochondriac. They also register a certain excess that is always at work in cases of hypochondria. Half-obscured by the smoky haze of uncertainty that emanates from Rowlandson’s despondent sufferer, these apparitions are all in some way visually incomplete and as such provide the viewer with a glimpse of the greater incompleteness of the hypochondriac’s self-understanding. The failure of the hypochondriac to fully complete his hallucination of one threat to his body before conjuring another invites the viewer to reflect upon the difficulty of recognizing exactly what troubles the sufferer. Is Rowlandson’s hypochondriac sick? The dejected man’s well-being is not evidently disordered but he certainly imagines it is. The knowledge he possesses of his well-being is haunted by invisible specters that mark the uncertain prospect of ascertaining his health or illness. Such a malady is as much epistemological as it is personal, persistently marking the presence of irrationality for a post-Enlightenment age of reason. This book is about the Romantic era’s persistent encounters with hypochondria and how the disorder’s shaping influence upon the culture of the period is treated in a selection of literary, medical, aesthetic, and autobiographical narratives. As hypochondria increasingly affected a broad spectrum of medicalized discourses – which is to say discourses that are not strictly medical but utilize a rhetoric of well-being – that sought to determine the truth and meaningfulness of the body in its health or illness, the malady became a ‘dense transfer point in the relations of power’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 103). If it is not dismissed too quickly and coarsely as a pathology, hypochondria embodies an anxiety troubling disciplinary formations that would produce the body as an object of knowledge. Focusing on particular expressions of the malady – expressions which include the disavowed hypochondria of the physician Thomas Beddoes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s cultivated aestheticization of health, Mary Shelley’s interest in national and international forms of unsoundness, as well as Thomas De Quincey’s economies of sickness and Mary Prince’s powerful narration of her own infirmity – I consider how a rhetoric of hypochondria becomes a way for these individuals to theorize and understand the health of the body in ways that both inscribe and unwork, sometimes painfully, the normalizing pressures of social and cultural efforts to regulate health and illness in the Romantic era. The interpretations of hypochondria that I examine here constitute 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


Interpreting Romantic Hypochondria 3


episodes in the life of a disorder and an unverifiable experience that refuses to become the conceptual ground for the individual who suffers from illusions of infirmity or a desirous relationship to the body. In addition to particular scenes of interpretation of hypochondria, then, this book is also interested in the manner in which the disciplinary ambitions of discourses of well-being confronted compelling and anxious attachments to a post-Enlightenment body that was constantly subject to revision and non-knowledge. It is difficult to declare with confidence what hypochondria is because the disorder is invested in the imagination, volition and compulsion, ways of fashioning the self, and even the body’s susceptibility to unpredictable fluctuations and degradations that mark health as, at best, a temporary state. Thus, it rarely manifests itself as an utterly singular experience. Hypochondria is always materialized in specific bodies and, unlike a relatively stable virus, this malady changes and responds to each unique host. The conceptual and lived flexibility of hypochondria was particularly troubling for a medical culture in which the resistance of the hypochondriac’s body forms an ongoing threat to medical perception and efforts to idealize a vision of proper moral health. Indeed, Rowlandson’s attending physician might have wished he could access his patient’s infirmities as easily as the artist does his disturbed thoughts because, unlike Rowlandson, physicians faced a much more vexing task when it came to perceiving and determining the presence of hypochondriacal tendencies. In the verse that accompanies the illustration, the print emphasizes the significance of hypochondria for medical perception: The Mind distemper’d – say, what potent charm, Can Fancy’s spectre – brooding rage disarm? Physic’s prescriptive art assails in vain The dreadful phantoms floating ’cross the brain! Until, with Esculapian skill, the sage M.D. Finds out at length by self-taught palmistry The hopeless case – in the reluctant fee: Then, not in torture such a wretch to keep, One pitying bolus lays him sound asleep. Unable to treat the hypochondriac’s consuming anxieties, the physician proposes to treat his hyper-awareness of well-being by anesthetizing him. Rowlandson satirizes a physician who cares only to collect his fee and whose treatment amounts to alleviating the sufferer’s troubling consciousness, but one suspects that the hypochondriac’s specters are 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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also troubling the physician’s confidence in his own ability to diagnose and treat illness. If the disturbances of the hypochondriac could not be distinguished from so-called real infirmities, could regular physicians – to say no more of the charlatan pictured here for a moment – ever be sure they were diagnosing disease accurately or that they knew health when they saw it? Were their talents so confounded by the possibility that an individual could feel sick and also be healthy that they resorted to doping their patients and superstitious practices to maintain their clientele? Could illusions of disease warn against an impending and all-too-real infirmity? Enough to make the physician long for a bolus of his own, perhaps.2 Hypochondria designates a crisis in legitimation for Romantic medicine but the malady’s powers to disorder and unsettle extend beyond this scene of therapy and individual suffering. As the historian of medicine Christopher Lawrence notes, ‘so visible had medicine become as a unit of cultural currency’ for an age in which the internal developments of health implied a range of moral attributions, that policing well-being became a complexly personal and social project of ‘a hypochondriacal society’ (1994, p. 15). British culture had become hypochondriacal. Rowlandson’s print exemplifies the attention paid to nervousness at the end of the eighteenth century and its status, increasingly, as a pathology as well as a complexly embodied practice of tending to oneself. Prior to the Romantic period, a nervous sensibility referred most consistently to an individual’s experience of life through his or her senses – literally the functioning of the nerves. English writers such as Adam Smith and David Hume recognized sensitivity as the capacity to feel and feel for another. What was new by the end of the eighteenth century, however, was that nervousness increasingly also denoted a pathological condition of the altogether too-sensitive body. To be nervous remained potentially salutary, especially for poets and writers, yet sensibility was not always easy to turn off and it could produce paralyzing states of introspection and attention to the body that prompted calls for treatment and correction. While the shift toward a pathology of nervousness was not monolithic, it was nonetheless an increasingly dominant understanding that reshaped hypochondria into a symptom of excessive and misdirected sensitivity. The hypochondriac had become a metaphor for a culture’s obsession with health and illness, even a sign of the intemperate cultivation of well-being and its meaningfulness for a range of discourses. Romantic medicine sought to treat hypochondria, then, and addressed what the disorder was and was not in a range of works and practices, though it did so without much consistency or success. Medical practice 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




often caused as many infirmities as it treated in the period, and while this was an age of reform and growing authority for regular medicine, sufferers were as likely to turn to mesmerism or faith-healers as they were to a physician. Regular medical practice was divided among physicians on the one hand and surgeons and apothecaries on the other. Doctors held a medical degree or belonged to the Royal College of Physicians and most were graduates from Cambridge, Oxford, or Edinburgh, though it ‘was possible to buy an MD from Aberdeen or St Andrews on the recommendation of a physician, and many well to do surgeons and apothecaries crowned their careers with a bought doctorate’ (Vickers, 2004, p. 19). Within the Romantic period’s medical milieu, physicians concerned themselves with internal medicine, which ranged from attention to the nervous system, to contagious diseases, to respiratory disorders and ailments of the intestinal tract. As well, the vast majority of medical research in the period was carried out by MDs. By contrast, surgeons were the manual laborers of the medical trade. They were responsible for dressing wounds and setting broken bones in addition to surgical interventions into the body. Surgeons frequently also plied the trade of apothecaries who sourced and dispensed drugs as a means of making extra money. In the early Romantic period, just about anyone who sold pharmaceutical drugs could call themselves an apothecary. It was not until the Apothecaries Act of 1815 that formal apprenticeship programs and education requirements for apothecaries were established, marking a substantial initial effort to regulate general medical practice in Britain. While the lax examination of the credentials of many apothecaries who worked as general practitioners delayed the effects of this reform-minded Act, the sentiment motivating it recognizes that a nervous society apt to turn anywhere for medical care had reached a crisis point and, more substantially, reflects the concentration of efforts to police well-being, including the regulation of those deputized to act as stewards of proper health. Romantic medicine was profoundly social in its desires to train individuals into a physically and morally healthy state. This meant that disease was always potentially also a disorder that implied a greater imbalance in the life of the sufferer, a symptomatic opportunity to insist that certain behaviors, desires, ways of being in the world constituted forms of illness that were harmful to greater or lesser degrees or led to them. The treatment of individuals – something which is never confined to the privileged site of one’s interactions with a physician but includes one’s compulsory negotiations with a range of medicalized discourses that shape what it means to be healthy or sick – is thus 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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also a local manifestation of ongoing social efforts to clarify and police norms of deviance and propriety. In Rowlandson’s visual representation of the interiority of the hypochondriac we see a visual representation of late-eighteenth-century medical efforts to catalogue disease and ‘botanize in the field of the pathological’, but also to work as agents of correction (Foucault, 1994, p. 89). Amid the historical moment of a decentered assemblage of medicalized practices which sought to produce specifically healthy individuals – over and against those diseased bodies whose pathology indexed not just poor health but forms of deviance that threatened normal and proper well-being – hypochondria is not just one disorder among many. Hypochondria is a disorder in the very ability rigorously to distinguish between illness and health. It is, in other words, a malady of interpretation, with far-reaching consequences for the extensive forms and modes of knowledge organized upon a principle of the legible differentiation between states of health and illness. Rowlandson’s graphic depiction of imagined infirmity is a single symptom of a much more widespread cultural fever of health-consciousness which was metonymically represented by the figure of the hypochondriac. Romantic culture was finding hypochondria everywhere, not just in etchings but also in literature, philosophy, and manuals of hygiene which offered ‘details of how the individual was to organize such things as diet, even the site of his home, so as to ensure health and, implicitly, prosperity’ (Lawrence, 1994, p. 15). In 1817, the physician John Reid wrote his Essays on Hypochondriacal and Other Nervous Affections in order to identify and treat the ‘nervous diseases’ of his age which ‘from their daily increasing prevalence, deserve at the present time a more than ordinary degree of attention and interest’ (1817, p. 9). To say that British society suffered from a form of unyielding and ‘fashionable ennui’ (p. 8) is also to say that the body and its health had come to occupy a primary and compelling place in the national imaginary. Proponents of abolition, for example, spoke rhetorically about the sickness of slavery and found traction among audiences by raising questions regarding the lack of adequate medical treatment for slaves. Similarly, a number of commentators addressed concerns over the wellbeing of the nation at a time of revolution in France and then war on the continent. The intensification of the Romantic period’s medicalized rhetoric comes not just from its conceptual reach and applicability but also from the increasing threat of new diseases that originated in the colonies and which were spreading across the globe. Britain was one of several European powers ‘grappling with new diseases’ as a consequence of imperialism (Bewell, 1999a, p. 3). Colonialism ‘may not have created 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




new pathogens, but it did bring people who had previously been isolated into contact with each other and with diseases that were new to them’ (p. 3). The belief that the spread of new diseases could be limited to the tropical climates and other zones of colonial contact – a fantasy that scarcely even acknowledged the disastrous health effects of imperialism upon indigenous populations forced to battle measles and smallpox for the first time – was rapidly assailed by the sheer spread of new as well as old epidemics in the period, ranging from the influenza pandemic of the 1780s, to the recurring summers of yellow fever in the 1790s in North America, and the rapid movement of cholera across the Indian subcontinent after 1816. At once fearfully anticipated and deadly upon arrival, new diseases charged already potent cultural understandings of well-being in ways that were not unified or singularly predictable. Faced with the threat of new diseases at home and abroad, the British reading public could respond by committing themselves to any number of newly proposed regimens of public hygiene, diets, or conduct that promised to secure their well-being. Yet the anxiety and instability that characterized how health was experienced, enjoyed, lost, recovered, and normalized were not entirely ubiquitous, and as real and physically urgent as ill health was for the Romantics, an anxious relation to health was also cultivated in ways that frequently retraced lines of class, race, and nationality. Hypochondria primarily afflicted the bourgeoisie, so much so that it might not be possible to understand one without the other, and thus to speak of a nervous nation in the Romantic period is to acknowledge the dominance of the middle classes and their efforts to shape the nation in their own image as a collective body composed of relatively leisured citizens whose wealth made possible an age of medical consumerism. Indeed, supporting and maintaining this Romantic medicalization of the self was an abundant marketplace of health manuals, pharmaceutical remedies, and spa retreats, and no shortage of personal instructors in the calisthenics of health, all of which combined to form a heterogeneous set of tactics that sought to police and consolidate middle-class bodies as objects of regulation. Medicine and consumerism were sister vocations of a nervous age. Rowlandson represented the capacity of hypochondria to demarcate social divisions by placing his affluent sufferer in a well-appointed room with a chest beneath his chair, a visual confirmation of conventional associations of the wealth of the bourgeoisie and their nervous maladies. In addition, Rowlandson includes a number of bottles of medicine placed on the table which reflect the growing social perception that physicians were interested in cultivating well-heeled hypochondriacs by aggravating a ‘trifling 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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ailment ... into a serious malady’ (Reid, 1817, p. 23) as a means of earning fees and selling nostrums. While it is in many ways exemplary, Rowlandson’s depiction is only one elaboration of a disorder which proved to be highly mutable in its application by a number of writers in the Romantic period. This book will chart some of these varied etiologies and consider how Romantic hypochondria, in its many forms, constitutes a unique disorder that persistently questions what it means to know the body to be healthy or sick.

Reading health in the Romantic period Taking such a position, I contend first and foremost that the concepts ‘health’ and ‘illness’ are historical and not natural constructions. Health is not something a subject simply or naturally has, but, rather, functions as a regulatory norm producing the bodies it polices. The end of the eighteenth century is a particularly important moment in the history of subjecting bodies to regimes of health because of the volatile mixture of new medical insights and widespread impulses to police morality that emerge in the period. Medicine has frequently provided the rhetorical figures for mapping the diseases afflicting the body politic, as Coleridge recognized when he noted of his friend and radical Dr Thomas Beddoes, ‘a Physician is peculiarly well-qualified for political research, since the large portion of human misery which passes under his immediate inspection’ (Watchman, p. 310). What Romantic medicine provides, however, is more than the applied attention to well-being of the sort Coleridge associated with Beddoes. Romantic medicine had begun to anticipate the revolutionary precision of cellular theory when it anatomized bodies and tried to ascertain the etiologies of illness, yet it remained attached to a much older Galenic model of well-being that saw disease as a local manifestation of disturbance in the entire body. This notion of a system of medicalized measurement that assessed the body, and thus also the person, as normal or pathological was given a decisively modern elaboration in the context of influential new understandings of the functioning of the nervous system. Over the course of the eighteenth century, new understandings of nervous physiology gradually took hold and gained a great degree of sway thanks to the Edinburgh physician and educator William Cullen.3 Cullen was one of the chief disseminators of nerve theory in Britain and it was the work of one of his students, John Brown, that most transformed understandings of the effects of nervous stimulation upon health. In The Elements 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




of Medicine (1795), Brown rebuilt ‘the whole of medicine on inductive principles, inferring general laws and principles from observation of clinical phenomena’ (Vickers, 2004, p. 43). He developed an understanding of well-being that was no longer grounded in the fluctuations of ‘immaterial entities such as fluids and ethers’ (p. 43) but in a theory of nervous stimulation, a theory that nonetheless borrowed significantly from earlier humoral medicine and its emphasis on constitutional equilibrium. Humoral medicine contended that the healthy body was the result of an ideal balance of black bile, phlegm, blood, and yellow bile. An imbalance in one led to an individual who was melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine, or choleric. Brown adapted these ideas to fit with a model in which health was determined by the stimulation of nerves. He contended that the body’s capacity to be excited by stimulation was the principle of life and that health was, in turn, a measure of the distribution of stimulation across the entire body: As there is always some excitability, however small, while life remains, and as the action of the exciting powers always takes place in some degree, I conclude that they have all more or less of stimulant effect, and that this must be either excessive, in due proportion, or too small. A great quantity of blood stimulates in excess, and, therefore, produces the diseases that depend upon too much stimulus; but an under proportion of blood, though debilitating in its effect, and inducing the diseases that depend upon debility, must still be understood to be stimulant; only so much less stimulant, as the penury is more considerable. (1795, pp. 8–9) Excessive or deficient stimulation of the nerves would lead to sickness, as opposed to the proper health that accompanies the median, or norm, of nervous excitability. Brown’s theory of a normative health – one defined against deviations of too much or too little – was tremendously popular, absorbing into itself other concurrent systems such as Galvanism and Mesmerism, which it interpreted as ‘merely partial formulations of the principle of excitability’ (De Almeida, 1991, p. 71). This new rational and calculating logic of medical inquiry provided the means with which to measure individuals according to their ‘deviation from the normal, and increasingly, for managing [their] deviations from that norm’ (Lawrence, 1994, p. 45). This meant the experience of being sick was a corporeal event in the history of a particular individual that was inextricably tied to questions of representation and mediation as both health and illness became conduits in the ongoing production 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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of a knowledge of the body and regulatory ideals of proper well-being. Romantic medicine is a science of normativity, in the sense that its efforts to cure sickness and maintain health were almost always part of an ongoing effort to assemble and organize what would pass for sickness and what would be counted as health, leading ultimately to disciplinary tactics aimed at treating the body in an effort to maximize something called ‘health’ and contain ‘illness’ as much as possible. Romantic medicine was not alone in this turn-of-the-nineteenthcentury project of subjecting individuals to a norm of well-being that was opposed to illness. While medicine is only one part of a network of discourses that contributed to what it meant to be healthy or sick, the normalizing force of idealizations of well-being defined the social, rhetorical, and thus even, in part, the physical experience of health. Discourses of nation imagined tending to the disorders of an unhealthy body politic in an attempt to homogenize a diverse citizenry and manage unwanted deviance as an expression of degeneracy and sickness. Attributions of health and illness took on considerable force for a range of concerns because they naturalized a morality in the form of an ideal body at a time when optimal health seemed less and less attainable. Aesthetic philosophy, to cite another example of a discourse that contributes to a logic of proper well-being, mobilized the form of the normally conceived healthy body in order to naturalize discussions of taste. Even political economy drew upon and in turn shaped a rhetoric of well-being in its attention to the ways in which health or illness reinscribes norms of self-possession that underwrite the subject’s autonomy as a productive laboring body. In each of these discourses, certain bodies, along with specific politics and practices, are constructed as healthy and ideal, while others are imagined to be unhealthy and improper. Examining the ways in which these discourses produce and police the healthy or unhealthy subject, I adapt Judith Butler’s influential argument that gender is a norm and a regulatory practice ‘that produces the bodies it governs’ (1993, p. 1) into an analysis of how medicalized norms of well-being constitute a healthy body, norms which, like gender, produce one type of subject primarily by forcefully excluding others. The dichotomy of health or illness treats certain bodies as diseased abjects and constructs other bodies as healthy and normal. Romantic wellbeing targets the body, subjecting it to the moral lessons of sickness and the corrective and disciplinary measures that work to restore a salutary health. The body emerges out of these efforts to construct it, specifically as an effect of the discursive investments in it, and it exists as an object of regulation prior to becoming anything else. To be embodied was to 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




be healthy or sick, especially in a hypochondriacal age, because one’s health is part of the unchosen social conditions that every person must negotiate as part of what it means to be an embodied individual. And while they are compulsory, determinations of health are not natural perceptions or states of being, but highly coded acts of mapping idealizations onto the body. Health is, in short, a way of mediating and materializing the body in and through efforts to know it. Yet sickness was never purely rhetorical the way health could be. Under the right conditions health could make the body seem as if it was not even there. Infirmity brought the corporeal crashing back, reminding individuals that even when ideals of the body materialized it in certain ways, it was still a body and as ungovernable as bodies always are. Fascinatingly, hypochondria insists upon placing idealizations of the body alongside corporeality in the same moment of the body, thereby marking the materialization of the flesh and its stubborn resistance and unconquerable alterity. Critical analysis of the healthy body has recently examined the extent to which Romantic well-being was a part of a culture of correction that supplied a moral language to a range of social and political discourses which sought to pathologize difference. Examining the social and political deployment of ideas of the normal and the monstrous in the Romantic period, Paul Youngquist argues that health and illness are irreducible to a war against infirmity being waged by a nascent form of ‘public hygiene’ (2003, p. 125). He contends that norms of well-being are part of a broader social project of producing and regulating proper bodies. The proper body is opposed to the monstrous body, which constitutes a form of otherness which both ‘afford[s] an occasion for the cultural (re)production of the proper body’ and ‘challenge[s] its performative authority, [by] inserting the material fact of bodily difference into the circuit of its re-enactment’ (p. xv). Martin Wallen has similarly noted how health is constitutively opposed to illness in the Romantic era in a manner that is irreducible to the pathology of disease. Because the Romantic physician treated the whole body rather than isolated parts, the terms, health and disease, as signifiers of general states along with the various names of diseases themselves, carried broader ethical and physical implications, both when used specifically within medical discourse and when used more generally in discourses of ethics or aesthetics. (2004, pp. 4–5) While it could take a number of forms – whether in denunciations of diseased ideas of revolution or the infirmity of the idle middle classes – this 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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moral health policed the social and political lives of Britons, and indeed the state, in the name of maintaining health and avoiding dangerous diseases. What, then, of the myriad individuals who fail to attain the normative ideal of proper health? Peter Melville Logan has examined this question in reference to a particular class of sick individuals who have written what he calls ‘nervous narratives’, or texts which both engage a pathology of nervousness and reflect upon the author’s own negotiation of what it means to be ‘hysterical’. Logan reads the nervous body as a symptom of ‘the social environment’ of the mercantile bourgeoisie that becomes enlisted in the service of social critique as it responds to the ‘order or disorder of the social conditions that produced it’ (1997, p. 2). For Logan, hysteria produces the individual as well as an immanent critique of the economic and gendered conditions that gave rise to the disorder. These surprising considerations of the productive, rather than pathological, work of illness rely upon an opposition of health and illness in order to examine how well-being works and what its goals are within and beyond the body. Yet the distinction between health and illness was never less certain than in the health-obsessed Romantic era. To what extent do these critical positions depend upon and reinscribe a constitutive disavowal of hypochondria as a disorder that troubles distinctions between health and illness? Against this as yet unacknowledged critical history of hypochondria, the chapters that follow attend to the ways in which hypochondria is the form given to a theorization of the subject’s failure to attain a normative ideal of health or illness, and thus consider how this complexly lived malady marks a troubling laceration in a normalizing opposition of sickness and health and potentially interrupts the social and political work of idealizations of well-being. While the ends of such a productive pathology are as varied and unpredictable as the malady itself, hypochondria is, as one recent anthology put it, complexly ‘enabling as well as disabling’ (Colburn, 2008, p. 2). What is more, the disorder resists being reduced to one and not the other at the same time, and consequently hypochondria is never simply productive, any more than it is ultimately pathological. Hypochondria leads to a range of effects and affects among British society in the Romantic period. And because Romantic well-being refers to much more than corporeal health, this means thinking about the ways in which hypochondria is a malady and a metaphor which negotiates a broad spectrum of pressing cultural questions, ranging from the articulation of healthy national communities, to the roles race, class, and gender play in the formation and deformation of the body politic. 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




It raises questions as to how notions of sensibility and self-fashioning intersect with medicalized understandings of the body alongside concerns with reason, judgment, and the powers of abstraction and attention. Even when hypochondria is deployed as a critical category situated between the normalizing impulses of health and illness, as it was by Romantic writers like Coleridge and De Quincey and even Mary Prince, the malady is complicated by its almost viral tendency to proliferate interpretive questions. Analyzing hypochondria leads to moments of exposure, where the regulatory workings of health and illness are caught as if in the act, but it also leads to expressions of attachment and loss, suspicion and abjection, even uncertainty alongside fantasies of absolute knowledge. It unexpectedly produces a better understanding of the ways in which normalizing discourses of well-being, as utterly pervasive and powerfully compelling as they were, were not centralized and univocal in determining and policing the welfare of Britons. Indeed, the rise in hypochondria in the period is as much a symptom of the instability of norms of well-being as it is indicative of the proliferation of idealizations of well-being at a time when formal medicine was barely organized as such and could not yet consistently diagnose or treat disorders as effectively as it desired. Hypochondria was constantly feeding into and interrupting the circuits of normalizing health. One lesson of hypochondria – which is also a reminder that a disorder can always be, in part, pedagogical, whatever its material effects upon the body – is that health is subject to efforts to know and police it and that even when these efforts are coherent they cannot escape the irrational possibility that health is not finally intelligible. The malady threatens to make visible the possibility of not knowing health, among so many other meanings attached to the malady, and does so for medicalized discourses that range from the disciplinary to the desirous, and which find expression in intimate and traumatic experiences of sickness as much as they do in ironic performances of infirmity. How, then, did Romantic hypochondria come to be at once singularly identifiable and an elusive disorder that manifested itself in so many divergent ways?

The rhetoric of Romantic hypochondria Romantic hypochondria is the name given to a disorder that is particular to a certain era of revolutions in cultural and political life and to a moment in the history of medicalized discourse in which an unprecedented fascination with well-being combined with greater investments in the construction of the body as an object of knowledge. 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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Hypochondria as it was experienced at the turn of the nineteenth century is not quite the disorder it is now, even if it does share certain intuitive similarities at the level of an individual’s fantasies of infirmity and a preoccupation with the body. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, hypochondria is a disorder of the mind that meets the following criteria: A. Preoccupation with fears of having, or the idea that one has, a serious disease based on the person’s misinterpretation of bodily symptoms. B. The preoccupation persists despite appropriate medical evaluation and reassurance. C. The belief in Criterion A is not of delusional intensity (as in Delusional Disorder, Somatic Type) and is not restricted to a circumscribed concern about appearance (as in Body Dysmorphic Disorder). D. The preoccupation causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. E. The duration of the disturbance is at least 6 months. F. The preoccupation is not better accounted for by Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Panic Disorder, a Major Depressive Episode, Separation Anxiety, or another Somatoform Disorder. (2000, p. 300.7) There is much that could be said about the imprecision that still haunts hypochondria in these criteria, but the hypochondria defined by the DSM-IV is significantly different from that of the Romantic period to the extent that it is an individual disorder and not a disorder in judgment that could be said to affect an entire society. Other pathologies – one might think of disordered eating, or questions of trauma, for example – have differently taken the place of a societal preoccupation with the body which was once labeled hypochondria. In contrast to this modern etiology of the disorder, Romantic hypochondria names an event that is not strictly located in an individual body. It is a malady that cannot be confined to particular identifiable symptoms and marks a social obsession with policing well-being and the vexing difficulty of discerning its limits, and at the same time it is a lived disorder experienced and understood in a number of competing and complementary ways. As all of the writers I examine here show, it was a malady that upset the body and thus belongs, in part, to corporeality and its indifference to language 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




and meaning. But it also disordered discourse and idealizations of well-being which means hypochondria must also be understood in reference to language – if language is one way of speaking about the social and those efforts to domesticate the indifference of the body. The term ‘hypochondria’ originated as the name given to a real and painful disorder of the hypochondrium – an area just below the rib cage – or more generally the stomach, a definition which can be traced back to ancient times. We can see Rowlandson recall this earlier diagnosis in his illustration of the hypochondriac clutching his midsection. While Romantic hypochondria had not entirely abandoned associations with the spleen or the hypochondrium, the history of this malady begins with forms of melancholia or what became known as the English Malady. The Renaissance deemed melancholia to be a rapidly spreading disorder imported from Europe. The melancholic was a figure of foreignness and disordered well-being who became a stock malcontent in the literary and medical texts of the Elizabethan era. For Shakespeare, the melancholic was also an anguished figure whose ennui was expressive of a troubled and tormented psyche. Hamlet is the example par excellence of the foreign melancholic, a sufferer whose spectacular grief and bodily disorders only further affirm his depression. His sorrows are expressed bodily while the depletions of the body in turn dispirit the mind. The Renaissance individual’s experience of melancholia is a psychological and physical event. Indeed, psychosomatic disorders did not exist as such in Elizabethan England. The term would have been meaningless to a society not yet accustomed to a psychology that separates the mind from the body. As Robert Meister notes in his history of hypochondria, for the Renaissance, ‘everything that happened in the mind also happened in the body, and vice versa’ making the notion of a strictly imaginary infirmity as yet meaningless (1980, p. 85). What makes Renaissance melancholia a significant precursor to hypochondria, particularly to the pathological forms of dis-ease that take hold in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is the normalizing force of humoral medicine that diagnosed the melancholic as excessively sensitive to the point of becoming abnormally introspective and self-consumed. In literal terms melancholia was thought to be caused by an excess of black bile which could originate in the organs of the hypochondrium – the area immediately below the rib cage, such as the spleen, gallbladder, liver, and extending to the uterus in females. A deficiency in black bile might lead to a corresponding excess in phlegm, making an individual sedate or numb to oneself and the world of human activity. These humoral states implied that disorders were 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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caused by the individual’s deviation from a virtuous and healthy life. Matters of health were understood to be moral, then, as well as physical. The restoration of health for such crumbling individuals came via forms and practices of self-mastery. In Anatomie of the Mind (1616), Thomas Rogers instructs his readers that the healthy individual must first know himself, by which he meant the healthy subject ‘must as well knowe his bodie, as his minde’ (qtd in Meister, 1980, p. 86). Renaissance well-being was an abiding truth of the self – its essence and its possible degradation or restoration – and a primary means of establishing a notion of the individual who is subject to forms of correction and normalization. For those who suffered melancholia, life may have been wretched but it was not disgraceful. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attitudes toward melancholia ranged from respect to desire for a condition that was as fashionable as it was debilitating. The melancholic – like the hypochondriac of the eighteenth century – was often associated with a scholarly life and refinement and sensitivity. Francis Bacon, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and John Donne all numbered themselves among the morbidly obsessed. They might not have been able to succinctly characterize their melancholia as an internalization or escape inward ‘from a disheartening world’ beset by political, religious, and social turmoil (Meister, 1980, p. 95), but their experience of it would not have been one of abject disorder. Robert Burton, for one, wrote positively of his melancholia, famously crediting his experience of ennui as the impetus to write The Anatomy of Melancholy (1638). While Burton did not relish his state, it was not debilitating. It provided the unlookedfor opportunity to witness firsthand and record the emergence of a compelling state of the mind and body which had begun to trouble the English cultural imaginary. The figure of the splenetic individual was given its most powerful revision by George Cheyne in The English Malady (1733). Cheyne subtitled his text A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Disptempers, a laundrylist which acknowledges the variability of disorders which encompassed a nervous obsession with well-being. Cheyne proclaimed melancholic hypochondria to be a property of English temperament, climate, and social practices. He notes: the moisture of our air, the variableness of our weather, (from our situation amidst the ocean) the rankness and fertility of our soil, the richness and heaviness of our food, the wealth and abundance of the inhabitants (from their universal trade), the inactivity and sedentary 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




occupations of the better sort (among whom this evil mostly rages), and the humour of living in great, populous and consequently unhealthy towns, have brought forth a class and set of distempers with atrocious and frightful symptoms, scarce known to our ancestors, and never rising to such fatal heights, nor afflicting such numbers in any other nation. These nervous disorders being computed to make almost one third of the complaints of the people of condition in England. (1991, pp. i–ii) Cheyne may not have been right to suggest that these disorders were unique to his age, or that they were really all that English either, but his most compelling assertion remains: hypochondria was not simply a bodily disorder but a symptom of social and political concerns such as matters of national self-identity, the economic comfort of the mercantile classes, and the unhealthiness of living in swelling cities. While the specific terms that support this eighteenth-century identification and appreciation of an English temperament would change as British society and medical culture approached the Romantic era, the essential allure and fashion of hypochondria and related disorders continued thanks in part to Cheyne’s decisive admiration for an English Malady. Cheyne insisted hypochondria could be experienced with national pride as a sign of the colonial wealth and luxury of the early eighteenth century. Nor was he alone in making such an assertion. The physician Andrew Wilson put forward a very similar understanding of the environmental factors involved in a continual rise in hypochondria during the eighteenth century in his Medical Researches: Being an Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Hysterics in the Female Constitution, and into the Distinction between that Disease and Hypochondriac or Nervous Disorders (1776). Wilson finds the ‘most probable reason for the revolution’ in nervous complaints does not lie in the climate, which ‘is the same as it was always’, but in changes to lifestyle and food among the bourgeoisie: Since the trade of the East and West Indies opened upon us, a great alteration of both [of] these has been introduced, especially among those who are above the labouring ranks of life. The alterations of dress in favour of elegance and cleanliness, have greatly circumscribed our exercise. A person who has contracted a taste for cleanliness of dress, is naturally restrained from either the quantity of exercise, or the varieties of it, that he would otherwise engage in. This soon grows into a habit, which fixes that quantity of exercise 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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that we find either agreeable or necessary. As exercise has a great effect strengthening the solids, increasing the heart and circulation of the fluids, and in short, in winding up the springs of life; so comparatively, inactivity must be accompanied with a more relaxed and less indefatigable constitution. Such constitutions as we acquire or form to ourselves, such do we transmit to our descendants. (1776, pp. 107–8) While Cheyne wished to credit the colonial economy, Wilson’s later analysis of national dis-ease argues that imperialism should be blamed for the apparent increase in hypochondria. Wilson’s portrait is notable as well for the way in which it associates degeneracy with this pervasive disorder, a revision of Cheyne and his insistence on reading this disorder as salutary. What is remarkable about Romantic hypochondria is that it will not decisively embrace either of these positions, as it increasingly denotes an undesirable pathology at the same time that the disorder continues to be fashionable at the turn of the nineteenth century. A very different and equally influential account of hypochondria was written by Robert Whytt in Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of those Disorders which Have Been Commonly Called Nervous Hypochondriac, or Hysteric (1767). Whytt was the physician to King George III in Scotland, beginning in 1761. Whytt’s treatise reflects a growing mid-century understanding of the nervous system and those diseases which could leave the ‘power of the nerves ... either too acute, abtuse, depraved, or wholly wanting’ (1767, p. 88). Unlike those disorders traced by the humoral medicine of the Renaissance, the pathological misgivings with the body that Whytt sought to examine were not rooted in particular regions of the body. For Whytt, hypochondria had become a pathological expression of malfunctioning nerves that could not properly perceive the body or the sensory world around it. By insisting upon the nerves as the seat of ennui, Whytt was part of an emerging understanding of hypochondria that was no longer located in parts of the body such as the spleen, or stomach, or womb. Instead, this hypochondria had its basis in the senses of the body. It was a disorder of the mind’s interaction with the body, intersecting and overlapping both. By removing the basis of health-anxiety from particular parts of the body, Whytt also addressed the gendered distinctions between hysteria and hypochondria, at the level of the etiology of the disorder, if not at the level of treatment. Treating the nervous individual as physiologically disordered, Whytt notes that hysteria and hypochondria ‘are generally [interpreted] by physicians as the same; only in women such disorders 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




have got the name of hysteric, from the ancient opinion of their seat being solely in the womb; while in men they were called hypochondriac, upon the supposition, that in them they proceeded from some fault in those viscera which lay under the cartilages of the rib’ (p. 104). Whytt’s assertion that nervousness is not firmly rooted in the womb or the hypochondrium, but is an indication of ‘faults somewhere else in the body’, may be little more than wishful thinking in terms of the practical and very different ways medicine treated men and women (p. 104). But his suggestion that medicine group these two sexed pathologies under the common term ‘nervous’ (p. 105), explains in part why hypochondria will become increasingly synonymous with a general nervousness experienced by Romantic culture as a whole – shedding its gendered status – while at other times the malady will retain or revitalize this history amid suggestions that nervousness is also a crisis in one’s gendered identity and that to be health-obsessed is to suffer from a feminizing malady. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an exemplary figure of this unstable genealogy in which nervousness is complicatedly hysterical and hypochondrical. In his Confessions (1782–89) he describes himself as variously suffering from melancholia and hypochondria and settles upon the feminized ailment of ‘the vapours’ to describe his infirmity: My health was not yet re-established; I decayed visibly, was pale as death, and reduced to an absolute skeleton; the beating of my arteries was extreme, my palpitations were frequent; I was sensible of a continual oppression, and my weakness became at length so great, that I could scarcely move or step without danger of suffocation, stoop without vertigoes, or lift even the smallest weight, which reduced me to the most tormenting inaction for a man so naturally stirring as myself. It is certain my disorder was in a great measure hypochondriacal. The vapours is a malady common to people in fortunate situations: the tears I frequently shed, without reason; the lively alarms I felt on the falling of a leaf, or the fluttering of a bird; inequality of humour in the calm of a most pleasing life; lassitude which made me weary even of happiness, and carried sensibility to extravagance, were an instance of this. (1796, vol. 2, pp. 136–7) For the Romantics who were such avid readers of Rousseau, hypochondria would become much what it is described to be here, a complicated pejorative that recognized the value of a cultivated sensibility while it also threatened the sufferer with a trace of feminine extravagance. The hypochondriac could always potentially be traced back, in salutary or 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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cautionary fashion, to parents ‘born with minds susceptible of the most exquisite sensibility and tenderness’ (vol. 1, p. 3). Interestingly, Rousseau’s confession of hypochondriacal vapours is a decidedly Romantic invention in this 1796 translation. Rousseau wrote ‘j’étais réduit à l’inaction la plus tourmentante pour un homme aussi remuant que moi. Il est certain qu’il se mêlait à tout cela beaucoup de vapeurs. Les vapeurs sont les maladies des gens heureux, c’était la mienne’; which has been more recently translated as ‘I was reduced to the most tormenting inaction for a man as restless as I am. It is certain that the vapors were very much mixed up with all this. The vapors are the malady of happy people; it was mine’ (Rousseau, 1995, p. 207). Romantic culture – with its masculine women and weeping men – assimilated Rousseau into a well-developed discourse of bourgeois nervousness that traced and retraced relations of power that traversed gendered terrains even if they were unprepared to imagine the decisive opposition of hysteria and hypochondria that Sigmund Freud would solidify at the end of the nineteenth century with his work on female patients suffering from so-called hysteria.4 Immanuel Kant, who was no stranger to hypochondria, saw in the malady an opportunity to reflect upon questions of perception, imagination, volition, and self-mastery. Kant recognized in his ‘flat and narrow breast ... a natural disposition to hypochondria’ that led him to cultivate an abstemious attention to his own well-being throughout his life (1979, p. 189), but he also understood that this disorder could be a figure for philosophical concerns as well. ‘The hypochondriacal illness consists’, wrote Kant in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), of ‘physical sensations [that] do not so much uncover a real evil present in the body as arouse concern, and human nature has the peculiar characteristic (not found in animals) that paying attention to certain local impressions makes us feel them more strongly or persistently’ (qtd in Shell, 1996, p. 284).5 Hypochondria could be a model for sympathetic identification, just as it could stress the importance of its opposite, an ability to ‘look away with manly courage’ from immediate sensations and reflect calmly and critically (Kant, 1974, p. 83). Hypochondria is an irrational attachment to the body that can be overcome, must always be overcome, and thus the disorder becomes something pedagogical, an aid to reflection and a reminder of the dangerous feminization that awaits those who fail to accomplish this task of looking away from the body. The threat the disorder poses to reason is one of the most consistent themes associated with hypochondria to emerge over the course of the eighteenth century. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault notes that 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




hypochondria is at the forefront of the commitment by a medicalized Enlightenment to divest bodies of their senselessness. It is an embodied representation of the epistemological crisis that dominates eighteenthcentury thought on language and presence. Foucault includes hypochondria as a species of borderline madness that supplied an exemplary figure for discursive interventions that sought to regulate the psychic and social objects ‘to which one was attached in the world, the life one had led, the affections one had, the passions and the imaginations one had cultivated too complacently’ (1988, p. 157). Hypochondria was symptomatic of a sufferer’s impaired moral conduct and improper desires, and as such it became ‘the site where a certain manner of imagining the body and of deciphering its internal movements combined with a certain manner of investing it with moral values’ (p. 149). Alongside this concern with morality, the experience of illusory infirmity marks the immanent stabilization of an otherwise incoherent body in its attachments. This turn-of-the-nineteenth-century discourse of hypochondria organizes and produces the body’s unintelligibility as an eminently conquerable symptom of underlying disease. In Zoonomia (1794), Erasmus Darwin contended that hypochondria was a disease of volition which caused the sufferer to hallucinate illness ‘without in reality having [a] symptom’ of the imagined disease (1794, p. 404). The hypochondriac’s body is said to lose its ambivalence, its resistance to being resolved into sense under the watchful eye of the medical professional. Or at least that is one conclusion of this story, and not one I find entirely convincing precisely because it imagines, to my mind, too neat a containment of the potential disruptiveness of the malady for an age of reason that was also an age of intense preoccupation with sickness. Romantic hypochondria is every bit as elusive and contradictory a concept as it is a malady. Drawing upon previous formations of melancholia and the return of a humoral medical model that is now couched in the language of nervous pathology, hypochondria possesses no single or singular etiological basis. Renaissance notions of the humors had never fully disappeared from English medical discourse. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, for example, was reprinted in London in 1800. While Romantic medical culture had moved away from a model of fluids and regions as a means of understanding an individual’s total well-being, it nonetheless retained this older understanding of the body’s potential for imbalance in Brown’s theory of excitability. An individual’s anxiety concerning this fragile state of health is not consistently the national identification it was in the time of the English Malady; nor is it a bodily disorder of the spleen. The hypochondriac 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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was an intemperate individual whose desire for balance had tipped over into pathology. In the works I study here, the disorder is almost always, in part, rhetorical, in the sense that it is concerned partially with the meanings, associations, materializing effects of Romantic medical discourse. Hypochondria beckons interpretation as it assembles an elusive amalgam of disquietudes and infirmities, some exaggerated, others imagined but no less real for being illusory. As a disorder that creates for itself a scene of reading, hypochondria undoes itself in the moment of definition: it is an indication of something not there, and a symptom of the difficulty of ever knowing where individual bodies cease and social ones begin except as reiterations of one another. Always leaving us grasping for something more solid than a vague sense of dis-ease, this rhetoric of Romantic hypochondria probes the myriad values of an era obsessed with health and invites an understanding of a very real malady that wearied so many people at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Sufferers and their treatments The Romantics’ anxiety over the body’s ends – which is to say both its social and political purposes as well as its discrete borders – poses questions as to the intelligibility of well-being and whether or not health and illness can be meaningfully distinguished in a body agitated by the threat of disease. Hypochondria is thus a form of interpretive disease that prompts numerous writers, poets, physicians, and thinkers to consider questions about how well we know what we know and to what ends a knowledge of the body is produced. The hypochondria I examine here steals into fissures opened up by discussions of the professionalization of medicine, the abolition of slavery, ethics, matters of aesthetics, as well as questions of class and racial identity. How hypochondria disrupts the policing function of moral assertions of health or illness reminds us that breaches always exist in so-called natural designations and that these are opportunities for us to rethink critically what appears to be natural. Methodologically, each chapter of this book disinters particular Romantic figurations of hypochondria in order to understand what it means to theorize questions of health in and through a shifting figure of dis-ease, whether in medical, literary, aesthetic, or economic texts in which the meanings associated with well-being are both reproduced and unsettled. Reading works by Thomas Beddoes Sr, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Charles Brockden Brown, Thomas De Quincey, and Mary Prince, the chapters examine a rhetoric of hypochondria that 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




embodies questions of interpretation and reading and which may, at times, produce understandings of infirmity every bit as elusive as the malady itself. To the extent that they examine hypochondria, the texts I read here also suffer from it. This means that in addition to contributing to our understanding of a distinctly Romantic hypochondria, these texts theorize the work of interpretation in and through their reflections upon the hypochondriac’s considerable and fraught powers of self-observation. My analysis proceeds by means of readings that attend to the ways in which meaning is formed and deformed and how it is transmitted within and, at times, between texts. In each chapter, considerations of what hypochondria does are developed through reading practices that attend to the myriad social and political energies that shape the Romantic period and are in turn shaped by its discourses. My object here is not to survey all of the possible iterations of hypochondria in the period but to attend closely to particularly volatile elaborations of the disorder to assess the ways in which the malady is a troubling call to interpretation that marks a persistent challenge for medical discourses couched in a normalizing opposition of health or illness, reminding us that such terms can almost never be opposed punctually and determined with any absolute surety. I expect there are also versions of Romantic hypochondria that may share very little with the forms of hypochondria I describe here. The disorder is by its very nature too resistant to being isolated and cultured even within the laboratory that is this book, even one that seeks to know it as open to endless permutation. My readings work through and are in turn unworked by the internal differences of the texts I study here, as readings always will be, and also by the enlivening presence of hypochondria that is so crucial to these texts and which opens them to a special form of endless interpretation. The histories of a Romantic hypochondria that emerge from such a reading practice are necessarily plural. Hypochondria is disruptive, even of itself, and hence is not always coherent or self-identical in these texts. The chapters follow an approximate chronology yet work to elaborate a history of the various mutations of hypochondria throughout the Romantic period that does not fit neatly into a narrative framework of how the disorder evolves over time. Indeed such a history of the malady is impossible because the disorder behaves much like a virus that makes bad copies of itself. The epidemiology of Romantic hypochondria that emerges out of these focused studies is that of a disorder that turns upon itself at moments and at others reactivates long-dormant aspects of the malady, making earlier versions of the disorder at times more 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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contemporary and familiar than later ones. In order to capture the complexity and difference that inheres in and indeed defines these expressions of Romantic hypochondria, this book proceeds in a recursive manner, then, considering and reconsidering the ways in which the malady shifts and transforms, serving quite different ends in different cultural and literary texts throughout the period. The first chapter examines Thomas Beddoes’ Hygëia: or Essays Moral and Medical, on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of our Middling and Affluent Classes (1802), a manual of public hygiene that offers a rich and reflexive examination of the contours of a deployment of health in Georgian Britain. Hygëia is a medical text with political aspirations. It produces and regulates a specifically bourgeois well-being that works to clarify classes according to their relative health or infirmity. Beddoes, who translated Brown’s Elements of Medicine from Latin, idealizes a notion of hale and hearty working-class health for the nervous British middle classes. Yet he is also drawn to hypochondria and the ways it might trouble the social segmentation of health and illness that his text polices. Coleridge’s ill health has frequently been stigmatized as a primary reason why he did not produce more as an artist. In the second chapter, I consider how his hypochondriacal responses to ongoing infirmity can be read as productive and not disabling. I argue that Coleridge’s disordered health enables him to produce a uniquely lived theorization of a normalizing politics of health. This chapter assembles a number of Coleridge’s publicly personal reflections on hypochondria, culminating in an examination of an embodiment of dis-ease in Principles of Genial Criticism (1814). Addressing aesthetics through the physical body and its apprehensions of the world, Coleridge considers how natural ‘taste’ might be distorted by bodily disorders. This means a text that seems to focus on aesthetics also contains within it a crucially important critique of how a notion of health that so preoccupied him and so many of his contemporaries has been enlisted as an ideal form with which to police the validity of so-called natural responses to beauty. The third chapter considers how two novels concerned with epidemic disease revitalize the eighteenth-century hypochondriacal nationalism Cheyne introduced in The English Malady. Examining Mary Shelley’s spectacular account of a contagiously conceived nation in The Last Man (1826) and passages from its precursor, Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799), that have significantly shaped Shelley’s text, this chapter addresses an increasingly influential rhetoric of national well-being at a time of considerable dread and anxiety over the arrival of tropical disease in Britain. Examining how Shelley’s fictional pandemic marks 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




the return of a melancholic hypochondria in which the well-being of nation is premised upon the irretrievable loss of health in the age of empire, this chapter also addresses the ways in which discourses of health idealize the body and how these representations always threaten to violently displace a corporeal and lived experience of infirmity. The fourth chapter focuses upon Thomas De Quincey’s reflexive considerations of what it means to have health, or how well-being is a possession of the body that confirms its autonomy in discourses of political economy. A rhetoric of well-being in economic texts written by De Quincey and others significantly structures his understanding of himself as the self-possessed narrator of his own unhealthy body in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). These claims to selfpossession are complicated by De Quincey’s all too strident disavowals of a hypochondria that haunts his knowledge of himself. He anxiously abjects specters of hypochondria in his portraits of a pathologically selfinvolved Immanuel Kant in ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ (1827) and ‘The Last Days of Immanuel Kant’ (1827), as well as his depiction of the Malay and others in Confessions. But these avatars of pathological hypochondria also hold another, potentially less conserving, expression of health in reserve. They stress the indeterminacy of Romantic health in expressions of hypochondria, and De Quincey glimpses the possibility that well-being emerges less as an absolute property of the autonomous body than as a mediating principle within and between bodies – one that exists between Kant and the Malay and De Quincey. The final chapter extends the consideration of an ethical relation to others instantiated by health introduced in the previous chapter. Here, I attend to the ways in which Mary Prince performs infirmity as part of her articulation of herself as an individual who merits care and medical attention. The History of Mary Prince (1831) is an account of her life under slavery and is structured by her repeated declarations of ill health, declarations which at once mark her text as hypochondriacal and also work to realize the radical potential of the malady to respond to a schema of well-being that had denied her – as a slave – the right to be sick and receive treatment. In addition to situating Romantic hypochondria in the context of colonial medicine, this chapter considers the ways in which hypochondria is a performative expression of the healthy subject and is particularly attentive to the ways in which Prince’s task of giving an account of herself also involves giving an account of those discourses by which she makes herself a legible or illegible subject. Prince’s narrative of her complexly unhealthy body reminds us of the 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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ways the field of health was used to dehumanize slaves. The History of Mary Prince also exemplifies, I argue, the potential in Romanticism to prompt us to think otherwise about received categories of being by crafting a relationship to health that is irreducible to either soundness or sickness. While such a reading might seem unexpected to readers familiar with Prince’s life and narrative, it is motivated by a desire to take seriously her impassioned theorization of what it meant to be sick in the Romantic period.




Occupational Hazard: Beddoes and the ‘Great Dark Threat’ of Romantic Medicine

Beddoes begins Hygëia: or Essays Moral and Medical, on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of our Middling and Affluent Classes (1802) with a hesitation that will mark much of his text. He wonders aloud if he is prepared to treat medically the ills of the increasingly wealthy merchant classes in Britain, remarking, ‘a writer in my situation finds himself obliged to fix upon an imaginary standard of capacity’ (1802, 1: 7).1 Beddoes was already a well-qualified physician and medical researcher when he wrote this, which suggest that the capacity of which he speaks is not simply one of medical proficiency. Because Hygëia sought not so much to target an already existing bourgeois clientele but to produce that readership as the object of the medical treatments it offered, Beddoes had to create himself as someone capable of treating bourgeois health and illness. He had to fashion himself into a physician who could care specifically for middle-class bodies, which required, moreover, imagining and then determining what constitutes specifically bourgeois health or illness. Attending to diseases associated with prosperity, the three volumes of Hygëia offer a capacious understanding of the ‘physical or ideal pleasure and pain’ affecting the minds and bodies of the middle classes in Britain (1802, 1: 89). Hygëia will, Beddoes promises, fix the reader’s ‘attention severally upon the modes in which [health] is forfeited, on the advantages that accompany its possession, and the consequences that accompany its loss’ (1802, 1: 19). Expressed with such economic calculation, health appears not just as the object of study but a product that Beddoes himself is making available to the acquisitive classes. The idealization of health or illness that occurs in Hygëia is part of a regulatory impulse to conceptualize health in terms that are moral as well as medical. This chapter reads Hygëia to be symptomatic of a broader medicalized culture 28



1

that was ‘physical in its application but disciplinary in its regulative force’ (Youngquist, 2003, p. 122) and which supplied ‘the overt reasoning for governmental restriction on behaviour and activities’ (Wallen, 2004, p. 6). Beddoes directs the disciplinary energies of medicalized discourses specifically toward the production of a distinctly bourgeois well-being for his readership, though not without some difficulties and unexpected insights into medical perception that significantly compromise the regulatory ambitions of this project. As a text that seeks to ascertain and treat the ills of the bourgeoisie, Hygëia is powerfully concerned with hypochondria, both as a figure for a class obsessed with well-being and for the unsettling prospect of not being able to identify health in cases of imagined infirmity. Whether from his own practice or from the culture at large, Beddoes had good reason to suspect his readers were all ‘hypochondriacs running from one medical counsellor to another’ (1802, 8: 88). Writing to an audience already versed in self-applied remedies, Beddoes was forced to reflect upon the rise of nervous complaints among classes with the means to seek out multiple medical opinions and what such hypochondria meant for his delineation of an idealization of health in Hygëia. His anthropology of ‘the anatomy and physiology of external prosperity’ among the British middling classes (1802, 1: 29) is anticipated by an entire genre of medical manuals that sought to afford a range of literate individuals the capacity to manage their own health – whether fevers, broken bones, or minor surgery – as much as they took care of their own economic or intellectual well-being. Beddoes’ own complicated relationship with these texts in Hygëia informs his efforts to model – in a performative dissemination of medical advice – a reorganization of a specifically professional medical practice in Georgian England. In Hygëia questions of medical authority and proficiency intersect with the hypochondriacal concerns of the bourgeoisie in a manner that will begin to demonstrate what hypochondria means for discussions of social medicine.2 My reading of Beddoes’ text unfolds in several sections, each populated by the disparate figures of illness that embody the early Romantic era’s attention to health and myriad forms of hypochondria that threaten health. The chapter begins with a consideration of Beddoes’ efforts to delimit his concern for the health of the bourgeoisie and what it means to class and classify health at the same time in Hygëia. Next, the chapter delineates the medicalized culture that informs and structures Beddoes’ intervention into an epidemic of nervousness, a section which focuses upon Beddoes’ reflexive attempts to understand himself as a physician capable of securely diagnosing illness. Pursuing hypochondria as a disease 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


Beddoes and Romantic Medicine 29

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Something in the air In his Notice of Some Observations Made at the Medical Pneumatic Institution (1799), a text Beddoes wrote primarily to establish for his investors the path-breaking research into the potential of gases to treat tuberculosis, he remarks on experiments just completed at his newly founded Institute: after the first moments of surprise it was impossible not to recognize the expressions of the most extatic pleasure. I find it entirely out of my power to paint the appearances such as they exhibited themselves to me. I saw and heard, shouting, leaping, jumping, running and other gestures, which may be supposed to be exhibited by a person who gives full loose to feelings, excited by a piece of joyful unlooked for news. (1799, pp. 7–8) The effects Beddoes finds himself unable to adequately describe here are of his experiments in administering nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, which in addition to performing on himself he also performed on such Bristol luminaries as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Anna Letitia Barbauld. Far from a systematic or scientific accounting of the effects of the gas, Beddoes writes here as if still intoxicated by the gas. This curious account of the early work of his Pneumatic Institute neatly captures the promise, spirit, and excitement of experimental or scientific medicine at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Yet the results he publishes open himself and pneumatic medicine to ridicule from a Tory press already predisposed against him for his outspoken criticism of Pitt and more generally his radical democratic values. Beddoes’ father-in-law, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, predicted precisely this sort of professional difficulty for the young physician. Writing to an acquaintance on the topic of the engagement of his daughter Anna with Beddoes, Edgeworth comments: Dr Beddoes the object of Anna’s vows is a little fat democrat of considerable abilities, of great name in the scientific world as a naturalist and Chemist – good humored good natured – a man of honor and virtue, enthusiastic and sanguine and very fond of Anna. His manners 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


troubling the conceptual stability of something called health, the chapter finally marks the ways in which Beddoes understands a medical pathology structured by the impossibility of finally bringing the illness of hypochondria to sight.

are not polite – but he is sincere and candid ... The doctor will settle at Clifton and if he will put off his political projects till he has accomplished his medical establishment he will succeed and make a fortune – But if he bloweth the trumpet of Sedition the aristocracy will rather go to hell with Satan rather than with a democratic devil. (qtd in Butler, 1972, p. 110) The concern Edgeworth voices here about Beddoes’ anti-establishment politics stems from the reputation he earned at Oxford and after in the mid-1790s. He resigned his post as reader in Chemistry in 1793 because the atmosphere at Oxford had become too hostile to his democratic leanings. The proclamation against seditious publications would soon lead to the treason trials of 1794 and during the years that followed Beddoes would trade more on the reputation he had earned as a voice of preventive medicine with the publication of his moral narrative of alcoholism, The History of Isaac Jenkins (1792). During this period, Beddoes also resolved to start up his own research institute, and after leaving Oxford he settled in the Bristol suburb of Clifton, just as the area was becoming known as a fashionable resort town, the sort of place to which consumptives would flock in order to breathe the fresh sea air (Porter, 1992, p. 133). But if the location was perfect, Beddoes’ timing was not. His lingering record of political pamphleting and early support for the French Revolution made it impossible for him to obtain any private support for his Pneumatic Institute from the Royal Society or his former colleagues at Oxford, despite the acclaim his research had received from such figures as Erasmus Darwin, Coleridge’s patron Thomas Wedgwood, R. L. Edgeworth, and James Watt, among others (Stansfield, 1984, p. 155). Laughing gas trials aside, pneumatic medicine forms the primary mode in which Beddoes introduced himself to the public as a legitimate physician engaged in scientific research, and well represents the sort of professional medical practice that informs his popular account of the preservation of health in Hygëia.3 Notice of Some Observations closes with an almost manifesto-like advertisement for Hygëia, in which Beddoes claims his next text offers ‘to render health a main object of education; to deter the ignorant from tampering with the sick; to curtail the dominion of empirical imposture; to destroy the influence of male and female gossips upon the fortune of physicians; to promote the ascendancy of science over intrigue’ (1799, p. 47). Competing with the increasing commercialization of medicine in which quack doctors advertised ‘the latest theories and appliances of orthodox medicine 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




itself – the electrical machine, mud baths, hot springs, the mesmeric tub, the celestial bed – to bring their healing powers to public attention’ (Lawrence, 1994, p. 15), Beddoes articulates the contours of a professional medical practice concerned with its own health as well as the health of its patients. The understanding of health that Hygëia promotes needs to be considered as a symptom of a larger impulse to reform and a designation of the crisis of legitimation that structures much of Romantic medicine. Disease often outpaced the expertise and medical techniques of physicians in the period, and thus many practitioners were more concerned with cultivating polite nervous illnesses in their wealthier patients as a way of earning a living than they were with founding research institutions. It was not always clear, moreover, who was a physician and who was not. Despite the official hierarchical segmentation of medical practice that placed physicians at the top, surgeon-apothecaries in the middle ranks, and distinct surgeons and apothecaries at the bottom, the patient’s experience with medicine drew significantly upon a parallel system as well, the effects of which made it at times difficult to distinguish the care administered by quack doctors from the care of a professional. Readers of Hygëia were as likely to search out medical assistance from any number of irregular sources, whether that be faith-healers, spas, novels, or a range of tonics and nostrums, as they were from regular medical practitioners. On the one hand, ‘prosperous patients mixed quack with orthodox remedies in a “lively medical pluralism”’ (Lane, 2001, p. 8). While on the other, many practitioners were quack doctors offering little in the way of care, and many legitimate physicians had to sell their own nostrums in order to survive. From Beddoes’ perspective, ‘the British medical profession had sold its soul to trade’ (Porter, 1992, p. 41). Indeed, those doctors who are ‘mere collectors of fees, regardless of medical science’, form an entire section of Beddoes’ anthropology of the species ‘physician’ in the introduction to his translation of Brown’s Elements of Medicine (1795) (Beddoes, 1795, p. cxviii). While Beddoes and his fellow ‘Romantic physicians felt compelled to protect the reputation of their profession from the quackery and false medicine of prior ages’ (De Almeida, 1991, p. 39), nagging at this desire was an anxiety about how to demonstrate the physician’s legitimacy. The line between the general practitioner and the ostensibly corrupt empiric was constantly shifting and being redrawn according to social preferences and perceptions of efficacy. In proposing medical reforms Beddoes emphasized the importance of experimental activities for the profession. But this was not without 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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its difficulties, given that many were suspicious of a former radical like Beddoes. In starting the Pneumatic Institute, he was aware he opened himself up to accusations that he was a fraud. In a letter to Darwin, Beddoes expresses his anxiety about the possible deleterious effects upon his professional reputation that might come from starting the Pneumatic Institute. ‘Although it is evident that none but beneficial consequences can result to the public from the prosecution of my design’, writes Beddoes, ‘it requires very little knowledge of the world to perceive the danger to which I am exposing my reputation. It is impossible to engage in a new and arduous undertaking without incurring ridicule or obloquy. Of course I must expect to be decried by some as a silly projector, and by others, as a rapacious empiric’ (qtd in Stansfield, 1984, p. 151). The origin for Beddoes’ concern lies not simply in the public’s appetite for experiments with air, but in the meanings already associated with pneumatic medicine. Joseph Priestley’s experiments into the properties of the atmosphere, which had as their basis the assumption that the atmosphere was ‘a major site at which principles of health and disease were produced’ (Schaffer, 1990, p. 283), form significant antecedents to Beddoes’ project. The development of pneumatic medicine in Britain, moreover, was popularly synonymous with Priestley’s dissenting views. The associations among pneumatic medicine and an air of reform is in turn refocused by Beddoes’ work at the Institute which was aimed toward reorganizing a notion of medical pathology, or an anatomy of the causes of infirmity within the body. But Beddoes is primarily concerned in this letter to Darwin with the overwhelming association of pneumatic medicine with ‘silly projectors’, perhaps a reference to reform-minded sympathizers of the French Revolution like himself, or with greedy charlatans looking to fabricate the health benefits of something that could not even be seen. Beddoes elaborates his notion of a pneumatology before a backdrop of anxiety, then, in which being a physician involved not just the labor of experimental medicine but also the constant and ongoing political work of attempting to carve out a role for himself and his medical techniques. But, as I will show, he registers this uneasiness most palpably not by expressing his own dis-ease but by examining the hypochondriacal anxiety of a bourgeois population fascinated by the curative promise of self-applied remedies. For many in Britain, medicine was to be had from a physician only indirectly. Written for a public receptive to conduct books that instructed the middle classes in ‘strategies of domestication’ (Armstrong, 1987, p. 91), late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century medical manuals 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




were a popular source of medical advice for the literate classes. William Buchan, the author of the popular Domestic Medicine (1769) – a text which was still being reprinted in the nineteenth century – summed up what he saw as the Enlightenment project of medical manuals when he epigrammatically declared patients ‘may be their own physicians’ if they take the advice of such works (1985, p. xiii). As Ginnie Smith notes, these works were, for the literate classes, a ‘far more familiar source of information than the personal advice of the trained physician’ (1985, p. 250).4 While an Enlightenment sense of ‘mission’ associated with medical manuals was perhaps a relatively recent variation, medical manuals of the late eighteenth century continued a humoral regimen that characterized earlier works of this sort. This body of literature, which included John Wesley’s Primitive Physick (1747) and James Parkinson’s Budget of the People (1793) among others, ‘recommended simple rules for diet, exercise, fresh air, cleanliness’ as a way of curing and preventing forms of infirmity (Porter and Porter, 1989b, p. 33). As Buchan put it: in the treatment of disease, we have been particularly attentive to regimen. The generality of people lay too much stress upon medicine, and trust too little in their own endeavours. It is always, however, in the power of the patient, or of those about him, to do as much towards his recovery as can be effected by the physician. (1985, p. ix) Thus, for Buchan, the careful reader of medical manuals could treat a variety of disorders with as much skill and success as the physician. While this empowering ideology of self-reliance is in some sense radical, its political associations are also conservative. Wesley, for instance, understood self-healing to be a form of resistance to commercial medicine that he expressed in masculinist terms as the work of ‘heads of households’ to assume ‘responsibility for health as well as godliness’ (Porter and Porter, 1989b, p. 35). It is true that a rhetoric of medicine served radical causes in ways that may have even trumped Burke’s powerful use of a rhetoric of disease in Reflections on the Revolution, as James Robert Allard has noted with attention to the way in which John Thelwall ‘seamlessly merges medicine and reform’ (Allard, 2004, p. 83). But this eighteenth-century ‘democratization of medicine’ (Porter, 1992, p. 160) also aspired to thoroughly conservative values of the function of medicine to regulate a body politic through calculated acts and regimes of self-policing, even if it could not control how its advice was applied. 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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When Beddoes wrote Hygëia, he entered into an already saturated medical marketplace that did little but exacerbate a culture of intemperate attention to the body. He did not see himself as just another individual offering advice on infirmity, however. Addressing the position of his own text in a marketplace crowded by self-help manuals, Beddoes reflects he ‘is certainly accustomed to see invalids, for whom it would be happy if their whole mass of ideas – provided those were included that relate to their means of recovery – could be abolished’ (1802, 1: 53). He believed, moreover, Buchan ‘had done the people’s health a grave disservice’ (Porter, 1992, p. 165). What we have in Beddoes’ reformist description of his project in Hygëia is an elaborate rhetoric of selfreliance that results in an even more pointed medicalization of a British bourgeois body politic. That is to say, Beddoes’ response is to recommend the most conservative policing tactics of this genre but present it as a radical reform of the genre, one aimed particularly at safeguarding the health of the middling classes. Unlike Domestic Medicine, which offers a collection of diseases and treatments, Hygëia reads like a taxonomy of the infirm bourgeoisie. As such, it exhibits in medical terms the spirit of contemporary attempts to clarify increasingly anxious divisions in British society generally. Beddoes imagines a Romantic hygiene in which ‘each individual might find his station on the scale of health, as readily as he could the class, order and genus of a plant in the most convenient botanical arrangement existing’ (1802, 4: 91). He suggests that Hygëia will provide this taxonomy of health in Britain, with a particular focus on producing something called the health of the middling classes. He notes, ‘in my choice of topics, I shall principally hold the middle and more opulent classes in view. There only do we find leisure for study; there only the necessary degree of intelligence; and the means of carrying good counsel fully into effect’ (1802, 1: 8–9).

Medicalizing social divisions Hygëia is composed of 11 distinct essays organized topically, with subjects ranging from the well-being of girls and boys in boarding schools to fever to habitual sickliness. Biographer Dorothy Stansfield has noted that in Hygëia, Beddoes ‘hoped to educate not just by explaining practical matters of health, but by bringing about a change of thinking’ (1984, p. 198). He asked his audience ‘to pay critical attention to the way in which their lives were conducted and to see there the need for the practical measures which he was advocating’ (p. 198). His text is not the simple account of prescriptive medicine he makes it out 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




to be, however. It is a complex delineation of normal and pathological behaviour among the middling classes and an effort to police this class and its others by ‘medicalizing behaviours that contradict its values’, to borrow a phrase Peter Melville Logan uses to describe the social application of medicine in the Romantic era (1997, p. 30). Like his contemporary Thomas Trotter, Beddoes viewed bourgeois health to be plagued by nervousness, which was filling ‘the nation with degenerate fears, apprehension, and hypochondriacism’ (Trotter, 1807, p. 147).5 The cure Beddoes proposes for such nervousness is a surprising one, especially considering the primary method Beddoes employs to articulate the health of the affluent classes is a mode of differentiating the bourgeoisie from its others in the aristocracy and the working classes. Beddoes idealizes the health of the working classes for his bourgeois readership. If it could be exported to the bourgeoisie, the insensibility to health Beddoes identifies as a property of the lower orders and their robust well-being would prevent the proliferation of morbidly self-obsessed hypochondriacs in the middle classes. To this end, Beddoes notes that the ‘first great preservative of mental, as of bodily health, is active occupation’ (1802, 10: 79). Work is a therapy that preserves health, and ‘[n]o species of nervous disorder’, Beddoes further specifies, ‘easily fastens upon persons, who devote a part of their time to moderate labour’ (1802, 10: 79). At first glance, the value Beddoes places upon labor appears to be at odds with a dismissive neglect of the working classes, at least of the sort typified by Edmund Burke’s disgust at the ‘swinish multitude’ working and sweating among British society (Burke, 1986, p. 173). Beddoes’ concern is not for the working classes, however, but for what can be excised from them and used more productively by the bourgeoisie. Similarly, he cautions the bourgeoisie against aspiring to the pathological indolence of the aristocracy, despite their growing wealth and leisure. Beddoes takes a position similar to that of Mary Wollstonecraft who, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, contends that the affluent classes of Britain have acquired ‘food and raiment, for which they neither toil nor spin’ and thus give up their ‘health ... in exchange’ (1993, p. 125). She further insists the intellectual vigor of the middle classes must be distinguished from the excessively physical health of the so-called lower orders: ‘I find that strength of mind has, in most cases, been accompanied by superior strength of body, – natural soundness of constitution, – not that robust tone of nerves and vigour of muscles, which arises from bodily labour, when the mind is quiescent, or only directs the hands’ (1993, p. 105). The ideal of health Beddoes constructs is bordered by 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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difference, then, and is premised upon a diagnosis of nervousness that threatens to wreck the middle classes. He charts a ‘comparative physical census of the population’ (1802, 2: 79) that roots well-being in class affiliations and attachments, and in doing so he actively suppresses differences within the bourgeoisie, particularly the differential treatment of nervous ailments in women and men. In a passage that so readily dismisses the gendered nature of medical treatment in favor of other concerns, he notes: Many discerning medical writers have confessed their inability to lay down any marks, by which hysterics in women can be distinguished from hypochondriasis in men. To enter into this question does not belong to the plan of the present work. Hysterical women, it is certain, are liable to be discomposed by causes equally trivial with hypochondriacal men. The slightest moral or physical impulse gives a shock, which is felt with equal violence throughout the system. There is therefore the same inability to cope with the common incidents of life; and there is the same soreness of feeling. (1802, 8: 95–6) Conflating hysteria and hypochondria into a single form of nervousness has the effect of underscoring the common cause of both: ‘neglect of that exercise, which the human animal was formed for taking’ and which is a crucial preventive measure in the treatment and delineation of bourgeois sickness (1802, 8: 96). Gendered differences are ignored here, so that the bourgeoisie can be constitutued here as a unified class in opposition to its unhealthy others. As Beddoes notes in the second essay of Hygëia, physical activity forms the cornerstone of bourgeois health because it can become a mode with which to distinguish the middle classes from the dissipated idleness of the aristocracy and the unfreedom of the toiling working classes: The cells and conventicles of gentility, it is true, harbour beings, upon whose wearisome uniformity the tumult of pleasure never breaks in. But so do the cells and conventicles of labour, when it is fixed down beside machines, whose eternal rotation produces no greater variety of chearful sounds than the rattling of the turnkey’s bunch of keys, or the creaking of the prison doors. These classes, then, whatever be the distance between them, are inseparably linked together by the chain of destructive vanity: and though born under such different stars, they pretty equally share a lot in life, which no image can better represent than that of helpless crews, 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell



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Clarifying his position on the health benefits of physical work, Beddoes notes that laborers who cannot work in the open air and whose freedom of movement is brutally confined are no more healthy than the inactive and degenerate aristocracy. The pleasurelessness of the working classes and aristocracy that Beddoes notes here results from the degenerate and diseased practices of each class. Interestingly, this representation of imprisonment also references another virtual, though no less tangible, confinement of the subject by medicalized attributions of well-being, encoding as this scene does a fantasy of maximal visibility and the physician’s determining gaze that peers into these clandestine spaces in order to examine the bodies within. Beddoes’ rhetoric of imprisonment and discipline, of individuals suffering because of their attachments to class and its secret cells, evocatively imagines quarantining unhealthy, un-bourgeois bodies. As illusory as it is, this brief rhetorical flourish nonetheless represents a desire, in essence, to pin down bourgeois health via its difference from other pathological forms of well-being. Beddoes continues in this goal by turning his attention to the aristocracy exclusively, as the most vividly foreign and exotic figures against which his delineation of a healthy bourgeois body emerges. They are ‘frequenters of the opera’ (1802, 2: 76) who consume dramatic narratives ‘of illness and suffering leading to death’ (Hutcheon and Hutcheon, 1996, pp. 11–12). As if desirously living within a world of illness, the aristocracy have bartered away ‘their most substantial valuables in exchange for trinkets’. Unlike the ‘various uncultivated tribes’ of the empire who ‘commit such mistakes in the appreciation of things’, the aristocracy have traded their well-being in an effort to secure status, thereby making the fulfillment of their desires worse than those of ‘the grossest savages’ because, as a class, the aristocracy have never been ‘trained up to set future suffering against present enjoyment (which is the true criterion of present enjoyment)’ (1802, 2: 76–7). Beddoes’ observations on the aristocracy and aboriginal cultures reflect the interests of a physician who acts as if he were a medical anthropologist, itemizing and cataloguing various disordered and unhealthy subjects. Reaching back for the remainders of health glimpsed by a ‘natural history of man’s development from hunting to commerce’ (Rajan, 2003a, p.189), Beddoes inhabits the role of an Enlightenment anthropologist who can imagine himself back to 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


committed in frail barks to an uncertain sea, without chart to warn them in time of currents, shoals and rocks, and without skill in the manoeuvres, necessary to steer clear of so many perils. (1802, 2: 63)

the phantasmatic beginnings of human life. The primal Native forms for Beddoes a metaphorical figure for the pathological underdevelopment of the aristocracy. His account ‘permits the imagination to rouse, mobilize, and discard the colonial other at will’ (Melville, 2007, p. 48) while his rhetoric also disposes of the aristocracy in an analogously hallucinatory gesture. Indeed, Beddoes embarks on this voyage in order to discover the constitutional degeneracy of aristocracy – a deviance every bit as obviously present in the upper classes as it is in the inhabitants of the new world – as a means of further shoring up a bourgeois well-being that might yet, with his help, emerge as properly healthy. It should be added that all of this talk of exotic others is little more than a cover for Beddoes’ uncomfortable intuition that the bourgeoisie are looking more and more like the aristocracy every day. Yet, if his project of determining and restoring bourgeois health is going to be effective, the fact remains that he must distinguish what properly and ideally belongs to it and what does not. Shadowing this process of differentiation and drawing its energies from it is Beddoes’ attempt to define his own position as a medical practitioner. Indeed, the object of Beddoes’ critical gaze here may not be the aristocracy at all, but the scene of observation implied by all of this anthropological rhetoric. Beddoes sets out to reconstruct what Alan Bewell calls ‘the physical characteristics and social organization of the primitive world’ of these opera-goers, and then places ‘himself imaginatively in this world attempting to see it through the eyes of the first humans’ (1989, p. 41). Much of the work of this scene, in other words, involves Beddoes’ attempts to naturalize his own self-assured position within an anthropological discourse. This brings with it certain difficulties, however. As Bewell notes, recalling the work of Rousseau, among others, ‘the primitive encounter developed into an elaborate philosophical fiction’ in which the anthropologist was no longer secure in ‘his understanding of himself’ (1989, p. 73).6 Beddoes confidently asserts that both the Native and the opera-goer exhibit a mistaken appreciation of the value of trinkets. But these ‘things’ are also signs of things, the compelling significatory value of which Beddoes seems unable to grasp. This passage introduces the possibility of misperceiving the essence of health by misreading symptoms, and Beddoes marks as anthropological a problem that will structure much of his Hygëia. Can he be sure as a physician he is diagnosing disease accurately? Beddoes’ role as a doctor delivering a bourgeois health into Britain implies he is also somehow delivering himself into that same breach. That is, he attends to what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls ‘the great narratives 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




of cultural self-representation’ (1999, p. 7) as he poses in the role of an informant wondering about his own capacity to speak as a native of something called medicine. Beddoes had already signaled the importance of such questions in his introduction to John Brown’s Elements of Medicine. In this text, he outlines his interest in classifying the self – ‘as Linnaeus sometimes manages with genera’ – as part of the ‘orders of the medical tribe’ properly called ‘doctor of physic’ (Beddoes, 1795, p. cxvi). He invents identities such as the ‘philanthropic doctor’, the ‘bullying doctor’, the ‘bacchanalian doctor’, the ‘club-hunting doctor’, ‘the case-coining doctor’, and even the ‘good-sort-of-man’ who does not seem to be a doctor at all (1795, pp. cxvi–cxxv). In Hygëia, Beddoes continues this anthropology of medical practitioners, in a foray into the uncharted regions of medicine that underscores the impression he gives here of the decidedly uncertain position of the physician at the end of the eighteenth century. Indeed, his efforts to catalogue and police certain forms of doctoring as improper speak to a broader cultural anxiety that the professional medical practitioner he models does not exist. Even occupying the role of an anthropologist to a disordered body politic leads Beddoes into the position of a subject potentially pathologically fascinated with his own professional body. That is, his gestures of self-anatomy mirror those tendencies that were increasingly identified with the pursuit of health in a hypochondriacal society. As Beddoes and the nervous bourgeoisie begin to appear as repetitions of each other, Hygëia takes the shape of what Paul de Man calls ‘a text that pretends to designate a crisis when it is, in fact, itself the crisis to which it refers’ (1983, p. 7). Hygëia works to produce bourgeois well-being as an object of regulation, yet Beddoes’ anthropology is haunted by the possibility that he suffers from an inability to know the health of the bourgeoisie. At other moments, Beddoes is full of confidence in his abilities, so much so that he imagines medicine might not only reinforce class divisions but that it could even put certain classes in their place. Beddoes provides an irresistible example from his own practice in which he treated those among the landed gentry who were particularly anxious not to contract smallpox. Working in Bristol alongside Edward Jenner, who was then on the verge of developing his cowpox vaccine, Beddoes developed a ‘cowshed’ practice of placing his well-to-do patients in barns in an attempt to replicate the curious immunity from smallpox that many farm hands seemed to have (Stansfield, 1984, p. 218).7 Beddoes’ techniques were not nearly as successful as Jenner’s, but he pursued them nonetheless. If some of his patients found living in a barn 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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altogether too degrading, he offered the alternative of introducing cow manure into their homes. While his ‘cowshed’ method failed to prevent smallpox, it was at least the sort of treatment Beddoes thought the aristocracy were best suited to receive. Holding back the swinish multitude on the one hand and the rather bovine aristocracy on the other, then, Beddoes sought to articulate a medicine that would treat a narrow band of nervous illness among the bourgeois classes. By casting the aristocracy and working classes as radically and almost inhumanly other they cease to be bodies that might require treatment. They are either degenerate beyond assistance or insensibly robust. Consequently, Beddoes associates illness with the bourgeoisie alone. Through this redefinition and reduction of the sites of health, of which bodies could be transformed again into the bloom of health, Beddoes would seem to participate in a process in which, as Butler notes: it is not enough to claim that human subjects are constructed, for the construction of the human is a differential process that produces the more and the less ‘human,’ the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable. These excluded sites come to bound the ‘human’ as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and re-articulation. (1993, p. 8) Rephrasing the terms of this elaboration for my analysis here, Beddoes notes that health demarcates a zone of sick and sound bodies, outside of which there lies something so far from normative well-being that it cannot be admitted into bourgeois health. Beddoes provides a veneer of stability and coherence to categories of well-being that are as immaterial, anxious, and internally incoherent as the bourgeois health they sustain.

Healthy bodies What is this thing called health that Beddoes strives to restore to the middle classes? To ask this question is also to hint toward a necessary interrogation of Beddoes’ discussions of hypochondria later in Hygëia. The ontological frustrations he will encounter in these sections, as it becomes increasingly clear that health cannot be designated either finally or absolutely, are preceded by his delineation of particular cases of disordered individuals. Typical perhaps for a disciple of John Brown who was well versed in the Brunonian approach to nervous excitability 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




taught at Edinburgh, Beddoes understands sickness as an inverse or negative experience of health. Brown developed a notion of a barometer of health in which sickness formed a deficit or surplus of healthy stimulation. In Elements of Medicine, a text translated by Beddoes, Brown develops a theory that ‘health and disease are different manifestations of a single principle’ (Vickers, 1997, p. 65). Brown notes that degrees of stimulation are ‘the cause both of diseases and perfect health’ according to their relative moderation (health), excess (disease), or deficiency (disease) (Brown, 1795, p. 9). So while the cause of ill health could be an excess or deficiency of stimulation, the presence of health, whether sound or infirm, is more elusive. This system of medicine contends that well-being is a measure of the balance of stimulation and that health and illness are not absolutely different states but expressions of degrees of stimulation. This means neither state punctually exists except as a repudiation of the other, in an always incomplete attempt to cure themselves of the influence and return of the other at a point when the degree of stimulation experienced by an individual changes. Brown’s conception of well-being, then, is an appeal to ‘identical factors and processes when describing’ the causes of well-being and sickness that are somehow resolved into distinct expressions of corporeal health in the body (Krell, 1998, p. 48). For an age so invested in bodily well-being, a theory that had the potential to discover infirmity in the very same activity that might have guaranteed health – had it only been administered in greater or lesser quantity – must have been tremendously appealing. Indeed, by locating health and illness at the same juncture, Brown expressed in neurological terms a discovery that almost everything could lead to infirmity, as if to elaborate an understanding of health rooted the period’s hypochondria. If one of the effects of Brown’s theory was ‘to blur the distinction between health and illness’, as Krell asserts it was (1998, p. 48), it is not clear whether that was a desirable or unwelcome prospect for Beddoes. This understanding of health models a non-knowledge or irresolution about the absolute nature of health and sickness that contradicts the dramatically different lived experience of each. Almost ignoring that difference, the physiological presence of health and illness was strikingly similar in how it could so easily disappear into the other. Yet, this theory of well-being remains open to economizing its uncertainty in a way that is not necessarily disruptive of broader medical impulses to classify and rank the pathological. Beddoes addresses precisely these fuzzy distinctions between health and illness within the figure of the hypochondriac and transmutes the uncertainty at the core of a discussion of health 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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into the useable form of an other against which to mold healthy bodies. In this sense, hypochondria is not just expressive of a bourgeois population plagued by nervous disorders, it is also the malady par excellence by which to understand a concept of Romantic well-being that cannot securely and consistently separate illness from health. Not only is Beddoes’ attention to hypochondria an increasingly necessary analysis of his age then, but it also hints that his taxonomy of well-being may be open to more transgressions of the boundaries of health than it can effectively police, because it has as its condition of possibility that which makes any coherent and punctual health impossible. The notion of health that animates Hygëia is, then, disciplinary in orientation but is nonetheless capable of generating effects for which the text cannot account. Such unexpected results can come, however, from the most banal origins, as Beddoes shows in his account of the importance of domestic observation for medical perception. Beddoes was a firm believer in the professional expertise of physicians, and he considered the role of the patient to be to prevent rather than cure complaints. He cautioned readers to ‘examine well the authority’ of the medical manuals they consult for they should not be venerated like the Bible (1802, 2: 18). This obviously poses potential problems for the legitimacy of Beddoes’ own advice, and consequently he works to demonstrate that the authority the reader places in his prescriptions for health is merited. Recalling Brunonian excitability, Beddoes seems to say it is not medical manuals that are dangerous per se, but the degree and manner in which they stimulate the individual. Toward the end of his text, Beddoes explains he wrote Hygëia in the hopes of preventing the ‘perpetual spectacle of the fatal effects, arising from domestic errors in every part of the country, and the hopes of paving the way for more salutary practices’ (1802, 11: 92). Attempting to put a stop to the domestic administration of drugs, especially by women for their children, Beddoes argues that the authors of medical manuals ‘fix their affections upon papers, similar in size, shape and style, but which direct how to compound dishes instead of drugs’ (1802, 2: 38).8 With these comments Beddoes draws upon a growing nationalist sentiment in which the health of the nation was linked to questions of consumption in which ‘English cooking was usually defined in opposition to the more costly, elaborate, and time-consuming French culinary methods’ that had been promoted in the early half of the eighteenth century in Britain (Costello, 1999, p. 176). Dangerous medical-manual writers might easily switch, Beddoes suggests, into a similar industry constituted upon a similar relationship of author and reader in which 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




cookbooks sought to instruct the female reader ‘in managing the diets of her family’ (p. 175). His remark encodes a powerfully masculinist dismissal of the sort of care that was practiced by women in the bourgeois home. It is also a dismissal that may not be nearly as complete as he would like it to be here. Imagining he could replace medical manuals with cookbooks, Beddoes yearns to place his own text and its correcting advice within the homes of the bourgeoisie. That such crucial work in delineating bourgeois health occurs in the home is perhaps surprising given Beddoes’ attempts to embody the role of a physician for whom the most professionally ennobling place in which to practice medicine is the laboratory. Yet Beddoes remains drawn to these homes, colonizing them and reforming the natives within, and not just because competing medical manuals had sanctified the domestic sphere as a site in which to articulate innovative medical practices. Following his discussion of the proper recipes that medical manuals ought to supply to the home, the doctor finds himself discussing these very ‘dishes’ and the possibility that the wrong foods, or the wrong amounts of certain foods for particular people, could ‘operate to all intents and purposes, as perniciously as the rankest poison’ (1802, 2: 46).9 Perhaps regretting his hasty rejection of what is involved in compounding dishes, Beddoes notes that the home is a site of dangerous experiments. This pharmakon of the table marks the health risks posed by domestic life and the importance of tending to what goes on there. And while professionally administered therapies may be the treatment that Beddoes hopes will reduce the hazards facing the bourgeoisie within their homes, he preserves the illusion of privacy associated with the home by appointing domestic agents who are capable of carrying out assigned regimens and policing the health of those who dwell within. Discussing possible ways of mitigating or preventing epileptic seizures, for example, Beddoes suggests a form of domestic physiology that will assist the attending physician. He calls on wives to keep a keen eye on an epileptic husband, for it is so desirable to make an acquaintance with the human body and mind, a branch of household knowledge. The wish to be useful would confer the faculty of observing; and the attentive wife of an epileptic husband would be able to give his physician instruction, which he could derive from no other source, and to which the patient himself might add. Twenty journals drawn up by as many attentive and ingenious couples, would I believe, do more towards the art of procuring composed sleep, and consequently toward 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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Rather than committing the care of the people to the people, Beddoes imagines for a moment a much more disciplinary environment of maximal surveillance, even and especially if the authority of the physician is not present. Having already depicted dangerous practices of self-medicating and other failures by the middle classes to perform careful domestic management, Beddoes supplements these deficiencies of a domestic medical practice with his own work that incorporates and repudiates the very grounds of this failure. In Beddoes’ version of a healthy home, the wife will be a handmaiden to the professional physician rather than one who aggravates domestic worries. Affording women the role of informant, able to act for the doctor so long as they do not act as the doctor, Beddoes sees wives as the domestic prosthesis of the doctor’s gaze into the household. In other words, whereas domestic medical manuals could be turned to by a wife looking to treat a husband or child, or so Beddoes imagines, his text reverses this relationship by casting the wife in the role of a repository of useful information for the physician. What is curious about this is that Beddoes may miss out on gaining more insight from his domestic agents because of his own failure to appreciate what domestic medicine entails. Unbeknownst to Beddoes, the wives whom he deputizes as useful participants in the practice of medicine may also be gathering knowledge from his medicine that can be incorporated into an alternative discourse network of care and which forms the basis of therapies that regular medicine cannot or does not offer. Instead of recognizing the home as the site of an alternative knowledge that comes from women’s experience tending to the sick, Beddoes prioritizes the ostensible authority of manuals of domestic medicine. The distinction Beddoes makes here between the work of his text and discursive practices of domestic medicine depends upon his understanding of an emergent professional medicine that is not just philosophically different from the spirit of domestic medicine, but is privatized and placed under the control of the trained physician. Beddoes’ elaboration of well-being is premised upon the increasing skill and authority of ‘Romantic physicians ... to read the living human bodies in the hospital much as the anatomists of the decades just preceding had read the diseased corpse’ (De Almeida, 1991, p. 46). Significantly, Beddoes’ supple sense of the insufficiency of the doctor’s powers of observation belies later nineteenth-century notions of the physician’s panoptic, and 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


breaking the force of nervous complaints than a hundred volumes by physicians, who have no better opportunity of information than the ordinary course of practice affords. (1802, 9: 128)


perhaps more thoroughly masculinist, survey of the body politic, or what Foucault calls a ‘happy gaze’ turned toward an intelligible domain of visibility that stretched from individual bodies to social spaces, rooted in efforts to separate the healthy from the sick (1994, p. 105). What is perhaps most notable, then, about Beddoes’ demonstration of such a gaze is the way in which a discourse of visibility organizes the healthy bodies of the physician and wife on one side and the epileptic who forms the object of their inquiry on the other. Beddoes’ supplemented gaze points to the physician’s tireless commitment to read the living body and make it meaningful wherever it is. Yet it also, perplexingly, emphasizes the insufficiency of his powers of observation alone. As soon as he admits he does not see all, Beddoes opens the door to other troubling possibilities. If he requires the eyes of others at times, can he be sure that these others see enough? Are there disorders that might still remain unseen by even this extension of the physician’s surveillance over health? Beddoes’ fealty to the heterosexual imperative of the bourgeois private sphere precludes him from examining the myriad instances in which the doctor’s ‘domestic agent’ might not be available. His fellow physician John Reid, however, considered precisely this possibility in an account that unsettles this fantasy of visibility with another example of an epileptic husband. In his Essays, a text concerned with hypochondria and other nervous disorders that relies significantly on the etiologies offered by Hygëia, Reid pointedly imagines a wife made blind by ‘witnessing a violent paroxysm of epilepsy, with which her husband had been attacked the preceding night’ (1817, p. 90). Rewriting the outcome of Beddoes’ domestic scene, Reid wonders if there could be an infirmity that would not just resist diagnosis but actively arrest the powers of perception of those who might aid in treatment. The scene of diagnosis in Beddoes, as it is for Reid, is part of an extended effort to unfold therapeutic medicine and to delineate the forms it should take. But cached within this experimental practice of self-fashioning is the unspoken threat that Beddoes’ powers of perception might not be adequate to judge health, with or without supplementation.

Illegible writing and prescriptions for health Beddoes’ chapter on nervous disorders opens by announcing the sort of turn his text is about to make. He writes: Hitherto I have been principally occupied in considering the first stages of life. By resolute adherence to the simple practices inculcated 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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in the foregoing series of essays, we shall no longer see those members of society, who seem to have the fairest title to a happy and protracted existence, mowed down by whole ranks every year. The agents which slowly and silently loosen the ties, and open the seams, of the constitution, leaving it a wreck to the mercy of the elements, will be counteracted in their operation. (1802, 8: 4–5) Gone is the rhetoric of anxious differentiation, replaced by a sense of having secured for his bourgeois readers a knowledge that they are the ones who are fairly entitled to enjoy their health in happiness. Yet if health is to be secured it must also appear to be attained, Beddoes suggests, as he turns to examine a malady of imagined infirmity. He notes: The hypochondriac sufferer always finds language fail him, when he gives vent to his complaints. After vain and unsatisfactory efforts, his conclusion generally is – ‘In short, you see before you, the most miserable wretch upon the face of the earth.’ And in his secret thoughts and his confidential communications, he incessantly paces round the circle of his miseries, making only a brief pause at this heart-breaking summary. – He tells you he has heart-burn, dreadful flatulence, rising of a clear watery liquor in the morning. Then there are stretchings, tearings, and a heavy load in the region of the stomach under the short ribs, on both sides or only one. (1802, 8: 78) Drawing upon classical understandings of disorders of the hypochondrium or the area just below the rib cage, Beddoes diagnoses a form of somatic illness that begins with an individual’s desire to be sick. The hypochondriac cannot have done with being sick. But the hypochondriac may not be the only one suffering from an attachment to illness here. What does it mean for language to fail someone? Are these failures of the same order as Beddoes’ failure to model the physician he would like to be ‘when he gives vent to his complaints’ about medical manuals and other dubious sources of medical knowledge? Indeed, what distinguishes this essay from many of the previous essays in Hygëia is the reflexive attention Beddoes pays here to his own project. Beddoes’ deployment of hypochondria is complemented in this essay by a rhetoric emphasizing authorship and writing. His discussion of the malady turns upon the ways in which hypochondriasis may be a medicalization of practices of reading and writing marked by – but significantly not limited to – concerns with symptomology. He provides several 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




examples of particularly fraught relationships to writing instruments that are notable for the ways in which they exemplify problems of reading, writing, and language. While each of his case studies in hypochondria merits exploration on its own, I want to rapidly assemble a sense of what several of them seem to do and how they operate in order to underscore the way in which Beddoes establishes a rhetoric of pathological writing and reading. For if case studies conventionally structure interrelated material into a narrative form, or what Dominick LaCapra has called the process by which ‘case histories’ are generated out of ‘complex combinations of narrative and analysis’ (1987, p. 237), Hygëia composes such studies by weaving several putatively distinct plots together. Not only do the repetitive returns of certain key figures in several of these case studies potentially reduce each narrative to a detail that has been produced as salient, but such returns also make plain the influence Beddoes has in shaping the narrative of hypochondria he is composing. Beddoes writes of a hypochondriac for whom the ‘movement of a pen over rough furrowed writing paper has brought on an undescribable jarring, like a general tooth-edge, which seemed to pass to the bowels and proceed there with redoubled and excruciating violence’ (1802, 8: 77). Evoking indigestion, Beddoes nonetheless couches his description of hypochondria in terms that emphasize the difficulty of resolving exactly what is troubling this individual. What this hypochondria ultimately means, as both a real and an imaginary malady, for the text is part of a larger narrative sequence that begins with this brief example. Beddoes immediately turns to introduce ‘another [who] writes of himself – “I could not look at a large cypher, as a 6 or a 9 for example, without an internal shock, a shelf, on which only three or four books were standing, threw me into a qualm, and I could not feel easy till it was filled up”’ (1802, 8: 77–8). As if to test his reader’s own reactions, Beddoes experimentally reproduces these shocking ciphers but then in the latter part of his citation translates the numbers into presumably less alarming words. Beddoes continues to develop his narrative of the complaints of hypochondriacs, and he next inserts the striking history of a ‘religious patient’ who was terrified of doing himself harm: fearing what he might do with knives, he fed himself with his fingers; even time spent in the drawing room raised specters of the ways in which anything might become a knife. Surprised by the idea and suddenly terrified by the weapon he possessed, ‘I set to my throat, in idea, the pen I was holding’ (1802, 8: 81). That he should seize upon pens and writing as that which returns to preoccupy his hypochondriacs is itself a rather conspicuous detail in 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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a work attempting to produce in print an understanding of Romantic medicine and well-being. The physician, moreover, is not immune to this sort of anxiety, Beddoes notes: ‘the physician cannot believe but he has poisoned his most interesting patient by a slip of the pen, and, in every noise of the night, he hears a summons to the consequences of his oversight’ (1802, 8: 82). But if writing can be poison, it is only when it has been ingested that it becomes poisonous.10 If, from Beddoes’ perspective as an author of a text on the health of the overwhelmingly nervous middle classes, writing seems to be a particular trigger or fetishized object for hypochondriacs, he may be concerned that his text will do nothing more than create the hypochondriacs he intends to cure – just as the domestic medical manuals caused more injuries than they prevented. It would be difficult to underestimate just how imbricated the period’s epidemic of nervousness and forms of writing are. As the case of Beddoes attests thus far, hypochondria may be exacerbated by certain genres of writing, and may even be symptomatic of the disorder in the case of the patients he outlines, patients who are always on the verge of becoming rhetorical figures that implicate Beddoes in precisely this same form of uncertainty when it comes to ascertaining well-being. The distinction between health and illness is always blurred by hypochondriacs who are inclined toward self-diagnosis. He states: There is no error more common or more mischievous among dyspeptic, hypochondrical and hysterical invalids than to suppose themselves bilious. The bile! the bile! is the general watch-word among them; and they think they can never sufficiently work it off with aloes, magnesia, or salts ... After much retching, a little bile is squeezed up. This only shows they have a liver, and that this liver secretes bile, as it ought to do; though, not improbably, it secretes too little. But sometimes even without this occular proof, the idea of an excess of bile arises merely from those uneasy feelings in the abdomen that accompany indigestion. (1802, 8: 102–3) Lacking conclusive evidence of a perceived infidelity to health, as Beddoes’ reference to Othello suggests, the hypochondriac is nonetheless inclined to believe that sickness has arrived. In another sense, this hypochondriac models the failure to overcome dangerous and incorrect ideas that Beddoes hopes will not also afflict his readers when they must choose among the diverse ideas and regimens that make up a market of popular medical literature. What is troubling about the hypochondriac 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




is not that they suffer from imaginary disorders but that they decide upon and affirm a disorder too quickly and too compulsively. Beddoes is concerned that the hypochondriac annihilates the body’s resistance to knowledge, a resistance that ought more properly to be addressed by the physician. In addition to marking a zone of professional practice, what this insight calls for is the managed care of the alterity or the abject – as Julia Kristeva calls it – that is repudiated by the healthy body.11 Beddoes is beginning here to underscore the importance of preserving that which eludes sense, at least for some, in order to imagine and treat the healthy body. Just as the slip of the poisonous pen suggests a prescription for health that could kill, here the signs of well-being may be just as easily misinterpreted as a symptom of infirmity if the difficulty of resolving it into sense is not respected. This curious remainder of difference reappears in a passage that extends Beddoes’ metaphor of writing toward what, at first, appears to be a less fraught scene of knowledge production in which anatomy lays bare the invisible workings of the body. The dissecting knife – itself another sort of pen – is, Beddoes notes, a crucial tool with which to understand the state of health post-mortem: But it should be considered that the dissecting knife, though it be the instrument to which we owe our superiority over the ancients in deducing inward lesions from external signs and particular sensations, and which therefore can be considered as the glass that shews the state of the viscera through the otherwise opake walls of skin and flesh, can be by no means adequate to lay open all the effects of unhealthy processes. (1802, 10: 13) Opening up a few corpses might reveal a source of death or disease, but it will not finally reveal to the doctor’s eyes all the ‘effects of unhealthy processes’. There remains a life of disease, the traces of which cannot be brought to sight in the remains of the cadaver. Probing beneath the surface does not simply or unproblematically reveal what lies within the recesses of the material body. Typically, underlying diseases of mind or body would finally become symptomatic in the living body and, in essence, bleed through in the form of legible signs of illness. Foucault notes that late-eighteenth-century pathological anatomy produced medicalized modes of perception that are ‘haunted by that absolute eye that cadaverizes life and rediscovers in the corpse the frail, broken nervure of life’ (1994, p. 166). The suggestion of cadaverous life beautifully captures the vitality of a regime of visibility that applied 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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the lessons and lesions of morbid anatomy to a medical physiology of living disease. The exhumation and revitalization of medical perception that continued in the beginning of the nineteenth century sought to bring the invisible causes of disease into a ‘suzerainty of the visible’ within the living body (p. 166). Beddoes however recognizes that even in death – to say nothing of the trouble of working with live bodies who self-diagnose at every turn – not everything can be resolved into sight. This amounts to a significant challenge to a physiological medicine that tries to give ‘medical experience an opaque base beyond which it can no longer go. That which is not on the scale of the gaze falls outside the domain of possible knowledge’ (Foucault, 1994, p. 166). In what sense can hypochondria especially, which is visibly invisible, be resolved into knowledge? Beddoes’ attention to pathologies of hypochondria marks the stubborn presence of what Foucault calls ‘the great dark threat’ of that which cannot be seen, a persistent and troubling other to the physician’s ‘knowledge and skill’ (1994, p. 146). Although he might not fully acknowledge it, Beddoes argues that medical perception will always involve something it cannot reduce into an economy of visibility or invisibility and thus, to adapt part of Derrida’s important analysis of the gaze, Beddoes does not ‘believe that looking is sufficient’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 11).12 Beddoes discloses an interest in anatomy in these passages that is not, in other words, specifically limited to the regulatory assumptions that organize practices of dissection. He suggests, moreover, that at the core of a practice of medical diagnosis is an attachment to something that may not be present or visible as such. And perhaps visibility is a trap, as Beddoes’ bilious hypochondriacs showed when they could proclaim their infirmity with or without the aid of visual evidence, however misinterpreted. Beddoes contends that even when hypochondria was itself obviously visible, effecting a cure remained particularly vexing. Those who tend to such disordered individuals, whether they are friends or a physician, would by ‘their most kindly intended offices’, provoke an ‘eruption of ill humour’ in the ever-wary hypochondriac (1802, 8: 85). Offering advice to such care-givers, Beddoes notes, ‘should they entertain the senseless vulgar notion, that hypochondriasis is not a real, but an imaginary disease, they will infallibly aggravate it, and draw down upon themselves all the consequences of the aggravation’ (1802, 8: 85; emphasis in original). While Beddoes reminds his readers that hypochondria is a real disease that produces illusions of infirmity, his advice here also underlines the social character of a malady that cannot be understood solely as an absolutely individual event. Adding that the hypochondriac inevitably 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




turns against ‘the physician and his advice’ if such interactions are recalled by the hypochondriac ‘in some unlucky moments of painful sensation’ (1802, 8: 88), Beddoes emphasizes the social interactions that structure a sufferer’s experience of hypochondria. Before long, medical care and the physician share the common lot of every object that occurs to thought and sense. Though lately sought with ardour, they are soon regarded with indifference, and at last, with aversion. Hence we see hypochondriacs running from one medical counsellor to another, till perpetual disappointment and progressive loss of spirits end in universal distrust of others, and complete despair as to themselves. (1802, 8: 88) Speaking about those patients who fail to heed his advice and are always running to another physician for further advice, Beddoes classifies the hypochondriac according to his or her behaviors and attachments. Hypochondria can frequently refer to a failure of will that results in ‘extremes of involuntary fixation or distraction’ manageable only by profound ‘voluntary efforts of abstraction and attention’ (Shell, 1996, p. 284). Yet hypochondriacs are also profoundly strong-willed, as Beddoes contends. They are characterized by an ‘abjection of self’ of the sort Julia Kristeva associates with originary loss that shapes the individual and which, Beddoes notes, leads to an aversion to others (Kristeva, 1982, p. 5). This proto-psychoanalysis of the hypochondriac marks the disordered individual as someone who fails to perceive the illness from which he or she is suffering. In another sense, the hypochondriac Beddoes produces here is akin to Wordsworth’s blind beggar from The Prelude. That is to say, the figure of the hypochondriac is an uncanny double of the physician who fails to diagnose a profound uncertainty in his own abilities to see and to say. The problem that Beddoes attributes to hypochondriacs, a problem which perhaps belongs to him as well, is that they cannot see in themselves a disease that might otherwise be diagnosed with little trepidation. But this can be taken further. The anxious Dr Beddoes is not simply a reflection of this patient but a curious repetition of hypochondriacs’ inability to see themselves seeing. Phrased more positively, the work of medical perception, as Beddoes imagines it, has hypochondriacal tendencies in the sense that hypochondria is, at least in part, an immanent theorization of the work of seeing and saying.13 It might now be possible to say that hypochondria is not simply antithetical to health. The resistance to punctual determinations 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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of well-being posed by hypochondria – a resistance which includes within itself the resistance of medical perception to analyzing what it cannot see – supplements Beddoes’ notion of hygiene in which such negativity is redeployed as the basis for an ideal of health. To put this another way, the text imagines a lively body, physiologically coherent in a gestural field of partial disavowals of itself. The hypochondriac engages in ongoing refusals to have a health that might be understood as well or ill. Indicative of the simultaneous residence of health and illness in the body, hypochondria is a dis-ease in attributions of wellbeing that the healthy body must always reject. The malady represents the indeterminacy always threatening health, but also the inability of health to have done with hypochondria. As Beddoes notes, ‘most hypochondriacs are men who have led irregular lives. Their unhappy habits are too apt to overpower the strongest resolutions of which an enfeebled mind is capable. This is precisely the greatest difficulty in the way of a cure’ (1802, 8: 107). This ‘stubborn attachment’ (Butler, 1997, p. 57) to a pathology of longing and desirous attention to body’s potential for disorder dramatically expresses a mode of health that resists being resolved into presence. Hygëia asks that we reconsider the critical emphasis so often afforded the medical gaze in and for itself. If the gaze matters, it is because it is the gaze of something not just an expression of disciplinary knowledge. Yet medical perception will always be confronted by the infinitesimal recesses of the body, recesses which, after all, will always grow ever smaller and inaccessible even and especially as technologies of medical perception improve. This means, then, that in order to gaze upon something, medical perception must rigorously repudiate the possibility of not seeing or not being able to reduce what is there to an order of visibility. This also means rethinking the visible as such. For Beddoes, in an age when science was arguably less prominent and indeed less visible than so many other competing forms of irrationality, what was most apparent to Romantic culture was not medical rationalism but hypochondria and a faith in things unseen. Beddoes confirms this in his consideration of the possibility of not knowing the body and by theorizing the healthy body in terms of its myriad abjects – including hypochondriacs, epileptics, and domestic practitioners – rather than stress its positive presence. He does not propose an ontological dissection of health but a Romantic anthropathology of the others of bourgeois health. At once deeply attached to the social workings of a regulatory ideal of well-being, Beddoes’ text also has within itself the possibility of disavowing the punctual coherence of health itself. Indeed, it has 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




this radical hypochondria as the very basis of the Romantic health it produces as an object of regulation. Like so many of his peers, both among regular physicians and among the authors of medical manuals, Beddoes is involved in practices of articulating and policing abject forms of health, marking differences in class as natural differences in well-being and even striving to make certain modes of being healthy disappear as almost unthinkable. Perhaps because he cannot contain the troubling interruptions in a knowledge of the healthy body associated with hypochondria, or because he glimpses the possibility of a medical practice that is not defined absolutely by regulatory aims and ideals, Beddoes also assiduously examines, as invisible, what he cannot know within something called health. At his Institute, Beddoes literalizes a spirit of scientific experimentation as he conducts pneumatological experiments into invisible gases. Fascinated by medical research that has since been disavowed by a confident and determined medical gaze, Beddoes offers a remarkable articulation of a mode of abject perception tied to strategies of visuality but also invested in that which cannot be brought to sight. Beddoes’ earlier claims about a bourgeois health differentiated from its class others contain another assertion that ‘a sense for health’ (1802, 1: 84) is bordered by an ultimately inconceivable form of well-being that forms what Kristeva described – in a passage Butler would later reproduce in spirit – as a space ‘beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 1). While this zone is almost always utterly abject, Beddoes’ notion of an ideal health unexpectedly preserves and values the possibility of something beyond the thinkable for medical perception. What is so compelling in Beddoes’ medical intervention into discourses of hygiene and well-being is that this mode of comprehension is rigorously uncertain. He imagines a medicine in which there will always be a remainder that cannot be apprehended, something of which medical perception cannot take hold. He cannot escape Brown’s suggestion that the conceptual ground of well-being might involve the co-mingling of health and illness. This suggests further, then, that normative notions of health need to be examined for the ways in which they are structured by a longing for something that does not exist. This sense of longing finds expression in part within Beddoes’ anxious attempts at self-fashioning, to be sure, but it is also crucially disclosed within his idealization of health for the bourgeoisie. Beddoes reinscribes the corporeal borders of the body, specifically as medically insufficient to reveal the causes of disease in their finality when he wields the dissecting knife with which he writes Hygëia. 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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Thought medically, this implies a turn toward reiterative, ongoing, living gestures that produce the body as an expression of regulation and away from a punctual ontological determination of well-being or disease characteristic of a morbid anatomy. But as the expression of a physiology or anatomy of the living body composed in print, Beddoes also transforms what composition means in this context. Carving the healthy body with both pen and knife, he implicates writing and physiology in a shared practice of imagining what cannot be seen. Beddoes does not give a name to this rather unconventional mode of medical perception that informs his work. But traces of what might be called his investment in a pneumatology, or the study of those elements that are not available to sight and which function alongside a regime of visibility, dwell within his attempts to articulate a professional experimental medicine. First conceived in the ‘high spirits’ and heady environment of his experiments into gas at his Pneumatic Institute (1799, p. 15), Beddoes’ abject medical perception is structured in part by an incomplete disavowal of its own inability to adequately record what it cannot experience. Beddoes may not have become the physician his father-in-law had hoped he would. Instead, he seems to have turned his radicalism toward medical practice in a way that seems all the more radical now for its attention to things unseen. In addition to constituting and acknowledging a remainder that haunts visibility, this curious expression of medical perception is also a compensatory discourse that marks a longing for the abject in and of itself that can never be grasped except as loss. And such a longing for health, for the ungraspable in sickness and health, cannot be reduced to a banality of the sort Beddoes offers when he reminds his readers ‘no one knows the value of health till it is lost’ (1802, 1: 83). What does it mean to write of the loss of health, if it comes into being at the moment of its loss, as the moment of loss? Such a health is not something and nor is it nothing. It might be fundamentally pneumatological, as if occupying a spectral realm of relationality which forms, as Derrida notes, a possibility for something yet to come, a sense of ‘awaiting without the horizon of the wait’ (1994, p. 65). In part anxious to ward off such an ethereal pneumatology, Hygëia continues to prescribe a reckless confidence in the physician’s ability to regulate health that is as much a reassuring palliative for Beddoes as it was the beginning of a regime of treatment for the middling classes. His text becomes a mode of compensating for the hopelessly irretrievable nature of health it cannot entirely disavow. Persistently associating hypochondria with acts of writing, moreover, Beddoes finds each symptomatic of the other, implying 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




a sense of well-being that is fundamentally attached to mediation even as it provides the rhetorical form for a crisis in medical perception. This hypochondria – and it is not the only version of the disease that circulates in the Romantic period – is the abject other to a normalizing taxonomy of health and illness. Conceiving a bourgeois health in Hygëia, Beddoes imagines he will overcome the nervousness that plagues his age by advocating a greater regulation of health. His measures are troubled by the still-developing professional medical practices that would implement such regimes and by a problem of definition that is more than simply rhetorical. So while Romantic medicine may have embodied what Paul Youngquist has called ‘a moral economy of health’ (2003, p. xxiii) that regulated bodies, well-being was itself powerfully haunted by hypochondria and the difficulties of knowing the body that this malady spread infectiously. Part of the reason why hypochondria is so difficult to define, is because it is an expression not of an individual’s failure to know his or her own state of health, but because it designates the physician’s inability to do so as well. And in Beddoes we find a radical expression of how such a diagnosis of hypochondria might be applied: his Hygëia prefigures for modern medicine the loss of a comprehension of loss always within something called health.



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Body Dysmorphic Disorder: The Self-Anatomy of Coleridge’s Aesthetics

Coleridge’s medical complaints were numerous and severe. Chronic aches, uneasiness, disordered bowels, a pain in the gut. He diagnosed in himself gout, depression, and rheumatic fever. Yet far from simply disabling, his various disorders quickened his sustained theorization of ‘his own diseased body’ in his letters, notebooks, lyric poetry, and essays, as Jennifer Ford has argued (1998, p. 3). That such incessant interpretations of his ill health could bespeak hypochondria, moreover, is the point George Rousseau and David Haycock make in a recent study of ‘the decades of [Coleridge’s] concern for his ailments’ (2003, p. 254). Yet even to diagnose Coleridge’s hypochondria as Rousseau and Haycock do leaves much work to be done. To suggest that Coleridge is ‘pre-eminently hypochondriacal’ (p. 232) in an era obsessed with health-consciousness risks obscuring the ways in which his ongoing attempts to dissect and ascertain his own health represent more than a preoccupation with illness, if such a compulsive and pervasive fascination with sickness is itself readily legible. His biographer Richard Holmes refers to his ‘hypochondriac delights’ to describe Coleridge’s focused relationship with disease (1989, p. 303). Despite frequent and sometimes rapid recoveries from serious illness, Coleridge nonetheless cultivated an understanding of a ‘body diseased and fevered by my imagination’ (CL I, p. 348). In part the product of Coleridge’s ‘nights of self-analysis’ (Holmes, 1989, p. 302), hypochondria describes his relationship to a fugitive body, the contours of which he never tired of tracing and retracing.1 In this chapter I will suggest that his enduring concern for his own well-being is not simply a disease he did or did not have – even if that could somehow be determined conclusively with all the posthumous medical and psychological tests it would surely require. Rather, it is a malady of interpretation that shapes his ongoing fascination with his own unhealthy body and poses 57



2


questions as to the legibility of the body he inhabits and which endlessly surprises him with new disorders. Begun perhaps like a skeletal sketch of a self-portrait – or an effort to understand and represent himself to himself and others – Coleridge outlines and theorizes Romantic hypochondria within numerous fragmented reflections which include his letters, lyric poetry, and aesthetic criticism. Indeed in the case of the latter, Coleridge examines works of art but reads in them reflections of his own hypochondria as he traces how Romantic discourses of well-being and aesthetics overlap to produce a naturally intelligible body. Coleridge’s Principles of Genial Criticism (1814) relies on the figurative power of language to represent aesthetic matters in the form of an individual’s embodied proclivity toward good taste and shows the extent to which reflections on health will always be mediated, in part, by language and its presumptions, even the untranslatable experience of pain that comes to be represented as an absence of language. To say that aesthetics is ‘a discourse born of the body’ (Eagleton, 1990, p. 13) is to begin to address how the body comes to inhabit philosophy.2 For if Coleridge’s elaboration of an aesthetic doctrine in Principles relies in part upon the carefully calibrated figure of the immediate and sensual proclivity of the healthy tongue to taste as the means with which to naturalize aesthetic judgment as a universally available faculty, such philosophizing also takes the body out of itself and reconstructs it in language. In Principles, the body’s naturalness is both compromised and conserved through a complicated desire to fashion it as suitably unsuitable for the task of making legible the workings of aesthetic judgment. Locating the primary trope for the subject’s natural judgment in the form of a healthy body capable of taste, Coleridge becomes concerned in Principles with how well a body can taste. His insight into how well or ill a body might apprehend the world quickly transforms, moreover, into a specifically hypochondriacal anxiety as to whether or not the sensory perceptions of the body are sufficiently legible and trustworthy to naturalize judgments of taste. Amid what seems so plainly to be about the appreciation of art, Coleridge develops a figure of the hypochondriacal body that links together many of his disparate theorizations of the malady into an innovative understanding of the ways in which well-being is sustained by the energies of hypochondria.

Critical hypochondria In the years after the 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge increasingly identified himself as infirm and complained that his health 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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prevented him from producing more artistically. He was dispirited by recurring ‘sickness and some other and worse afflictions’ (CL II, p. 814), a state of mental and physical deterioration perhaps exacerbated or caused by the painful recognition of ‘Wordsworth’s superior genius and superior powers of execution’ in matters of poetic expression (Parrish, 1988, p. 7). Martin Wallen has recently suggested that Coleridge’s declarations of infirmity are part of a larger project in which he fashioned the persona of a productive self inhibited by illness during the years in which he revised ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (2004, p. 52). The poet’s ‘understanding of himself as a diseased man’ (Wallen, 2004, p. 54) leads him to diagnose his own ills repeatedly as well as counsel treatments for those around him.3 Wallen argues that Coleridge’s ongoing fascination with his infirmities is often couched in a rhetoric informed by medical accounts of scrofula, or a form of lymphatic tuberculosis. This ‘manipulable rhetoric’ of scrofula in particular provides Coleridge ‘with an overarching diagnosis that explains a host of problems’, most centrally ‘why he has not accomplished more than he has’ (p. 52).4 A rhetoric of scrofula fixes Coleridge’s creative inertia in a downturn of the body. But if these attempts at apparent self-diagnosis generate a composite portrait of Coleridge as ‘his disease – a false or stifled version of himself’ (p. 59), they also need to be read sensitively for the ways in which they make claims to punctual self-knowledge which are contradicted by Coleridge’s unending hypochondriacal speculations into the contours of his ill health. Indeed, as Neil Vickers has noted regarding the depth and range of Coleridge’s medical interests – interests that he locates particularly in Coleridge’s friendship with Thomas Beddoes as well as his lively understanding of medical works by Erasmus Darwin, who was the physician to his friend and co-patron Tom Wedgwood – his ‘descent into ill health’ is also an occasion to consider and test medical and scientific ideas of the body and mind in a manner that significantly contributed to his development of ‘philosophic and aesthetic ideas’ (Vickers, 2004, p. 3). Whether Coleridge’s putative ill health led him to become a less productive poet or if his inclinations toward metaphysics somehow poisoned his imagination, this narrative of Coleridge at the turn of the nineteenth century reinforces normative associations of illness with a disabling non-productivity. Eric Wilson argues against this notion, however, to suggest that the melancholia the poet experiences during these ‘later nights as a sickly philosopher’ is also a curious gift that gives him an ‘extreme sensitivity’ in intellectual matters which enables him to perceive ‘the virtues and limitations of both sides of life’s grand 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


The Self-Anatomy of Coleridge’s Aesthetics 59


antagonisms … avoided by a majority hungry for univocal order’ (2004, pp. 33, 86, xiii). Coleridge’s sickness is not disabling. Rather, it grants him a ‘keener vision’ and, Wilson suggests, the ability to map poetically ‘the gaps and dreads of a world forever melancholy’ (pp. 46, 33). While I share Wilson’s interest in the inadequacies of a normalizing narrative of Coleridge’s life that links sickness with non-productivity, I contend that if his ‘sadness inspires acute observations’ (p. 86), Coleridge is also plagued by uncertainty and failures of perception which he recognized in the experience of hypochondria. Reading widely of Romantic medical works, he developed and embodied an understanding of nervous disease in these years that points toward a productive and innovative theorization of what it means to feel and to know oneself to be sick or healthy. Sara Coleridge certainly saw this in her father, and she wrote in a note to Biographia Epistolaris, ‘nervous derangement is a dear price to pay even for genius and sensibility. Too often, even if not the direct effect of these privileges, it is the accompanying drawback; hypochondria may almost be called the intellectual man’s malady’ (BE, p. 134). More than just a recounting of the complexity of living with hypochondria, Coleridge’s scattered considerations of the malady exemplify a way of thinking and writing about illness that is irreducible to a norm of pathology. In an 1804 letter to Sir George Beaumont, Coleridge admits ‘I am better than I was. My Spirits are low: and I suffer too often sinkings and misgivings, alienations from the Spirit of Hope, strange withdrawings out of the Life that manifest itself by existence – morbid yearnings condemn’d by me, almost despis’d, and yet perhaps at times almost cherish’d’ (CL II, p. 1122). Similarly, he complained to John Rickman in March of the same year he was becoming ‘literally sick of thinking, talking, & writing about my own miserable carcass’ (CL II, p. 1105). Closely attending to his ill health, cherishing and condemning it, Coleridge feels sick at the prospect of even imagining illness. And yet he could not have done with illness. Even as his preoccupation with health provides Coleridge a language with which to represent himself to himself, this rhetoric voraciously reinscribes sickness. So much so, as this letter indicates, that attempts to reject hypochondria only further indicate the firm grasp of the malady. In isolation, these brief notes might indicate little more than the abiding grip of hypochondria. It is important to resist that interpretation because it would distort Coleridge’s experience of infirmity as narrowly personal and ignore all of the attachments that come with a desirous relation to well-being. Coleridge’s comments focus on his own unsoundness here, but they are part of a broader interest 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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in thinking and talking about health that characterizes this period of his life and which marked an age that witnessed new diseases and significant new medical technologies. Coleridge was a keen consumer of medical knowledge who, in addition to reading a range of medical texts, had also taken part in Davy’s ground-breaking experiments into nitrous oxide at Beddoes’ Pneumatic Institute, which he would later note gave him ‘more unmingled pleasure than I had ever before experienced’ (SW, p. 104). Participation in medical research yielded great pleasure, as did its salutary discoveries. Coleridge praised the valuable medical advances of Edward Jenner whose development of vaccination was, in his words, ‘inspired into you by the All-preserver, as a counterpoise to the crushing weight of this unexampled war’ (CL VI, p. 1025). In addition to being personally interested in medical culture and its triumphs, Coleridge exemplifies the ways in which infirmity forms a reality that was as ever-present as war in the Romantic period. Writing in 1795 at a much earlier moment in the war with France, Coleridge contended exactly this, as he wrote that the life-robbing effects of infirmity were every bit as destructive and ever-present as the horrors of the battlefield. Issuing a critique against British imperialism in the course of his lecture ‘On the Present War’, he noted the nation faced a ‘loathsome pestilence that has mocked our Victories in the West Indies’ (Lectures 1795, p. 59). As a citizen of the port city of Bristol, Coleridge would have regularly seen the return of invalids from the colonies, and in his ‘Lecture on the Slave-Trade’ (1795) he made special mention of the ravages of new fevers and tropical disease upon those who spearheaded Britain’s activities in the West Indies: From the Brutality of their Captain and the unwholesomeness of the Climate through which they pass, it has been calculated that every Slave Vessel from the Port of Bristol loses on an average almost a fourth of the whole Crew – and so far is this Trade from being a nursery for Seamen, that the Survivors are rather shadows in their appearance than men and frequently perish in Hospitals after the completion of the Voyage – many die in consequence of the excesses, with which [they indulge] themselves on Shore as compensations for the intolerable severities they undergo. In Jamaica many rather than re-embark for the[ir] native Country beg from door to door, and many are seen in the streets dying daily in an ulcerated state – and they who return home, are generally incapacitated for future service by a complication of Disorder[s] contracted from the very nature of the Voyage. (Lectures 1795, pp. 238–9) 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




There is a rich history to the intersection of imperialism and notions of well-being that is of great significance for the subject of hypochondria and its relationship to mercantile wealth in the Romantic age, and it is one that I will examine in Chapters 3 and 5, with particular attention to the elision of the health of slaves that this passage accomplishes so quietly and effectively. What is particularly pressing in this context is the manner in which Coleridge tries to make sense of those diseases new and old, physical and mental, which were proliferating to a terrifying extent and which had the power to incapacitate those affected. As Bewell has noted, this is a pointedly political account of tropical disease that marks the period’s sudden understanding of ‘a global disease pool’ in which Britain’s participation in the slave trade had led to ‘an increasing number of people who suffered from tropical diseases in England itself’ (1999, p. 128). Coleridge might have seen more of these men who had been reduced to shadows of themselves in Bristol than might have been seen elsewhere in England, but his awareness and attention to what must have felt like an overwhelming vulnerability to new diseases and disorders was simply not unique in the period. Whether it was new fevers, the influenza outbreaks of the 1770s, or the cholera pandemic arriving from the East by the 1820s, health was a pressing concern because disease placed it constantly and spectacularly under threat, and in a manner that was most troubling: disease had proven it could strike without warning, and the rudimentary state of Romantic medicine meant that its physical and psychological effects could incapacitate the sufferer or linger for an unspecified length of time, if one was lucky enough to survive the onset of serious disease at all. Health could not be taken for granted during Coleridge’s lifetime. It wasn’t just tropical diseases that made this the case, though the experience of them might have made them the most striking representation of the fragility of well-being in the period. When Bewell cites this passage, he omits Coleridge’s attention to the sailors’ dissipation in the West Indies which comes as a consequence of the traumatic experience of participating in the dehumanizing work of the transatlantic slave trade. The effect of this elision is to make it seem as if it is only physical and not mental disorders that are a part of domestic concerns with disease, assuming for a moment that such a coarse distinction could be viable. For Coleridge, possibly more than many other Romantic writer, mental diseases – and nervous disorders in particular – are an irrepressible presence and must be understood to be a significant part of the era’s remarkable attention to infirmity. The fascination with sickness that Coleridge would exemplify in numerous writings across his lifetime, but perhaps most pointed 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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after 1800, is, then, not exactly remarkable. Coleridge may have witnessed more of the deleterious effects of global commerce upon British health living in Bristol, but his awareness of the vulnerability of the body to infirmity was not a unique insight. Health was indeed under significant threat by new and seemingly more virulent illnesses. As someone who traveled in medical circles, Coleridge would have seen, much like John Keats did, ‘the human suffering, disability, fear, and sometimes death that accompany diseases and accidents’ (Goellnicht, 1984, p. 20). Moreover, his attention to questions of well-being – questions that will begin in the 1790s and continue throughout his career – places the healthy body at the center of a number of philosophical and political concerns. Growing out of scenes of infirmity that reminded him he lived in an age when death was almost casual, Coleridge’s focused attention to matters of health and illness does not take the form of an introspective and worrying end in itself. His intemperate meditations upon health embody a particular form of hypochondriacal fascination with sickness that constitutes, I want to suggest, a way of living with such ever-shifting states of well-being. Such a hypochondria is not reducible to a form of illness, though it will always border upon a pathology of purely imagined illness, in which, really, what is the matter is not physical but in the individual’s social and psychic landscape. D. A. Miller describes the malady in a contemporary language of psychology as ‘a response to what without exaggeration may be called the tyranny of the social: for the social order imagined by hypochondria (in its unconscious, as it were) is so intractably oppressive that resistance can only take the form of an equally total and nonnegotiable negation’ (1990, p. 66). It is tempting to affirm that Coleridge’s ‘own selffashioning as a hypochondriac (despite his protestations), his incessant ailments, his constant, endless references to his own poor health … all combine to suggest an authentic case [of hypochondria] in its modern sense’ (Rousseau and Haycock, 2003, p. 234) as Miller defines it here, a diagnosis that marks hypochondria as a symptom of a broad dissatisfaction with his own life and work. Miller suggests that hypochondria is a psychic defense mechanism that takes the form of an assertive malaise, but Coleridge’s hypochondria also attests to another more markedly Romantic genealogy of the malady that begins in the body’s sensitivity and ends, I will contend, by laying the foundation for a conception of the body that is beset by the lively power of disease to wreck destruction upon bodies in ways that reveal health to be at best a momentary and not a lasting state of the body. If there is a psychology to such a body, it lies in the ways in which embodied life is structured by expectations of soundness that may be impossible to fulfill. 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




There were times when hypochondria could seem at least partially satisfying for Coleridge. The rise in nervous complaints and preoccupations with well-being at the end of the eighteenth century helped to produce an idealization of the ‘ill, langorous, hypersensitive body’ that ‘quickly became a principal characteristic of the Romantic sensibility’ (Rousseau and Haycock, 2003, p. 233). In a letter from 1802, Coleridge notes, ‘Virtue & Genius are Diseases of Hypochondriacal and Scrofulous Genus – & exist in a peculiar state of the Nerves, & diseased digestion – analogous to the beautiful Diseases that colour and variegate certain Trees. – However, I add by way of comfort, that the Virtue & Genius produce the Disease’ (CL II, p. 902). Strange comfort, but a comfort Coleridge experienced as richly as anyone in the period. As Charles Brockden Brown showed in Arthur Mervyn, in a scene I investigate in the next chapter, the body’s sensitivity to stimulation is a figure for both the cult of sensibility – the power of the individual who can feel deeply and transmit those impressions to others – and the paranoia that surrounded notions of sensibility and its potentially communicable threats of feminization and irrationality. In cases of the latter, hypochondria deteriorated into a devastating paranoia of the subject who knows the self in and through the vagaries of an all too meaningful body. While Coleridge affirms hypochondria here as a mark of genius, its affirming influence does not mitigate its troubling effects for judgment and reason. Sufferers of hypochondria lived a resistance to the body’s ability to know itself and to distinguish essential from surplus sensation. Hypochondria in this mode is always on the verge of becoming a bodily counter-discourse to the assumption that ‘even a strong ideological use of the body grants the body’s autonomy, its authority never to be wrong about its own responses: this is why, when the body can be made to second the motions of ideology … its support is so powerful’ (Miller, 1990, p. 59; emphasis in original). The malady showed that perceptions could not always be trusted, at least this is what Coleridge implied when he imagined a hypochondriac cursed with a profoundly fragile body in an 1812 essay on ‘The Soul and its Organs of Sense’ that he contributed to Southey’s Omniana. Borrowing a figure of imagined infirmity from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1638), and perhaps also Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Coleridge writes of a spectacular figure ‘out of his senses’, a ‘hypochondrist, to whom his limbs appear to be of glass’ (SW, p. 334; emphasis in original). The idiosyncratic perceptions of the hypochondriac produce, Coleridge states, a body that appears to be made of glass. Such a peculiar and irresistible life this might have seemed to Coleridge, living in a glass body in an era in which the anatomical gaze furnished Romantic medicine with a growing 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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understanding of what occurred beneath the surface of the skin. Yet he knew well that even a maximally visible body, a fully anatomized body, may not be enough to verify the absolute presence or absence of disease necessary for an estimation of well-being. By writing of a being out of his senses Coleridge withholds a determination of the hypochondriac’s mental and physical health or illness, stressing instead the disordered perceptions that summon misjudgments of the substance of the body.5 Rather than reducing it to a figure of illness or insanity, and hence a figure that would confirm the intelligibility of the body, Coleridge represents hypochondria as a disorder affecting the subject’s understanding of the body. Here and elsewhere, a rhetoric of hypochondria affords Coleridge the means with which to query the terms and assumptions of the epistemological crisis that attended having a health. His hypochondria is not an expression of pathological ill health, but forms instead an embodied critical engagement with the necessity of being sick or healthy. In many ways, such a critical perspective mirrored an everyday experience of disease in Britain because of the limitations of medical science to authoritatively diagnose and treat disorders and the corresponding rise in manuals of self-care which enabled the individual to produce the certainty – or uncertainty in the case of hypochondriacs like Coleridge – of a diagnosis at home. Coleridge himself consulted the frequently reprinted Domestic Medicine, written by the physician and self-help advocate William Buchan. In the previous chapter, I argued that Coleridge’s acquaintance Thomas Beddoes had feared this source of medical advice put too much power into the hands of a layperson, but the fact that Coleridge consulted Domestic Medicine while he could have easily contacted physicians he knew well such as Beddoes, or John King, or the surgeon J. H. Green gives a sense of the everyday practices of accessing medical advice in the period that was not necessarily a rejection of the authority of practitioners but a recognition that one source of advice was perceived to be as viable as another. Buchan had been a supporter of the revolutions in the United States and France, and was an Edinburgheducated reformer who sought to revolutionize medicine in Britain by making medical advice accessible to a reading public. Making such advice available, however, was for some also making it potentially too available to a health-obsessed Romantic culture. The 700 pages of description of various illnesses and their etiologies that constitute Domestic Medicine were, in Roy Porter’s description of this vexed scene of medical consumerism, potentially ‘manna to the hypochondriac’ (1989, p. 202), inducing self-diagnosis and dangerous therapies. If Coleridge consulted Domestic Medicine in an effort to treat his own nervous disorders, what 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




he encountered there gave him little hope for a cure. In a notebook entry from September 1815, Coleridge charges Buchan with neglecting the significance of hypochondria, noting the uselessness of ‘Buchan’s prescription for hypochondriacal patients – keep yourselves in even and chearful spirits’ (Notebooks III, 4268). It is difficult not to imagine Coleridge found such advice personally insulting, so little did it attempt to understand his concerns with health. For Buchan and similar-minded advocates of self-administered medicine, hypochondria designates a form of diagnostic uncertainty upon which their flourishing trade in medical manuals relied, even as they disavowed such problems of interpretation.6 ‘Physicians’, he notes, ‘are not more at a loss to account for the symptoms of these disorders than to prescribe medicines for removing them’ and he ‘would have treated [hypochondriacal affections] at greater length, but for this reason, that they are diseases which nobody chooses to own; and indeed it would be better if their names were never mentioned’ (Buchan, 1985, p. 561).7 Coleridge’s displeasure at Buchan’s dismissive pathology of hypochondria predates another similar remark on the malady from Biographia Literaria (1817), a comment which arises as Coleridge prepares his readers for a discussion of the imagination and aesthetics. While these subjects will be demanding, he intones, the interpretive difficulties they pose will become literally monstrous should the reader attempt to apprehend the argument too quickly. Coleridge asks his readers to either pass over the following chapter altogether, or read the whole connectedly. The fairest part of the most beautiful body will appear deformed and monstrous, if dissevered from its place in the organic Whole. Nay, on delicate subjects, where a seemingly trifling difference of more or less may constitute a difference in kind, even a faithful display of the main and supporting ideas if they are at once cloathed and modified, may perchance present a skeleton indeed; but a skeleton to alarm and deter. Though I might find numerous precedents, I shall not desire the reader to strip his mind of all prejudices, or to keep all prior systems out of view during his examination of the present. For in truth, such requests appear to me not much unlike the advice given to hypochondriacal patients in Dr Buchan’s domestic medicine; videlicet, to preserve themselves uniformly tranquil and in good spirits. (BL, p. 234; emphasis in original) Coleridge realizes he is making an impossible request of his readers and he acknowledges the work to come will always be determined to 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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a certain extent by his readers’ prior knowledge of similar systems of thought. Thus, approaching his next chapter without any prejudice would be like asking a hypochondriac to simply will away sensations of illness because they are ungrounded. But the otherwise healthy hypochondriac cannot accomplish this, as Coleridge knows. This ambivalent infirmity of a healthy body models an interminable crisis in understanding which Coleridge evokes as a figure for the sort of suspended judgment he would like his audience to master. His ideal readers would, in short, run with discontinuity and embrace a dis-ease in assumptions of punctual intelligibility. As an analogy, however, Coleridge’s hypochondria says more than it says. It describes a malady of interpretation that has implications which reach past the thirteenth chapter of the Biographia Literaria. If hypochondria was the complicated source of much of Coleridge’s ill health during the early decades of the nineteenth century, it also became a painful and unlooked-for opportunity to reflect upon the ways in which the body did not make sense, even and especially if it was subjected to norms of well-being that organized individuals as either healthy or infirm. Coleridge’s most significant efforts to theorize a body which risked being unrecognizable for its hypochondria come amid a discussion of aesthetics in which he would again evoke strange skeletons and palpable concerns with his own well-being.

Bodies of knowledge In 1814, during a moment in which Britain’s hostilities with France had ceased, Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal sought to replace its former war coverage with a number of edifying articles. On 13 August, the Journal published an introduction to a projected series of essays on aesthetic taste by Coleridge, essays which would later be collected together in On the Principles of Genial Criticism. The initial essay of the series was something of a homecoming in print for Coleridge, who had spent years in and around Bristol, and who had most recently lectured there earlier in 1814. By exploring aesthetic theory in the three essays (published in a total of four installments) that followed, Coleridge sought to educate a popular readership in judgments of taste. While many of his readers may have had some acquaintance with discussions of taste already, it is difficult to imagine they were entirely prepared for the strange portrait this work contained of the author’s irrepressible desire to understand his own complexly ill health, a portrait that emerges in his continual reflections upon the uncertainty of determining well-being in this work. 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




Coleridge opens Principles by emphasizing the British nation as a collective body that formally unites his disparate readers in a common cause of judging works of art ‘in the same spirit in which the artist produced’ (SW, p. 360). He invites British ‘patriotism to repose’ in grandeur during this time of peace and promises to document examples of the ‘superior beauty’ of British fine art for his readers: The tranquility of nations permits our patriotism to repose. We are now allowed to think and feel as men, for all that may confer honor on human nature; not ignorant, meantime, that the greatness of a nation is by no distant links connected with the celebrity of its individual citizens – that whatever raises our country in the eyes of the civilized world, will make that country dearer and more venerable to its inhabitants, and thence, actually more powerful, and more worthy of love and veneration. (SW, p. 358; emphasis in original) Coleridge’s brief invocation of a nationalist rhetoric may have been part of a broader impetus to make his aesthetic argument accessible to the Bristol bourgeoisie. He mimes a language with which his readers would have been well acquainted from the sensational and patriotic accounts of the Napoleonic Wars that had filled the pages of the Bristol Journal. These ‘troublesome times’, Coleridge notes, have ‘occasioned thousands to acquire a habit, and almost a necessity, of reading’ (SW, p. 357). His readers had previously shared in the consumption of articles covering the war, and he proposes now to substitute war reporting with concerns for art or the ‘the noblest works of peace’ (SW, p. 357). He writes at the end of a period of national consolidation and builds upon a rhetoric of the national body imagined in and through acts of reading. Coleridge looks to reinscribe this process and imagines readers united by their appreciation of national beauty – if that is not always already an oxymoron – and in so doing calls into service a conservative rhetoric ‘of moral and aesthetic policing’ (Pfau, 1996, p. 633). Specifically, Coleridge’s discussions of taste are part of what Marc Redfield calls philosophy’s ‘effort to discover a ground for itself in the activity of the judging subject’ (1996, p. 6) and are set against a backdrop of wartime which recalled his writings from 1795 in which he recognized concerns with the healthy body are never far removed from discussions of that other more obvious field of violence and death. Coleridge characterizes his examination of the judging subject’s ability to taste properly as a corrective for discussions of aesthetics in Britain, particularly those informed by Archibald Alison’s popular Essays on the 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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have been either technical, and useful only to the Artist himself (if indeed useful at all) or employed in explaining by the laws of association the effects produced on the spectator by such and such impressions. In the latter, as in Alison, &c. much has been said well and truly; but the principle itself is too vague for practical guidance. (SW, p. 359) Alison developed a particularly influential ‘doctrine of the association of ideas’ which can be read – as Martha Woodmansee does in her account of Alison’s place in a genealogy of theories of association – as a ‘psychology of reception’ (1994, p. 128). Each spectator’s unique appreciation of a work of art is, Alison argues, an effect of the differing ‘ideas individuals associate with a given object’ and the capacity of these ideas to subjectively establish the ‘meaning and value’ of the work for each spectator (Woodmansee, 1994, p. 131). Coleridge, on the other hand, promotes a universalizing Kantian aesthetic that would organize and regulate the subject’s proper, and properly natural, aesthetic response to works of art. Briefly, he sets out in these essays to educate his readers in principles ‘deduced from the laws and impulses which guide the true artist in the production of his works’ (SW, p. 359). Instructing the reader in principles of artistic production, Coleridge promises to ‘enable the spectator to judge in the same spirit in which the Artist produced’ (SW, p. 360). His emphasis on the artist is misleading to a certain extent because it is not the artist who interests him but rather the form of the artist’s capacity to represent the universality of judgments of taste. Coleridge conceives of an ideal artist whose judgments are the natural expression of a taste that is ultimately available to all. This idealized artist is quickly and thoroughly given over to the vicissitudes of the flesh, however, as Coleridge naturalizes aesthetic judgment in the form of bodily sensation.8 Participating in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic conventions in which sensory perception provides the conceptual basis for more complicated judgments, Coleridge instructs his readers that proper assessments of taste are as natural as the sensation of sweetness one has from honey: ‘we have a sensation of sweetness in a healthy palate from honey; a sense of beauty in an uncorrupted taste from the view of the rising or setting sun’ (SW, p. 375; emphasis in original). Indeed, Coleridge naturalizes a practice of aesthetic judgment in the form of the ‘body’s material relation to 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


Nature and Principles of Taste (1790). He notes that the works which precede his own


the phenomenal world’ (Bruhm, 1993, p. 402). In a manner similar to Coleridge, Edmund Burke had relied on the form of the body to explain taste, noting that because ‘the senses are the great originals of all our ideas, and consequently of all our pleasures, if they are not uncertain and arbitrary, the whole ground-work of Taste is common to all’ (1776, p. 31). Erasmus Darwin, too, affirmed from a scientific perspective that aesthetic judgment begins in apprehension: ‘our perception of beauty consists in our recognition by the sense of vision of those objects … which have before inspired our love by the pleasure, which they have afforded to many of our senses: as to our sense of warmth, of touch, of smell, of taste, hunger and thirst’ (1794, p. 145). David Hume deployed this analogy of taste and sensory experience in slightly different terms in his ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757). What is notable in this context about Hume’s contribution to a discussion of taste is that he queries whether or not the aesthetic experience of taste might be colored by the health of the perceiving body. ‘In each creature’, he notes, ‘there is a sound and a defective state; and the former alone can be supposed to afford us a true standard of taste and sentiment’ (Hume, 1963, p. 234). While Burke had posited ‘there is no diversity’ in taste among individuals as the first principle of an effort to naturalize taste as universal (1776, p. 9), the particular terms in which Coleridge will understand proper and reliable aesthetic judgment draws most pointedly upon Hume’s impulse to clarify sick from sound forms of knowing. That the body is legible and that it could be a trope for sound rational judgment is the very furthest thing from a natural apprehension, especially for Coleridge. To assume the body could be rationally intelligible is almost as hopelessly imaginary as suggesting that it could not be. The body is at once ‘given over to degradation, death, and corruption’ and so ‘ungovernably desirous and fallible’ (Redfield, 2004, p. 77) it is difficult to imagine it could be a figure for anything but disfiguration, so little does it know its own limits. Blessed and cursed with an ungovernable body, Coleridge must have not only sensed this but indeed lived it to its depths. He deploys the body as the form within which to model aesthetic understanding, but he does so without abandoning the idea that every recognition that the body and its sensations are naturally legible belies another insight into the paranoid experience of ‘being stuck with a body’ that does not seem the least bit predictable or rational (Ronell, 2003, p. 180). He notes, ‘the least reflection convinces us, that our sensations, whether of pleasure or of pain, are the incommunicable parts of our nature; such as can be reduced to no universal rule; and in which therefore we have no right to expect that 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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others should agree with us, or to blame them for disagreement’ (SW, p. 381). There is no intelligible body without a correspondingly aphasic body. Making the body intelligible and making it speak for aesthetic discourse involves, Coleridge realizes, a process of normalizing how and how well the body speaks. In Principles this process of policing the body involves a fantasy of the subject’s unmediated self-knowledge which is structured by a rhetoric of health and illness. Adopting a scale of well-being, Coleridge discriminates the normative healthy responses that can, according to the aggressive logic of the norm, be attributed to everybody from the infirm responses that cannot be trusted to be available to every individual, arising as they do from particular bouts of illness. In a fragment entitled ‘On Death and Disease and Consciousness’, Coleridge similarly contends that ‘organic lesions, or obstructions, exert a disturbing force on the thoughts themselves, and in too many melancholy instance on the faculty of thinking’ (SW, p. 424). Translating this all too hard-earned knowledge of the body into aesthetic terms, Coleridge emphasizes that the ‘sensations [of beauty] in a healthy or uninjured state’ of mind (SW, p. 377) arise from ‘that which is naturally agreeable and consonant to human nature, so that the exceptions may be attributed to disease or defect’ (SW, p. 376).9 The potential ill health of the subject’s ability to judge suggests that if the subject is to expect others to perceive beauty in the same spirit then the subject’s sense of taste must be healthy. Moreover, if the body provides Coleridge with a form for aesthetic judgment, such a form must also work to exclude, as pathological, instances of the body’s misperception of the phenomenal world. It must be able rigorously to distinguish between health and illness. Lurking within this normalizing distinction is a greater disorder than the ill health that distinguishes improper judgment. As Coleridge explains in Principles, an infirm body would still taste as ‘naturally’ as a healthy body, but its responses would be the occasional and improper responses of a body not in its normal state of sensory perception. Whether well or ill, the healthy body is meaningful, even irremediably so. Health serves in part for Coleridge as an indicator of the body’s intelligibility, an indicator that its responses to stimuli can be calibrated as healthy or infirm as opposed to being absolutely unintelligible – the products of sheer irrationality or alterity. This means in part that calling aesthetics a discourse of the body is not nearly precise enough. Aesthetics is a discourse that produces the body as an object of regulation, intelligible so long as it is subject to a logic of well-being that measures the relative deviance or normativity of the body. 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




While these comments on well-being are enlisted in the service of his description of aesthetics in Principles, they speak powerfully to Coleridge’s unyielding concern for his body, and the extent to which his own infirm body troubles his confident system in which a distinction between health and illness polices the reliability and naturalness of aesthetic judgment. Indeed, Coleridge cites his own dejected body in Principles – in the form of two brief fragments from ‘Dejection: An Ode’ – in order to underscore the idea that the body is always capable of aesthetic intuition, even when that body seems insensible to the phenomenal world, as in cases of ‘a great depression of spirits’ (SW, p. 380). Coleridge’s attention here to matters of sensory perception anticipates later critical receptions of ‘Dejection’ which read in the poem a concern with the relationship between imagination and nature and locate the work as a response to the first four stanzas of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections in Early Childhood’. Both poems address questions of poetic inspiration and stand as paradoxical expressions of the Romantic poet’s frustrating inability to create. Wordsworth imagines consoling himself in nature, while Coleridge despairs that nature offers little more than what the subject perceives in it. As the speaker says of the cosmos, the stars and the moon, ‘I see, not feel, how beautiful they are’ (‘Dejection’, 18; emphasis in original).10 For Coleridge, the ‘tranquil eloquence of his natural surroundings’ may inspire, but if he cannot properly perceive them, then their effects will not be felt and he will remain ‘an exile from a universe of harmony’ (Parker, 1975, p. 188). The speaker of ‘Dejection’ declares he can ‘see, not feel’ the beauty of the world around him, offering a poetic expression of what it means to be aware yet unaware of the world. As Tilottama Rajan notes, moreover, the depressed speaker of the poem receives no consolation from the inability of the imagination to constitute an ideal form of sensory perception uncorrupted by ‘the difficulties of existence’ (1980, p. 252). Within Coleridge’s own life, ‘Dejection’ registers the bleak depression that permeated nearly every facet of his life during a period in which ‘he lost his health for good’, fell in love with Sara Hutchinson, and began to doubt seriously whether or not ‘he and Wordsworth shared the same poetic values’ (Vickers, 2001, p. 156). When Coleridge revives this poetic portrait of a body dead to the world by citing it in Principles, he does so as if he were a physician about to perform in the operating theatre. The poem becomes a scene of teaching in which he references his own poem in order to diagnose a hypochondriacal conflict between the speaker’s bare awareness of the phenomenal world and his failure to process perceptual data and arrive at a corresponding 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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sensation of that world. He uses it to document ‘a grief without pang, void, dark, and drear’ (‘Dejection’, 1). The lesson to be learned is one that teaches the difference between association and intuited perception. The speaker exemplifies the ability to know something is there even when depression denies the sufferer the ability sensibly to feel. The aesthetic correlative of this encounter lies in the subject’s experience of beauty as something unmotivated and universal, as if located in the object itself rather than in the subject’s perception of it. Coleridge explains that the distinction between what is agreeable and beautiful rests in the agency of aesthetic judgment: We have sufficiently distinguished the beautiful from the agreeable by the sure criterion, that when we find an object agreeable, the sensation of pleasure always precedes the judgment, and is its determining cause. We find it agreeable. But when we declare an object beautiful, the contemplation or intuition of its beauty precedes the feeling of complacency in order of nature at least: nay, in great depression of spirits may even exist without sensibly producing it. (SW, p. 380; emphasis in original) Coleridge breaks off at this moment and illustrates his point with ‘Dejection’ as an example of an intuition – here troped as sight – that is not reducible to the sensible body’s perception. Significantly, this example is also an aesthetic object that affirms the power of beauty to ‘explode the terror or aversion’ that one would normally associate with depression (SW, p. 372), and thus the reader intuitively transforms what would have been a grim experience, according to a logic of association, into a beautiful one. Turning from the speaker’s depression to his exhumed poetic representation of it, Coleridge invites his Bristol readers to engage their senses in an aesthetic object: a poetic body in need of interpretation. He hopes his readers ‘feel some part of the beauty which he could no longer feel’ (Dekker, 1978, p. 231). In part, the aesthetic experience of reading ‘Dejection’ is to feel for the speaker in a process that augments the sufferer’s inability to feel with the reader’s surrogate intuition of the poem’s grace. It is a supplementary experience that underscores the importance of reading for an aesthetic that was supposed to engender automatic apprehension. Further complicating this teaching moment, the reader’s intuited judgments remain troubled by this depiction of a body that might not feel, because the ends of such an impairment might only be partially, if at all, resolved by an aestheticization of that experience for a discussion of judgment. ‘Dejection’ 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




introduces into his argument a lingering hypochondriacal intuition of the body’s unintelligibility – an almost impossible glimpse of its unruly capacity to see and not feel in the same moment.11 As necessary as it is as a rhetorical form of natural perception, this paranoia-inducing body shows an unwelcome inclination to contaminate judgment with unreliable and untrue perceptions. Thus, even as the hypochondriacal body of ‘Dejection’ is reimagined in order to exemplify what it means to intuit without sensible verification, the troubling absence of sensation in the speaker’s ‘unempassioned grief’ remains and is potentially transformed, interestingly, in a manner that does not preclude a process of making sense, but perhaps not in the manner at first intended. As Coleridge delved into the second and third essays of Principles, his text became ‘as convoluted and schematic as the Preliminary essay is discrete and concrete’ for his Bristol audience (Woodmansee, 1994, p. 122). What the text announces as its aesthetic project and what it accomplishes by way of that project are two very different things as the essays unfold. And if making sense of the later essays was a particularly demanding task for Coleridge’s contemporary reader, it may not be so for us now because ‘unlike the burghers of Bristol we are able to turn to the Critique of Judgment for aid’ (1994, p. 122). Already familiar with Kantian aesthetics, modern critics recognize and hence already know the skeletal frame of Coleridge’s aesthetic argument. We can only wonder at Coleridge’s disappointment had he been able to anticipate that chains of association would enable future readers to grasp his aesthetic arguments here. But just how readily we anticipate Coleridge’s aesthetic arguments even as he unfolds them may also create a conceptual blindspot that conceals another inquiry, specifically the inquiry into health that courses through Principles. Coleridge had warned the readers of Biographia Literaria of the importance of reading slowly and accommodating uncertainty, of the need to approach texts much like a hypochondriac does the body, ceaselessly interpreting and reinterpreting his or her body. Reading Principles for the aesthetic might just mean missing the meditation it offers on the difficulty involved in knowing the healthy body.

The skeletal sciences If concerns with bodily legibility afflict Principles and show the extent to which aesthetics cannot have done with the body as a form in which to naturalize judgment even as that body poses incredible interpretive difficulties, the text is thoroughly beset by Coleridge’s own inability to 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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renounce his hypochondria. It is as if Coleridge theorizes his desire to determine health and the haunting uncertainty of never being able to do so as a subtext to his aesthetic treatise. I say as if, here, because this is never a stated goal of Principles, yet once Coleridge has brought the body, and indeed his own poetically conceived body, into view he will not let it depart without taking this opportunity to inquire after its presence and intelligibility. He undertakes this analysis at a distance, however, raising questions of well-being and the legible surfaces of the body in his consideration of a work of art by his American friend Washington Allston. His remarks on Allston’s painting The Dead Man Restored to Life form the conceptual core of Coleridge’s aesthetic education of the Bristol bourgeoisie, but they also, surprisingly, provide a means with which Coleridge will pointedly imagine the ambivalence of the healthy body. The occasion of Coleridge’s reflections upon Allston’s work is rooted in the exigencies of his friend’s prolonged infirmity. Coleridge met Allston in 1805 in Rome and renewed the friendship in 1811 when Allston visited London.12 In the summer of 1813 Allston grew sick and retired from London to Clifton, a suburb outside of Bristol associated with spa culture and health tourism, following Coleridge’s advice to place himself in the care of Dr John King. Writing to Charlotte Brent on 24 October 1813, Coleridge remarks ‘Mr King has performed several operations on [Allston] – and it appears, that I was too much in the right in fearing it to be an analogous case to Thomas Wedgwood’s – It is a stricture, or thickening of the colon – but it will not put a period to his life, I trust. Indeed he is very much better – and out of pain’ (CL III, p. 444). Physically recovering and attempting to reestablish his financial well-being, Allston staged an exhibition in Bristol in 1814. A primary motivation of writing Principles was Coleridge’s desire to assist his friend by publicizing his work in the essays. In keeping with Coleridge’s noted preference for an aesthetic that would seek to reconstruct authorial intention, the artist is not dead, but he is ailing. The difference this makes is remarkable – and not just for Allston. What are we to make of the all too meaningful trope of the sick artist? The question has by now degenerated into something of a cliché of the necessity of suffering for one’s art. But what does this mean particularly when part of the occasion for Principles is Allston’s convalescence from a sickness that not so privately afflicts the author of Principles? For when Coleridge likens Allston’s sickness to Wedgwood’s he likens it to his own opium addiction that he shared with Wedgwood. The ‘thickening of the colon’ that Coleridge diagnoses in Allston is also a ‘mephitic horror’ of which Coleridge himself often complained in graphic detail 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




(Holmes, 1998, p. 14). As yet another figure of disabling ill health that threatened Coleridge’s sense of his own productivity, opium-induced constipation represented to Coleridge a ‘body closed in upon itself’ and a physical symptom of his ongoing anxiety that ‘his mind had become fruitless and unproductive’ (Holmes, 1998, p. 14). Coleridge too had received medical treatment in Bristol during this period. He spent the first nine months of 1814 in the care of Josiah Wade’s personal physician, Dr Daniel, ‘fluctuating between the status of house-guest, medical patient and in the early weeks almost that of a medical prisoner under restraint’ so intense were the suicidal impulses Coleridge experienced during this period of opium withdrawal (Holmes, 1998, p. 354). By describing the recent ill health of Allston, then, Coleridge produces a curious displacement of his own ill health that haunts Principles even as he makes the painter a focal point of this text. The central aesthetic goal of Coleridge’s analysis of Dead Man Restored is to examine how the component parts form a lively or harmonious whole embodied by the painting. In his own words, he is concerned with demonstrating how ‘all “the many”, which I actually see, each and all are really reconciled into unity’ (SW, p. 372). What is most significant in Coleridge’s extended description of the Dead Man Restored for his transient discussion of hypochondria is his sketch of a skeletal figure which raises questions of the presence of the body in language and in flesh. He draws attention to the groupe in Mr Allston’s grand Picture of the Dead Man reviving from the touch of the bones of the Prophet Elisha, beginning with the Slave at the head of the reviving body, then proceeding to the daughter clasping her swooning mother; to the mother, the wife of the reviving man; then to the soldier behind who supports her; to the two figures eagerly conversing; and lastly to the exquisitely graceful girl who is bending downward, and whose hand nearly touches the thumb of the slave! You will find, what you had not suspected, that you have here before you a circular groupe. But by what variety of life, motion, and passion, is all the stiffness, that would result from an obvious regular figure swallowed up, and the figure of the groupe as much concealed by the action and passion, as the skeleton which gives the form of the human body, is hidden by the flesh and its endless outlines! (SW, p. 373; see Figure 2) This is a remarkable reading of the painting. But what is Coleridge reading? In aesthetic terms, he notes the way in which the formal composition 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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Figure 2 Washington Allston, The Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha (1811–13)

of the work is almost concealed by the ‘action and passion’ of the many figures who form this whole and thus make the discovery of the ‘multëity in unity’ that inhabits the work of art that much more pleasing and unexpected (SW, p. 372). The concealment of the arrangement of several figures in Allston’s work is accomplished, at least as Coleridge would have it, in a manner similar to the way in which the skeletal form of the human is ‘hidden by the flesh and its endless outlines’. As an example of aesthetic beauty that is intuited by Coleridge rather than an interpretation he imposes upon the painting, it is remarkably difficult to read his account





and arrive with an accurate mental picture even resembling Allston’s painting. Aesthetic judgment and its assumption of a ‘pure’ grasp of beauty ushers in its opposite in the form of a figure requiring patient interpretation, similar to the work of depression in ‘Dejection: An Ode’. Here he insists this lively and unstable body in Allston’s painting does not make itself visible, but rather, provides a surface that must be read, never to be fully read, so endless are its surface outlines of itself. Reading against Coleridge’s stated purposes of aesthetic intuition does not seem particularly difficult here given this figure of the particularly elusive character of the body that addresses questions of perception and intelligibility. Read in the context of his ongoing concern with the body, this lurid trope of a figure whose bodily borders are dissolving into endless outlines of themselves recalls another body that was endlessly circumscribed, fiercely dissolute, and unable to be contained.13 In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge cited ‘the advice given to hypochondriacal patients in Dr Buchan’s domestic medicine; videlicet, to preserve themselves uniformly tranquil and in good spirits’ (BL, p. 234) as an example of the difficulty of preventing the associative mode from tainting new scenes of thinking. One of the primary disappointments of associative thinking was this tendency to so readily clothe new thoughts in the dress of previously held ideas and thus conjure up alarming skeletons to deter understanding. Associative thinking might be held in abeyance, but it is almost unavoidable, as the return of these skeletons and the hypochondriac’s conception of an endlessly dissolute body attest. Once the body has been introduced its associative meanings cannot be contained. In short, it means too much too quickly as it overruns Coleridge’s desires and intentions by conjuring, for this reader, other skeletal apparitions. Such a body might indeed be beautiful, but it is also a figure for the extent to which the body is beset by interminable efforts to mark the limits of the flesh. Indeed, Coleridge’s hope that he could contain this proliferation of meaning was perhaps hopelessly idealistic in a document in which the body must exist as flesh as well as a rhetorical form for aesthetic judgment and which seems to be an avatar of Coleridge’s own hypochondriacal body. In a recent study of portraits of Coleridge, Morton Paley emphasizes the poet-philosopher’s ‘dislike of his face’ (1999, p. 107), a feeling which might be taken, at the very least, as a further symptom of his general distaste for his troublesome body. Does he, then, seek to repaint his own portrait using the hand of Allston, a gesture which might not be motivated by displeasure but by a compulsion that continually returns him to questions of his own well-being? Coleridge’s reading 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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of Allston’s painting hallucinates a hypochondriacal body that is strikingly characteristic of his own preoccupations with the body, even if the image he intuits when he looks at Allston’s painting is not exactly a self-portrait. Intuition might not willfully distort the substance of the painting he is reading; yet nor does it lead him to produce an analysis of what is visibly present in the painting. Instead, it is as if he reframes it according to his preoccupations with his own body without borders. This complicated gesture reminds us ‘there is no natural frame’ (Derrida, 1987, p. 81), or no frame that is not also an imagined hypochondria capable of dissolving borders as readily as it constitutes them and thus there is no way of intuiting beauty that would not discover that the multëity that emerges in unity is always also a multëity of disunity. Taking Coleridge seriously, what is beautiful, then, is beautiful in part because we cannot know it is beautiful absolutely and with confidence but we can discover it as something that must be there, just as the skeleton must be present beneath the flesh. To the extent that this model of judgment requires and necessitates patient, even endless, discernment on the part of the viewer, this also appears as an avatar of Coleridge’s body and its persistent elusiveness, and it is to this convergence that I now wish to turn in order to consider how aesthetics returns and remaps the body it so productively draws upon. Accordingly, this means treating his hypochondria as something more than a pathology of a body that fails to be normal. Coleridge’s aestheticized hypochondria is, then, a mode of writing about the body that actively corresponds to his health anxiety – again, an anxiety that is pervasively general and all too personal in this context – but which also unexpectedly replaces those disorders and the sheer uncertainty of infirmity with a complexly discomforting body that appears at least minimally circumscribed and comprehensible, even if it is in the negative mode of appearing to elude efforts to frame it. In general terms, Coleridge’s aesthetic hypochondria is an other to the illnesses, both tropical and all too familiar, that haunt his return to Bristol. It creates a curious but not entirely confounding interpretive framework within which to understand the body: that of a hypochondriacal uncertainty amid an era of unparalleled anxiety regarding new diseases and a frustrating illegibility of the body’s well-being. While such a rhetorical act of framing and containing the body potentially undoes itself at every turn, given over, as it is, to illusions of presence, even illusions are a kind of presence compared to the stark and utter indifference of disease and death. And how reassuring might it be to imagine this scene that invites us to discern skeletons where they so 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




obviously are and are not, at the same time, could be translated into a narrow genealogy of Coleridge’s hypochondria, a gesture of reading that discovers a multëity in unity of these scattered reflections upon the body? The assurances of hypochondria, as desirous as they surely are, are fleeting and this understanding of the significance of aesthetics for theorizing and understanding Coleridge’s health anxiety is perhaps no more present than another apprehension. If Coleridge’s hypochondriacal reflections on aesthetics contain a truth that endures it is perhaps this: there is no way to overcome, in advance and with confidence, the potential interruption of those unexpected and unhealthy workings of the mind that discover what it should not, where it should not. The significance of Coleridge’s aesthetics for a lived care of the self – one that, counterintuitively, involves attentive distrust and disappointment with oneself – lies in how the aesthetic transforms the very body it needs into surfaces and scenes of reading, in short, into something rhetorical. It would be wrong to say the body disappears from this scene, because it does not, but it is no longer, if it ever was a purely material body, indifferent to efforts to know it, indifferent to all of the ways in which the body speaks for and with language and the social. The body is always material – given over to failures to speak as much as it is to outbursts of inexpressible pain and trauma – but here we see a body that has been rematerialized as a scene of reading, a body that cannot be disentangled from efforts to know it, and thus what emerges from the intersection of the aesthetic and the haunting presence of hypochondria is, for Coleridge, a metaphorics of bringing the body into presence and making it, minimally, legible. By conjuring Allston and his work in a manner that turns upon a hypochondria process of discerning endless surfaces, Coleridge imagines what the body of the hypochondriac might look like if it was the form given to an impossible scene of reading and deferred knowledge. This is a curious sort of reassurance that dissolves some of the material body’s sheer indifference and reduces that alterity to something tangibly unknowable. His figure of the endlessly outlined body personifies the perhaps limitless interpretations of the body’s health or illness which characterize hypochondria over and against the sheer rationality promised by normalizing distinctions of proper health or pathological illness. Despite the (metaphorically appropriate) borderlessness of it, Coleridge’s embodiment of hypochondria nicely concretizes a rather abstract understanding of a state of health. The image of hypochondria Coleridge paints in words evokes ‘the rhetorical basis of the mind’s presentation of objects to itself’ (Clark, 1992, 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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p. 126). Dressing an idea of aesthetics in the form of the body – which is itself a personification of some many complex desires and dissolutions of presence – Coleridge attempts to understand judgment in and through the mind’s embodiment of the world for itself. The importance of this personification lies primarily in Coleridge’s distinction of a concept of hypochondria from its pathological and unhappy basis in the body, while nonetheless emphasizing the bodily health that troubles it. At the turn of the nineteenth century, personification was treated, David L. Clark has suggested, ‘not simply as one trope among many but as the enabling condition of thinking itself’ (1992, p. 126). That is, personification describes the form by which the mind supplemented its inability to think purely with a practice of referring ‘concepts to what is given to the mind by sensible intuition’ (1992, p. 126). Clark cites a description of personification put forth by the education theorist David Fordyce in his Principals of Taste, or the Elements of Beauty (1786), that resonates in surprising ways with Coleridge’s discussion in Principles. On the necessity of personification Fordyce notes: ‘The Idea must be cloathed in a bodily Form, to make it visible and palpable to the gross Understanding’ (qtd in Clark, 1992, p. 126). The similarities between Fordyce’s description of the function of prosopopoeia and Coleridge’s particular tropes of figurative thinking in Principles and in Biographia Literaria are uncanny. Yet the embodiment of interpretation that these rhetorical gestures mark, an embodiment that the hypochondriac lives every day, leads to a radically unstable body and suggests that Coleridge may be creatively extending a difficult hospitality to a body that is not legible. If this is so, it is a limited hospitality, in the sense that Coleridge seeks to stabilize the body and know it as something. As Peter Melville notes, true hospitality, as impossible and radically conceived as it must be, enables ‘the alterity of the stranger to remain strange’ (2007, p. 8). What Coleridge hosts in the figure of the body is not an absolute alterity. Both here and in his recurrent and ephemeral portraits of his own infirmities which haunt Principles, hypochondria assertively marks the body as limited in its capacity to provide a reliable and natural knowledge of the body, at least one predicated upon the regulatory distinctions of Romantic health and illness. If it can be a form for imagining aesthetic judgment, the hypochondriacally aware body emerges as a containment of the body as a zone of absolute otherness and instead comes to declare itself to be inadequate and all too adequate to naturalize discourses of taste. Coleridge had envisioned testing these ideas out in a much smaller fragment by wondering if hypochondria might be understood with algorithmic clarity: ‘Spirits = Hypochondriacal 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




Appearances &c from Faeces accumulated in the lower bowels. But is the converse true affirmable? Are hypochond. &c = Spirits? – ‘ (SW, p. 250). Not only does this brief reflection show a significant hesitation at the thought that hypochondria might be stabilized into an equation, it also marks an effort to think of the malady as one that transforms the body into something to be read and assessed, first and foremost. Such a body leads a life of surfaces and a series of uncertain displacements of symptomatic depths that, I have suggested, achieve a much fuller elaboration in Principles. This body takes on a rhetorical form that poses questions as to legibility and thus it is a form that pointedly undoes the very naturalizing work the normally conceived healthy body ought to perform, so long as it remains obvious that it provides a material and natural basis for the individual and his or her perceptions and reflections. The skeleton is out of the closet, Coleridge would seem to say. His hypochondria marks the absolute necessity and insufficiency of the body for discourses of aesthetics, yet it also marks the painful underside of a discourse of subjection to well-being – rarely lived so fully and reflected upon as richly as it was by Coleridge – and a mode of embodiment that treats the body as if it were, before all else, subject to critical judgment, in an age when the stakes of such judgment could be life or death. The stark reality of Romanticism’s relationship to medical crises and fears of new contagious diseases at home and abroad cannot be separated from the cultural and philosophical deployments of the body as a site of epistemological crisis, a topic which I will further examine in the next chapter. As pressing as the need was to produce a knowledge of the body, a desire which Coleridge embodied fervently and unhappily, the body’s natural intelligibility proved to be as fleeting as its health in an age of new tropical disorders. Under Coleridge’s patient and searching gaze, the body signified the enduring presence of sickness in health and the difficulties entailed in producing a stable knowledge of that experience.

Before death It is far too limiting to continue to diagnose Coleridge’s health as disabling or as the reason he was not more productive. His concerns with health are not simply pathological nor are they a temporary anomaly of his identity that would ultimately be cured. Rather, he was subject to a health he could never know and perhaps never stopped endeavoring to understand. Indeed, Coleridge enlisted the physician J. H. Green to perform an autopsy of his body after his death. That his desire to know 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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the state of his health continued after his death forms one of the most fascinating posthumous gestures of Romanticism. In an 1828 letter to William Sotheby, Coleridge provided a sense of the motivation behind this request as he fantasized he might anatomize his own body by projecting ‘this and that thought into the mind of the anatomist’: Be so good as to give a cut just there, right across the umbilicar region – there lurks the fellow that for so many years tormented me on my first waking! – Or – a Stab there, I beseech you – it was the seat and source of that dreaded Subsultus which so often threw my book out of my hand, or drove my pen in blur over the paper in which I was writing! (CL VI, pp. 769–70; emphasis in original) Coleridge’s desire to dissect his health will, he imagines, continue into the afterlife because, despite his morbid daydream, he will not – consciously at least – be able to attend his own autopsy. Even if Green’s finding of rheumatism as the source of Coleridge’s chronic pain could firmly repudiate the suggestion ‘that all of his complaints had ultimately been nervous’ (Rousseau and Haycock, 2003, p. 251), the information gleaned from the autopsy would still have eluded Coleridge. Even if his hypochondria had not outlived him, this hallucinatory malefactor cannot finally be dissected and found there, despite all of Coleridge’s efforts to search it out. Coleridge might imagine in anatomy the most real, most present of encounters with the body in its absolute, coldest rational fixity, but his deictic will always fail to pinpoint what is not there. Indeed, the very gesture of pointing, or of circumscribing, registers the elusiveness of there. It is an attempt to speak with specificity ‘in this determinate place at this determinate time, now, here’ (Hamacher, 1997, p. 38). But pinpointing something ‘there’ right now involves a scene of reiterated and non-specific localization that exists as a ‘formula for concentrating and communicating’ that has a long history that outlasts any particular deictic (1997, p. 38).14 Anything Coleridge might say within this formula appears as if in quotation marks, referencing the generality and performativity of claims to identify what is there that haunt and overpopulate every distinct movement of localizing. Coleridge’s remarks cannot finally confirm the presence of specific disease. Even if he could domesticate the otherness of the body in language, the body will still be subject to all of the degradations and failures that characterize language. His desire to determine health functions otherwise as well, then, as his hallucinated daydream also registers the ways in which ‘there’ is absent in its presence, embodying 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




and sustaining hypochondria as the inaugural desire to know health as unintelligible. While his instructions to Green suggest a certain faith in anatomy to make visible the ailments that so characterized his life, his reflections upon the impossibility of receiving this knowledge in this world express another impulse to theorize the elusiveness of the healthy body.



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Phantom Memory: Nation and the Absent Body of Idealism in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

In the spring of 1796, 70 men landed at Plymouth after having served as part of the 20th regiment in the West Indies. While these sailors were in ‘an unhealthy state’, according to Coleridge who recorded this in The Watchman based upon news reports he first read in the Star, they were ‘the remains of 700 fine fellows, who have been thus reduced by the ravages of the Yellow Fever’ (Watchman, p. 332). This brief account of maritime sickness was recorded alongside reports of battles with the French and marks the extent to which well-being was a matter of concern even and especially during a time of war. As concerned as Coleridge may have been for the crew, his account inevitably reduces them to allegories for a broader understanding of the contemporary crises facing the health of the British nation. Britain’s enterprise with the rest of the world was a boon to its domestic economy and imperial ambitions, but it was also increasingly a source of tropical disease and domestic infirmity. And while Britain did not suffer the pestilential summers the eastern United States experienced during the yellow fever outbreaks of the 1790s, scenes such as this one dramatized how Britons now perceived flows of disease that crossed geographical and national borders with ease, channels of transmission that had long been open but which went largely unacknowledged because they tended only to carry diseases from the old world to the new. What shall it profit Britain to gain the whole world and lose its health? To ask after the national health of the country was to foreground the medical emergencies facing its citizenry but also to mark the ways in which health was always being abstracted as an object of knowledge that risked making the corporeal body disappear into language. In this chapter, I am interested in how two Romantic-period plague novels address these concerns by examining the relationship between 85



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aesthetic representations of the nation’s well-being and the corporeal nature of sickness. In The Last Man (1826) Mary Shelley speculates upon what it means to fashion a medicalized understanding of the nation in an age of hypochondria, and she does so in part by drawing upon another national health she read in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799). Such a task asks after the aesthetic basis for the nation as an imagined community and how such critical or conserving national metaphors affect medicalized discourse and cultural understandings of well-being in ways that – building upon the close of the last chapter – can violently reframe or ignore the lived materiality of infirmity in favor of an imagined state of somehow purely rhetorical disease. These novels are poised at precisely that moment of incalculable risk and violence toward a notion of well-being that must be addressed simultaneously as a philosophical concept and an embodied experience. While I will pursue the question of an idealist conception of the body with reference to national anxieties of health here, this is a question that pertains to hypochondria throughout the period, and to concerns with embodiment in general. As James Allard has recently noted: to try to ‘retrieve’ an a priori body is to suggest that there can be knowing prior to the modes of knowing … Conversely, to treat only representations and other discursive constructs of the body, medical or otherwise, is, at best, to gloss over and, at worst, ignore the lived reality of the material body that seems both to exist prior to any discursive act and to be materialized in (or consumed by) such acts. (2007, p. 8) The hypochondriac, in particular I would argue, knows well what it means to live at such a troubling crossroads because the disorder is, among other things, a somatization of the unpredictable reality of corporeality and efforts to materialize various social and personal conceptions of embodiment that are anything but illusory. Shelley’s apocalyptic novel approaches an idealist conception of the body by marking the ways in which Romantic well-being must be understood as a spatial event in the consciousness of the age, one that draws together distinct nations and geographies into a global web of territorial and rhetorical health. News of the plague in the Mediterranean leads Shelley’s narrator Lionel Verney to comment ‘though it seemed absurd to calculate upon the arrival of the plague in London, I could not reflect without extreme pain on the desolation this evil would cause in Greece. The English for the most part talked of Thrace and Macedonia, as they would 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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of a lunar territory, which, unknown to them, presented no distinct idea or interest to the mind’ (Shelley, 1996, p. 173). Shelley probes England’s cultural isolation with a pandemic that spreads with all the efficiency of England’s commercial trade, and her narrator’s thoughts show the extent to which transmission of disease in the novel will be twinned with considerations of the social horizon within which individuals frame and interpret disease. For those Britons who care nothing for what goes on in the lunar reaches of the empire, Shelley will return frequently to how the care or neglect of bodies is powerfully shaped by the narratives we tell about them. The particular figure that fascinates me here is that of a melancholic hypochondria that is replayed in each novel and which recalls an eighteenthcentury notion of imagined infirmity that was marked and celebrated as decisively English. I am returning here to questions of loss that I addressed in the first chapter. There, I examined the enduring presence of Romantic hypochondria as a form of non-knowledge that disquieted medicalized efforts to reduce bodies to objects of visibility. I return to questions of loss here, but it is to a melancholic hypochondria that encodes a mournful relation to health as the rhetorical basis for the nation and as a cultural moment in which to consider how such an idealist displacement of wellbeing into the cultural realm can risk the disappearance of the living body for discourses of health and illness. Set in twenty-first-century republican England and in parts of Europe and the Middle East, The Last Man describes the movement of a global plague that only one man survives to record. Shelley’s narrative was inspired, in part, by another national narrative of disease in a text from her parents’ generation. In Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn she found a text upon which she could model her apocalyptic allegory of the deteriorating health of the British nation following years of economic depression and political violence at home and in the colonies in the 1810s and 1820s. Her text is decidedly influenced by Brown’s descriptions of sickness and his account of disease transmission as well as the cultural meanings that he attached to the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, then capital of the United States. Both of these plague narratives offer pointedly allegorical interpretations of the social and political ills that address the circumstances in which they were composed. These two novels are the first works of fiction that I examine here, and, looking forward to the final two chapters, they are the only texts that declare themselves openly to be fiction. Accordingly, fiction is itself at issue here, in the form of hypochondriacal fictions of the body and the tendency of such representations to disavow the unruly nature of reality and the living body. 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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The chapter begins by outlining a concept of a nationalized hypochondria associated with Cheyne’s English Malady and then considers how such a disorder responds to Romantic-period conceptions of the health of the nation and empire. After considering how Shelley translates this older understanding of hypochondria into The Last Man, the chapter follows Shelley as she draws upon another representation of national sickness that she finds in Arthur Mervyn. The chapter concludes by considering the significance of Shelley’s depiction of the failure of the nation to police its own well-being and the fragmentary dissolution of such national bodies into so many scenes of technical repetition that mark an uneasiness with understanding the body as an aesthetic form that is central to Shelley’s critique of national health.

Being without health Feeling the ground shaking beneath their feet in the years following the French Revolution, English thinkers reached after the firmness of the body in an effort to understand political crises and renewed an idea that the nation could be defined as healthy or unhealthy. Edmund Burke consolidated a sense of the English nation against revolutionary propositions by arguing a system of primogeniture formed the basis for ‘the healthy habit of the British constitution’ (1986, p. 109). Offering a counterpoint to this conserving suggestion, William Godwin imagined that ‘ill constituted governments’ must receive careful and thorough treatment lest a radical ‘cure should be effected before we were at liberty to discard those practices to which the disease owes its most alarming symptoms’ (1993, p. 391). Personifying the nation in terms of bodily constitution, ideas of revolution or tyranny are construed in the Romantic period as diseases affecting the health of the national body. The usefulness of this rhetorical move comes from its potential to mitigate against the anonymity of the nation. The nation cannot be pointed to and seen. It must instead be imagined. Metaphors of health provide one way of rendering the nation familiar and legible, and such a language has the political advantage, moreover, of presupposing an ideal and natural state of the nation that must be protected from degeneracy and disease.1 Thus a healthy national constitution is underwritten by a fantasy of round-the-clock bedside care, in which dangerously disordered bodies and ideas are quarantined or expelled from the state as quickly as they appear.2 Such an ideal of the state motivated any number of formal and informal interventions into the life of the body, yet they also tend to replace the material body with so many visions 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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of its past and its future. For Mary Wollstonecraft, moreover, such a rhetoric also describes the ways in which individuals are diseased by the degeneracy and infirmity of the national body: ‘morality, polluted in the national register, sends off streams of vice to corrupt the constituent parts of the body politic’, she notes (1993, p. 264). Attributions of national or political health could propel and reinvigorate idealizations of individual health every bit as much as those dangerously pathological bodies could derange the nation’s well-being. It would be impossible to say one form of health preexists the other in the Romantic period. Both national and individual idealizations of health are imbricated in the health of the other. As a member of the second generation of Romantic-era writers, Shelley writes her novel in an era no less tumultuous than her parents’ and no less shaped by national discourses of well-being. Over the course of the 1810s, the working classes increasingly agitated for substantial reform of a political system that was unresponsive and unable to alleviate economic depression and rising food costs. Following the end of the slave trade and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the empire struggled to reinvent itself. Riots at home and revolts in the colonies made this an era in which it was all the more pressing to develop a language with which to comprehend and imagine the nation in order to posit a future that was not one of endless deterioration. One of the more triumphalist images of empire in the late Romantic period come from Robert Southey’s poem A Tale of Paraguay in which he acknowledges the utter ruin that smallpox epidemics caused as they devastated populations in the Americas. Speaking on behalf of the empire, Southey represents these absent victims of the original global plague – a plague that seemed, for so many in the new world, to bring about the very end of human civilization – because he can now declare war ‘against the miseries which afflict mankind’ (1827, p. 24). Thanks to the development of vaccination by Edward Jenner, smallpox ‘shall pass away’ (p. 24) and it is England that will spread this protection from disease across the globe: Jenner! For ever shall thy honour’d name Among the children of mankind be blest, Who by thy skill has taught us how to tame One dire disease, – the lamentable pest Which Africa sent forth to scourge the West, As if in vengeance for her sable brood So many an age remorselessly opprest. (p. 23) 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




Celebrating Jenner’s work with cowpox, Southey imagines the new English medical practice of vaccination might eradicate all the foreign disease that plagues the outer reaches of the empire. Thus, Southey sees Britain on the cusp of becoming a beacon of health to the world, not a victim of the mobility of foreign disease.3 The Last Man would seem to be at odds with this premise, yet it nonetheless offers a reassuringly unreal future that potentially calls upon the nation to extricate itself from the sickening grasp of the present colonial order of things and return to the promise, well not of ‘England as a well-defended sanctuary’ (Wright, 2000, p. 129), but at least of a nation whose future destruction is less certain. After all, the idea that the nation’s pulse could be taken and a therapeutic response developed, amid a time of political uncertainty, is as much a palliative as it is an utter fabrication. It is, I think, difficult to say that such a richly layered novel abandons all hope for the future and thus I want to consider the ways in which the novel is not exactly an endorsement of a simplistic declaration of the nation’s sickness or health any more than it is an affirmation that the nation has a health in the first place. In 1824, when Shelley began writing her novel, an outbreak of cholera had begun to spread across Asia, the Middle East, and into North Africa. As the migration of a pandemic from other lands became a pressing possibility for the British, The Last Man vividly imagines ‘the rapid travel of diseases across the globe’ and their devastating impact (Bewell, 1999a, p. 307). Shelley’s plague has the curious effect of cementing and undermining sovereignty: ‘nations, bordering on already infected countries, began to enter upon serious plans for the better keeping out of the enemy. We, a commercial people, were obliged to bring such schemes under consideration; and the question of contagion became matter of earnest disquisition’ (Shelley, 1996, p. 182). The plague, Shelley notes, is further distinguished by its modernity. It is ‘called an epidemic’ and ‘not what is commonly called contagious, like the scarlet fever, or extinct small-pox’ (p. 182). The novel hypothesizes a future in which vaccination has successfully eradicated smallpox. In turn, it is replaced by a disorder that does what smallpox never could within Shelley’s era: infect the old world with the same virulence that it affected the new. As a uniquely new mode of illness that is no longer confined to elsewhere and othered bodies, to zones of imperial exploitation and guilt, Shelley’s catastrophic plague is also not as futuristic as it seems because it is also a cultural symptom of English anxieties that epidemic disease might reach this ‘inconsiderable speck in the immense whole’ of the globe (p. 7).4 That is, in addition to narrating the end of humanity, 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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the novel also documents and theorizes that other domestic epidemic of hypochondria that so distempered the period and Shelley’s own life during the composition of The Last Man. England’s culture of fashionable health-consciousness and cultivated sensitivity to disease was so pervasive that neither Shelley nor her husband could have imagined health without some reference to hypochondria. Indeed, commentators remain uncertain whether Percy Shelley’s ‘constitutional disease’ was ‘largely imaginary’ (Crook and Guiton, 1986, p. 2) or not, and admit his ‘absorption with his disintegrating health’ (Porter and Porter, 1989a, p. 207) in the late 1810s nonetheless distinguished his health as an object so profoundly uncertain as to always require renewed attention, an attention that may have also manifested itself as a self-absorption and ‘insensitivity to the needs of his wife and children’ (Mellor, 1988, p. 150). Beyond the novel’s anxious expression of health-consciousness, The Last Man explores nervous intuitions of sickness that enable some characters to possess almost fantastic abilities to sense the presence of disease and thus exist in a state of health that is well and ill. More significantly for my purposes here, the novel insistently offers the plague as an object of interminable analysis, an object that resists being read even as it provides Shelley the means with which to critique the normalizing work of the healthy nation as she draws upon the rhetoric and meanings of a nationalized hypochondria that was elaborated almost a century earlier. George Cheyne had provided the most influential description of a specifically British nervousness in The English Malady (1733), a name that ratified hypochondria and melancholia as historically associated and nationally specific disorders. As a medical disorder it denoted ‘nonspecific pains and their relation to the ever-fecund imagination’ (Porter and Porter, 1989a, p. 203). Cheyne argues that this new hypochondria coursed through the veins of refined society like never before, and forms an emergent national disorder. Responding to the early signs of an epidemic that would, by Shelley’s day, be naturalized as an expression of Romantic culture, Cheyne instructed his lay audience in the healthbenefits of temperance and the methods best employed for achieving lasting mental and physical soundness. By way of opening he notes that this designation had long been ‘a reproach universally thrown on this island by foreigners, and all our neighbours on the continent, by whom nervous distempers, spleen, vapours, and lowness of spirits, are in derision called the English Malady’ (Cheyne, 1991, p. i). The idea of an infirmity that was particularly English is not new to his text, Cheyne points out. Nor was it uncommon for the English to speak of syphilis 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




as the French disease or the French to call it the Spanish disease (Porter, 1991, p. xxvi). But what is new in Cheyne’s description of the English Malady is that he does not treat the denomination as an insult. Instead, he argues that it is symptomatic of English civilization. Cheyne and others considered nervous diseases to be the product of luxury and indolence. He writes ‘since our wealth has increased, and our navigation has been extended, we have ransacked all the parts of the globe to bring together its whole stock of materials for riot, luxury, and to provoke excess’ (Cheyne, 1991, p. 49). The newfound wealth of colonial England has dissipated an idealized and natural well-being (‘we suppose, as we must, that mankind at first, were healthy and sound’ (p. 58)). Anticipating the terms of a normalizing Brunonian medicine, Cheyne contends that all nervous disease is the consequence of intemperance, or some error in the quantity or quality of their food, and laziness or neglect of due exercise: by which as the solids and juices of the parents have been spoiled, so their posterity by continuing the same courses have gradually suffered higher and more extreme disorders or symptoms, arising from the same general causes: which upon their first appearance receiving new names by their observers, as new and particular distempers, have increased to such a number, as to exhibit that numerous train of miseries with which our books of physick and bills of mortality are filled: And as the Age grew worse, and the same causes have been continued, and consequently the constitutions more depraved, not only more numerous, but higher and more terrible symptoms have arisen, till they have come at last to such a degree of malignity, as to infect and contaminate by mere touch or contact; nay even by the smoak or steam emitted from such diseased habits. Not that I would deny that seasons, climates, astral and aerial influences, and many other circumstances, had any effect or influence inbegetting or propagating these distempers, but that these are slight, partial, and occasional causes only, in respect of those other mentioned. (p. 58) Experiencing a spike in the general causes of illness that corresponds to the ‘idleness and luxury’ of an age increasingly powered by smoke and steam and characterized by colonial expansion (p. 59), Cheyne describes how ‘nervous diseases began to shew themselves more eminently’ in England in the eighteenth century than in any early period (p. 59). This diagnosis of English Malady is more than the discovery of a statistically significant increase in ‘nervous, hysterical, and hypochondriacal 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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distempers’ (p. 60). It is also the burden and the distinguishing mark of a mercantile society. Cheyne’s denomination of the English Malady names and lays claim to ‘the distinctive historical, social and cultural configurations of the English way of life’ (Porter, 1991, p. xxvi). Thus, it firmly associates Englishness with economic well-being and the domestic alterations brought about by the emergence of a consumer society thanks to imperialism. As such, it is an exemplary cultural elaboration of what Suvir Kaul has called ‘narratives of manifest destiny, in which each episode in imperial history is understood as a separate unfolding of a providential or even historical telos’ that created a blindness ‘to the relentlessly contingent, tentative, and even stumbling means by which territories were subjugated and empires consolidated’, thus giving the empire a more ‘finished form than its actual performance warranted’ (2000, pp. 20–1). When Shelley revitalizes this eighteenth-century understanding of nervous distempers, she replaces Cheyne’s backhanded celebration of empire and its temporary deleterious effects with a more thoroughgoing suspicion of imperial trade and its catastrophic threat to domestic life – though she has very little to say about the health of those who received little more than death and disease as a result of England’s imperial ambition. Her attention to Britain as a commercial trading nation marks it as susceptible to plague, and in her description of how England has been wrecked by the pandemic she places particular priority on its now diminished economic superiority: The overgrown metropolis, the great heart of mighty Britain, was pulseless. Commerce had ceased. All resort for ambition or pleasure was cut off – the streets were grass-grown – the houses empty – the few, that from necessity remained, seemed already branded with the taint of inevitable pestilence. In the larger manufacturing towns the same tragedy was acted on a smaller, yet more disastrous scale. There was no Adrian to superintend and direct, while whole flocks of the poor were struck and killed. (Shelley, 1996, pp. 204–5) The only victims of England’s commercial demise here are the curiously identified ‘flocks of the poor’ who are missing their leader to guide them in a time of crisis. For a novel that so dramatically trades upon the threat England faced thanks to its international commercial exploits, this is a surprisingly foreshortened description of the cessation of the heart of British imperialism. Where are the ships, the stock markets, the colonies, the inheritances and property lost at home and abroad? Most tellingly absent from this description are the bourgeoisie 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




who have made themselves an ascendent power thanks to the spoils of empire. Elsewhere in the novel, Shelley will note, in a passage that can be read as either earnest or caustic, that when ‘the misery of their fellow creatures became glaring’ in the eyes of ‘the wealthy of the land’, an ‘enthusiastic generosity inspired their decrees’ and led them to open their estates to the poor and allowed forests to be harvested for timber (p. 187). This spirit of generosity translates into very particular acts and affectations more than open charity, however. She notes, ‘high-born ladies of the country’ were ashamed to exercise their economic privilege and travel with ‘the ease of a carriage’, while the landed classes refused to distribute their horses lest ‘we should … have destroyed our fine breeds of horses’ (p. 187). Shelley would seem to write with more than a little irony when she concludes, ‘it may be imagined that things were in a bad state indeed, before this spirit of benevolence could have struck such deep roots’ (p. 187). Curiously, in both of these scenes the emphasis on the wealth of Britain has the effect of abstracting the infirm bodies that are at the core of both of these critiques. It is as if the critique has overtaken the spectacular occasion of its utterance. I do not wish to imply that Shelley neglects the sick body in the same manner that those in her text do at these moments, but scenes such as these that precisely lose sight of the sick body in favor of other concerns that are prompted by infirmity are intriguing for their potential, symptomatically, to register a remainder of loss at the core of abstractions of the body. Cheyne’s readers were perhaps not yet ready to see his clinical diagnosis of empire as detrimental, even if that was implicit in his account of the rise of nervous disorders. While Cheyne celebrated the source of nervousness, the ailment was still something that many sufferers would have chosen to do without, and thus the potential for the English Malady to become the allegory of an infirm nation was strong. He stressed he had not ‘turned all things into allegory and analogy’ nor had he ‘advised people to turn monks, to run into deserts, and to live on roots, herbs and wild fruits’ to restore their health. Cheyne was concerned his readers might jump to conclusions too quickly and decide that if the social was the source of nervous disorders, then it would only be by ‘destroying rank and property’ that it could be treated (1991, p. iii). He insisted he was not ‘at bottom a mere leveller’ who advocated the dissolution of British society in the name of restoring health (p. ii), and while such a defense may be expected and even stringently necessary, it still happens not to be true. The English Malady is an allegory if it is anything. It tells a story of a social disease that is a symptom and an aid to reflection upon the vices of imperialism and civilization.5 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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The Last Man recalls precisely these questions of the nation’s relationship to its colonial others and insists that when we speak of health in the Romantic period we are also speaking of something else implied by this culture of introspective nervousness, namely an aggressive empire casting its gaze upon the entire world as its terrain. In addition to marking the importance of imperialism for understanding domestic well-being, The English Malady also provides the Romantic imagination with an important allegory of diagnosis. Cheyne crafts a hermeneutic of dis-ease in which hypochondria and similar nervous disorders are never simply representative of themselves. If hypochondria names an otherwise nameless imaginary infirmity it nonetheless is the ‘first symptom of a real chronical disease, which, if neglected, will terminate in spoiling some of the great bowels, and so in putting a period to animal life’ (p. 203). If the warning of hypochondria is not heeded and one’s regimen is not altered for the better then the disorder, Cheyne warns, ‘will certainly terminate sooner or later in those real distempers, which have names and determinations, such as dropsy, asthma, or consumption, and so may be attended with the symptoms that these mortal distempers are described by, and at last end in death’ (p. 204). Cheyne’s hypochondria represents for the sufferer an otherwise unavailable future event in the health of the body. It anticipates and brings into consciousness the fragility of health by warning the body of impending sickness. For Cheyne, the importance of hypochondria lay in the implied presence of some underlying condition, the contours of which could begin to become intelligible only if the individual’s experience of ill health was recognized to be imaginary. Robert Whytt, whose mid-eighteenth-century ‘knowledge of the brain and the nervous system’ was more extensive than Cheyne’s, takes this notion that hypochondria could indicate a potential for disease a step further, and contends that hypochondria had a positive basis in the body’s infirmity (Goellnicht, 1984, p. 173). In his Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of those Disorders which Have Been Commonly Called Nervous Hypochondriac, or Hysteric, Whytt notes that those disorders like hypochondria which ‘deserve the name nervous … are produced by causes, which, in people of a sound constitution, would either have no such effects, or at least in a much less degree’ (1767, p. 92). The hypochondriac suffers from nerves which ‘are more or less hurt; and, in consequence of this, various sensations, motions, and changes, are produced in the body’ (p. 92). Whytt locates a nervous origin for sensations of hypochondria in the body.6 Such a pathological basis for the malady in the body suggests that while hypochondria prompts an illusory state of health, it is also indicative of a greater ill health. 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




Paradoxically, this tendency of the English Malady to reference an underlying infirmity transforms the malady into a sign of health, or an expression of a robust body that refuses to suffer unseen disease silently. This is a markedly different understanding of the disorder than the one Coleridge had. After all, there was no triumphant future well-being to be anticipated by hypochondria for Coleridge, only unremitting pain and obfuscation. The English Malady embodies and disembodies an authentic well-being of the individual and its real distempers or its real health. Read productively, hypochondria posits the health of the body as absent – as an attribute of the self that has disappeared but not been forgotten. The sufferer’s experience of hypochondria is structured by a longing and an awareness of the absence of an ideal well-being from the body. Cheyne’s idea of a hypochondriacal loss of health draws in part upon a particular form of melancholic hypochondria theorized by Richard Blackmore in A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours: or, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Affections (1725). Blackmore shares Cheyne’s supposition that ‘the natives of this island’ are constitutionally disposed to ‘hypochondriacal and hysterical affections, vulgarly called the spleen and vapours, in a superior and distinguishing degree’ to the people of any other nation (pp. iii–iv). Of particular significance for Cheyne’s sense of hypochondria is Blackmore’s concise examination of ‘hypochondriack melancholy’ (p. 154), a name which captures the fluidity among nervous disorders in the period and the ongoing efforts of both texts to progressively distinguish hypochondria from melancholia in the eighteenth century. Melancholia induces the sufferer to dwell compulsively ‘upon a series of sad and afflictive objects’ (p. 160). In cases of hypochondria, however, the ‘melancholy constitution of the spirits is fruitful of a surprizing and copious diversity of odd and ridiculous phantasms, and fills the imagination with a thousand uncouth figures, monstrous appearances, and troublesome illusions’ (pp. 162–3). Preoccupied with unfounded suppositions of illness, melancholic hypochondriacs believe ‘themselves to be actually dying’, for instance, ‘and imagine they were cold half way the body; and of others that took themselves to be really dead, and desired to be laid out, in order to their funerals’ (p. 162). Like Cheyne’s hypochondriac, Blackmore’s sufferer is rather ahead of himself. Anticipating the end of his life in visions of sickness, the hypochondriac imagines living a funereal life. He is already at the end of his health, experiencing mental and physical well-being as if posthumously. Shelley is not alone in returning to the conceptual potential of a specifically English hypochondria in the Romantic period, though she may 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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provide one of the richest and most nuanced examinations of it. In Essays on Hypochondriacal and Other Nervous Affections, John Reid offered a brief analogy of a foreign body worming its way into the hypochondriac that shares in the nationalist rhetoric of Cheyne’s nervous disease and also participates in the temporality of a hypochondria that forewarns the sufferer of an as yet undetected disorder in the body. Hypochondria, he writes, entails unfounded symptoms of ill health that indicate ‘the worm of mental malady … gnawing inwardly and undetected at the root of the constitution’ (Reid, 1817, p. 5). Adding to the complexity of a disorder that ambivalently represents both the possible preservation and diminishment of health, Reid’s figure of a worm engenders a fantasy that hypochondria might be luridly and obviously visible, despite the contrary discursive tendency of the disorder to embody the interpretive difficulty of detecting and diagnosing illness in the Romantic period. His epigrammatic description of hypochondria is composed, then, of two mutually reinforcing ambiguities that each work to defer conclusive attributions of the health or disease of the body. Hypochondria potentially preserves and disorders well-being, potentially making it visible and invisible to a medical gaze. Rephrasing Cheyne and Blackmore’s understanding of hypochondria as the experience of being without health, moreover, Reid further notes that the ‘constitutional or inveterate hypochondriac is apt to view every thing only in the relation which it may bear to his malady’ (1817, p. 208). Like Cheyne or Blackmore’s distempered Briton, Reid’s constitutional hypochondriac persistently – even pathologically – defers his health in any number of other affects or desires.

The future of an English Malady In The Last Man, Shelley examines questions of national and individual well-being in the form of Adrian, the Lord Protector of the twenty-firstcentury republican England. Adrian is the Earl of Windsor, the son of the former king, and is described by Shelley as excessively sensitive to disease. Perhaps modeled upon Percy Bysshe Shelley, the republican aristocrat Adrian suffers from a melancholic temperament and a proclivity toward hypochondria. Indeed, the heroic yet complexly unhealthy Adrian may represent a significant though fictional memorialization by Shelley of her late husband. Sir Timothy Shelley had refused to allow her to write a biography of his son and her financial dependence upon her father-in-law may have forced Shelley to sublimate her remembrance of Percy into the pages of this novel. As every memorial must be, this document is a testament to the exorcisms, desires, and longing that 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




accompany the work of mourning and the creation and preservation of memory. As Anne Mellor notes with reference to Shelley’s journals, letters, poetry, and novels, The Last Man records the lingering dissatisfaction she felt with her husband and a certain Romantic idealism he embodied, in addition to documenting her loving remembrance of him. Shelley may have been drawn to a rhetoric of melancholic hypochondria, moreover, not just because it represented Percy Shelley’s disordered health but because it resonated with her own pervasive sense of loss and her ‘non-clinical depression’ which ‘had dominated her emotional life since the summer of 1819’ (Mellor, 1988, p. 146). So much so that after the deaths of her children William and Clara, and her husband, she declared in a journal entry she was herself ‘the last man! Yes, I may well describe that solitary beings feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me’ (qtd in Mellor, 1988, p. 157). It is worth pausing for a moment here to note that The Last Man is narratively structured by its very impossibility: how to narrate the end of all humans? Confronting the loss of loss that such a topic raises, Shelley’s response is to explain her text as the prophecy of the narrative of Lionel Verney, the last man and lone survivor of a plague-ravaged world. Shelley introduces her novel with an unnamed author and her companion discovering ‘scattered and unconnected’ pages of a prophecy in Sibyl’s cave. These ‘Sibylline pages’ are then slowly collected and assembled on repeated trips to the cave by the author. She works to translate and interpret these pages first with her companion and then alone. The ‘consistent form’ that emerges from this archival labor is said to be the product of the ‘particular mind and talent’ of this lone ‘decipherer’ and thus even the simulated artistic production of a novel concerned with lastness inscribes loss, bearing traces of the mournfulness of Shelley’s author and the potential for loss that is part of every effort to reconstruct or translate a narrative (Shelley, 1996, pp. 2–4). After the prophesied end of the narrative it is organized, in advance by the fictional introduction, into a plausible form that makes it readable but likewise makes the absolute finality it promises impossible. Shelley’s attention to loss is, then, structural to the telling of her narrative. It is also crucial to its unfolding and this is most pressingly apparent, as I have suggested, in her representation of Adrian, whom Shelley idealizes as a born leader, a man who should become an acknowledged legislator of the nation, if not the world. Yet, perhaps like her husband, ‘his own determination never to enter into public life was insurmountable, and the delicacy of his health was a sufficient argument against it’ (p. 75). Adrian declines to run for the position of the 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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Lord Protector of England out of a generalized concern for his health, rather than any particular illness, choosing instead to ‘rule the little kingdom of my own mortality’ (p. 74). Adrian’s selfish hypochondria marks him as a particularly sensitive and refined individual, a characterization which reflects the discourses of this malady in the Romantic period. While questions of health and illness still idealized a range of proper and improper political and social practices, to be sick – to be hypochondriacal – was a valued marker of sensibility in the period. To be sick was more interesting than being healthy. With Adrian, such compelling sickness takes the form of a disorderly yearning after health and an impulse to retreat from the world and his nation-building heritage, as he refuses to be anything more than a signatory to his own bodily constitution.7 Yet even the small degree of sovereignty Adrian imagines he has over his health takes the form of an overthrown aristocratic privilege. His rule of health is the decree of a sovereign unable to subdue his own rebellious body politic. Reinforcing suggestions that The Last Man memorializes the untimely demise of Percy Shelley and the work of mourning, Shelley’s characterization of Adrian recalls a letter from 20 January 1820, in which she associates her husband’s ill health with the degeneracy of England: Here is a fine Tuscan winter! Are you not in a passion, my dear Mrs Gisborne? I am sure I am, and have every reason; for besides all pains in the side of which Shelley has plenty, he had an attack last Friday of fever, just like only more severe, the one he had on returning to Leghorn from Florence – Wind! Frost! Snow! How can England be worse? Are you yet reconciled to the idea that England is become a despotism? The freedom with which the newspapers talk of our most detestable governors is as mocking as death on a death bed. The work of dissolution goes on, not a whit slower – And cannot England be saved? (qtd in Bennett, 1995, pp. 54–5) In The Last Man, Shelley revisits this correlation of individual and national unsoundness as Adrian responds, just as Percy Shelley had in 1819, to the infirmity of a republican England. As the mysterious pandemic begins to spread across England, Adrian summons his strength and almost wills himself into health in an attempt to rouse the sick nation and leaves the hypochondriac within him suddenly dethroned. His apparent hypochondria is supplanted by a sudden and remarkable state of well-being which leads Lionel to comment, ‘his eyes were bright, 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




his countenance composed, an air of concentrated energy was diffused over his whole person, much unlike its former langour’ (1996, p. 197) and adds later his sister Idris ‘hardly recognized the fragile being, whose form had seemed to bend even to the summer breeze, in the energetic man, whose very excess of sensibility rendered him more capable of fulfilling his station of pilot in storm tossed England’ (p. 237). Unable to see Adrian as anything other than his formerly sick self, Lionel comments yet later, with amazement, ‘you could no longer trace in his look of health, the suffering valetudinarian’ (p. 260). Adrian in turn responds to Lionel’s reflections: from my childhood aspiring thoughts and high desires have warred with inherent disease and overstrained sensitiveness, till the latter became victors. You know how I placed this feeble hand on the abandoned helm of human government. I have been visited at times by intervals of fluctuation; yet, until now, I have felt as if a superior and indefatigable spirit had taken up its abode within me or incorporated itself with my weaker being. (p. 310) Adrian’s ‘inherent disease’ may not be imaginary, but it nonetheless recalls nervousness and hypochondria – perhaps most properly the constitutional hypochondria Reid associated with a sufferer’s fixation upon illness – and symptomatically registers a scholarly fragility and the persistent loss of an ideal and irretrievable health. Speaking at a moment when a remarkable and unanticipated spirit of health – almost infectiously – overwhelms his ‘weaker being’, Adrian recalls and embodies his hypochondria despite his apparent salutary good health. As Lionel notes, the ‘energetic man’ Adrian had become made it almost impossible to recognize in him the ‘fragile being’ he had once been (p. 237). In keeping with the medicalized narratives of Cheyne and others that contend that hypochondria presages greater infirmity and implies a temporality that postpones a properly singular health as a future event of the body, Adrian’s hypochondria is a figure for a latent expression of well-being. His hypochondria surprisingly inoculates him for a time, transforming him from a state of enfeebled health to an unlikely state of masculine physical and mental robustness in a time of mass contagion. Yet Shelley’s account also implies Adrian’s well-being may only be transient and indeed already vanishing at this moment. His malady is marked by its simultaneous affirmation and deferral of health, noting, ‘yet, until now’ he had experienced salutary good health. Adrian’s continued loss of health and its construction as an unattainable ideal is further marked 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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by Lionel’s perhaps altogether too persistent disavowals of his friend’s seemingly inherent unsoundness. His anxious comments upon Adrian’s apparent and sudden reversal of well-being mark his friend all the more convincingly with hypochondria. Lionel’s renunciations underscore, in other words, Adrian’s inherent ‘sensitiveness’ to disease and put into question the very possibility he possesses a salutary form of well-being, for if Adrian’s sensitivity to disease has been his own personal plague up to this point in his life, his capacity to judge his own health may be only skin deep. Shelley associates the foremost representative of England with hypochondria, a gesture which demonstrates in part the lasting effects of an eighteenth-century discourse of hypochondriacal nationalism, as well as the pervasive health-consciousness of the period. Recent critical attention to The Last Man has been similarly attentive to the metaphoricity of disease. In her study examining the novel’s echoes of Malthusian anxieties about a healthy British population, for instance, Sussman argues that ‘disease’ is the ‘most compelling device’ available in The Last Man ‘for imagining a world in which no culture or community can remain isolated from others’ (2003, p. 289).8 This interest in disease is shared by critical discussions divided by their perceptions of the novel’s commitment to alternative and equally viable understandings of disease transmission. Shelley’s novel has been recognized to mediate a ‘fear of contagion that shaped European encounters with others over so much of the colonial period’ (Bewell, 1999a, p. 313). It has also been said to express ‘an explicitly anti-contagionist perspective’ in which disease was not thought to be endemic to particular populations but was a ‘quality of the air itself’ (McWhir, 2002, pp. 23–4). Such commentary affirms the novel’s capacity to respond to a range of medicalized discourses and embodies the novel’s resistance to producing a singular and stable ground upon which to understand and theorize Romantic health and illness.9 This is the sense one has quite particularly in a scene in which Lionel Verney suddenly faints, and awakens to realize it was not just Adrian who experienced hypochondria: ‘My beloved friends were alarmed – nay, they expressed their alarm so anxiously, that I dared not pronounce the word plague, that hovered on my lips, lest they should construe my perturbed looks into a symptom, and see infection in my langour’ (Shelley, 1996, p. 190). To experience anything even approximating a symptom was potentially a sign of plague as the circumstances of a pandemic render everyone into hypochondriacs who search themselves and others for signs of deterioration. And while Lionel does not wish to affirm the presence of disease, his powers of observation are no 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




less anxiously invested than those of the hypochondriac. Interestingly, it is less Lionel’s symptomatic collapse than the unbidden word ‘plague’ that broaches his lips and threatens to undo him here. Appearances matter, but avowals and disavowals even more so, as if to suggest that the health of the body resides in the power to narrate the body, to shape it as one sees fit and make it presentable or unpresentable. Lionel’s concern with how his body is read by those around him reminds us that the hypochondriac lives the plague everyday. It is a mode of being in the world that is constantly fighting to refocus attention away from the body, as Lionel does by just barely preventing his thoughts from becoming words, and yet it is also an abstraction of the body that places the flesh into a world of representation in which the real state of his health matters less than the appearance of ‘feigned hilarity’ he can create to reassure himself and those around him that he is not now waiting to become a corpse. In addition to disordering distinctions of normal and pathological health, then, the conceptual purpose of hypochondria pertains to words as much as bodies, and specifically how the body is abstracted within a field of representation. This abstracted state of the body will become a defining feature of Lionel’s existence by the end of the novel as he inexplicably survives what no one else does, as if he has become a spirit unaffected by bodily disease. The last man is, after all, a dematerialized being, a person who lives after the body and as if he does not have a body. Part of the reason for this may be that he is a genre and not a body at all.

Fictional health The novel’s thematic interest in the loss of all human life reflects the influence of myriad fictional and poetic treatments of the ‘last man’ subject that became popular in the years following the 1806 English translation of Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le Dernier Homme. Grainville’s text in turn influenced Lord Byron’s composition of ‘Darkness’ (1816) and a poem by Thomas Campbell entitled ‘The Last Man’ (1823).10 Recently, Charlotte Sussman has suggested that Shelley’s relationship to the ‘last man’ genre needs to be reconsidered, noting the ‘loneliness of the last man takes up a bare twenty pages of the almost five-hundred-page narrative’ (2003, p. 286). Such a reconsideration of lastness is necessary, and perhaps most pointedly from the perspective of an age in which the lonely solitary figure was increasingly a densely populated role. Adding to such a call for further attention, the novel’s generic interest in a devastated landscape of disease is 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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explicitly addressed by The Last Man in passages that place infectious fictionalized accounts of ill health at the core of the novel’s fascination with infirmity. Fiction supplants disease at several moments within the narrative and not just at those moments in which Adrian will retell his pathobiography. In a passage that opens with Lionel close to Windsor Castle, Shelley tells how her narrator ‘passed by a number of country people’ who, while attempting to flee the pestilence, had deserted ‘one of their company behind them sick of the plague’ (1996, p. 202). Realizing no one ‘dared approach within half a mile of the infected neighbourhood’, Lionel resolves to ‘ascertain his situation, and administer to his wants’ (p. 202). But Lionel quickly discovers this man has already succumbed to the plague. Confronted by the irreducible event of this death, Lionel is curiously drawn away from the body and instead toward textuality and the workings and unworkings of fiction: I had never before beheld one killed by pestilence. While every mind was full of dismay at its effects, a craving for excitement had led us to peruse Defoe’s account, and the masterly delineations of the author of Arthur Mervyn. The pictures drawn in these books were so vivid that we seemed to have experienced the results depicted by them. But cold were the sensations excited by words, burning though they were, and describing the death and misery of thousands, compared to what I felt in looking on the corpse of this unhappy stranger. This indeed was the plague. (p. 203) Having come face to face with the limits of his comprehension in the form of a plague corpse, Lionel returns to an earlier moment in which he and his circle of family and friends had turned to works of fiction as if they were medical manuals that might provide an etiology of plague and help them comprehend the effects of epidemic disease. The narrator evokes Brown’s Arthur Mervyn – and Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year (1722), though the latter is only ‘perused’ – as accounts that, at first glance, fail to compare with the feelings he has upon witnessing the effects of plague. Yet Lionel also records that reading about plague ushered it into the household as he and his compatriots encountered representations ‘so vivid’ as to make them feel as if their health were already disordered. Brown’s text is introduced in order to be repudiated as a sensational narrative, one that is explicitly too literary, and thus cannot compare with the stark reality of death, but it nonetheless sears burning cold symptoms of disease into otherwise healthy bodies. Lionel claims the ‘sensations excited by words’ cannot compare to the 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




presence of the plague, yet it is seeing its effects firsthand that sends him back in his mind to these fictions of illness. Paradoxically, then, the insufficiency of words represents the significance of something words cannot acknowledge; language marks the magnitude of the pandemic by its failure to represent it. Shelley chooses, here and elsewhere, to reference an analogous episode of infirmity that belongs to the history of the United States, and does so for reasons that exceed this scene and its emphasis on the frightening prospect of attempting to prepare for the worst. With Arthur Mervyn, The Last Man transmits into itself another narrative of a nationalized disorder that is eerily similar to Britain’s plague.11 What is most intriguing is that Shelley evokes this earlier account in order to supplement her own elliptical account of social disintegration thus producing the very absence she is trying to fill with reference to Brown’s novel: It would be needless to narrate those disastrous occurrences, for which a parallel might be found in any slighter visitation of our gigantic calamity. Does the reader wish to hear of the pest-houses, where death is the comforter – of the mournful passage of the death-cart – of the insensibility of the worthless, and the anguish of the loving heart – of the harrowing shrieks and silence dire – of the variety of disease, desertion, famine, despair, and death? There are many books which can feed the appetite craving for these things; let them turn to the accounts of Boccaccio, Defoe, and Brown. (Shelley, 1996, p. 209) Introduced to show what Lionel does not, Shelley references a literary genealogy of representations of plague beginning with The Decameron (1349–52) and implicitly suggests that her name should be included as the most recent in this history of epidemic literature.12 That she displaces her own depiction of the most sensational details of the genre into other contemporary works demonstrates, minimally, the allegorical and social ends of her novel. Likewise, these detours remind the reader this is a novel by strongly asserting the rules and functions that govern reading and textuality at the very moment when it would be easiest to dissolve mediation and make the narrative as immediate as real life. That Shelley asks the curious reader to look elsewhere in history for details of what a global end-game looks like, specifically in other texts that examined epidemic disease on a much smaller scale, suggests at least two further points to consider.13 First, the novel may not be as interested in the spectacular dissolution of society as one might expect given its premise. And second, The Last Man is a reflexive 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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text that is interested in being read intertextually with these other loosely contemporary works, so much so, that it announces a swerve from its own narrative at a moment when it makes the least dramatic sense to do so. What are the effects of such a return to the fictional in the form of prior representations of catastrophic infirmity? Extending Julia Wright’s claim that The Last Man examines a ‘reverse colonization’ of imperial Britain by a diseased periphery (2000, p. 145) to include a geography of textuality, this rhetorical gesture infects The Last Man with questions of national well-being and mediation as if they came obviously from outside its own borders. What would the reader find if s/he followed Lionel’s repeated advice to look to fiction for an account of the pandemic? Not greater clarity, certainly, and it would not be much of a departure from a world that is all too ready to announce the difficulty of distinguishing reality from fiction.

The unreliable narrator of the body Brown’s novel is a densely layered Bildungsroman of a young man in Philadelphia in the feverish summer of 1793. Arthur Mervyn was published in 1799, at the end of a decade in which American readers were held fascinated by numerous accounts of the nation’s capital invaded by disease. The United States was in turmoil in the 1790s and Philadelphia’s repeated summertime epidemics of yellow fever coalesced into a powerful cultural metonymy for the young nation’s disorders and questions of homeland security. Although citizens of the United States had welcomed the French Revolution as an affirmation of their earlier revolution, conservatives increasingly worried the atrocities associated with France in 1793 would occur on their soil as well. American reception of the French Revolution and the Terror polarized radical and conservative opinion in the United States. Brown’s novel was considerably influenced by the political radicalism of Godwin and Wollstonecraft and is fascinated with how revolution and the spread of revolutionary ideals could be understood via a rhetoric of contagion that was condensed in the form of an almost biblical epidemic of yellow fever in the 1790s that had become a powerful figure for comprehending the numerous ills of the nation. Mathew Carey’s famous A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia, published in November 1793, was among the first cultural forms to whet the hunger of Americans to know what had occurred – what had gone wrong – in its capital. Carey suggested that the nation’s capital was degenerate, noting, ‘though it were presumption 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




to scan the decrees of heaven, yet few I believe, will pretend to decry, that something was wanting to humble the pride of a city, which was running on in full career, to the goal of prodigality and dissipation’ (1794, p. 10). Readers were so intensely fascinated and unsettled by this symbolic event in the young nation’s health that Carey’s authoritative text went through several editions before the turn of the century. Shelley recalls these associations of Philadelphia with extreme infirmity in a scene that marks an initial moment of contact with the plague on English soil in The Last Man. Having just returned to England from Greece, Lionel narrates ‘a strange story [that] was rife’ in Portsmouth: A few days before, a tempest-struck vessel had appeared off the town: the hull was parched-looking and cracked, the sails rent, and bent in a careless, unseamanlike manner, the shrouds tangled and broken. She drifted towards the harbour, and was stranded on the sands at the entrance. In the morning the custom-house officers, together with a crowd of idlers, visited her. Only one of the crew appeared to have arrived with her. He had got to shore, and had walked a few paces toward the town, and then, vanquished by malady and approaching death, had fallen on the inhospitable beach. He was found stiff, his hands clenched, and pressing against his breast. His skin, nearly black, his matted hair and bristly beard, were signs of a long protracted misery. It was whispered he had died of the plague. No one ventured on board the vessel and strange sights were averred to be seen at night, walking the deck, and hanging on the masts and shrouds. She soon went to pieces; I was shown where she had been, and saw the disjoined timbers tossed on the waves. The body of the man who had landed, had been buried deep in the sands; and none could tell more, than that the vessel was American built, and that several months before the Fortunatus had sailed from Philadelphia, of which no tidings were afterward received. (Shelley, 1996, p. 170) Like Coleridge’s accounts of tropical disease in Bristol and the story of the ship that landed at Plymouth with only a tenth of its crew, this scene contends that England’s commerce with the Americas all but guaranteed the arrival of unwelcome diseases stowed away among the cargo and crew. That this ship is wrecked upon the shore recasts the supposed security of England’s isolation into the powerlessness of a globalized island to prevent disease from washing up unexpectedly. Interestingly, this harbinger of the plague who arrives from Philadelphia is also a precursor of the last man, an anticipation of the narrative’s interest 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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in mournful isolation that reflexively returns the text to questions of the construction of fiction and the anterior movements of figuration. Having heard the story, Lionel casts his eye over this scene and reassembles it in his mind almost like an anatomist examining ‘the disjoined timbers’ of the ship’s wreckage. That this scene of visual dissection is missing the body at the center of it – a body that has literally been disposed of – marks it as part of an ongoing series of moments in which The Last Man will raise the specter of diseased bodies, much like the ghosts that now populate the ship instead of people, only to mark the flesh as something disappeared and replaced with discourse. If these two last men – last men who don’t quite cross paths – are structurally similar in their isolation, they experience very different fates. While Lionel will conclude his text as a citizen of the world, walking ‘the shores of deserted earth’ with a dog at his side (1996, p. 367), this sailor is rendered abject, marked with disfigured hands and blackened skin, terms that associate the plague with colonial bodies in general, and African bodies in particular. Just as Shelley faced the problem of infusing life into a popular and formulaic genre, Brown similarly confronted the task of dramatizing a thoroughly overdetermined event. His readers were every bit as saturated with narratives of yellow fever as Mervyn is by the ‘fugitives’ who discourage his progress into Philadelphia: ‘from every mouth the tale of sorrow was repeated with new aggravations. Pictures of their own distress, or of that of their neighbours, were exhibited in all the hues which imagination can annex to pestilence and poverty’ (Brown, 1962, p. 132). Yet even as the pictures of distress which characterize the nation as unwell reiterate the discursive naturalization of the essential sickness of the nation’s seat of power underway in the 1790s, they also illustrate Brown’s interest in unsettling these normalizing representations of infirmity associated with the 1793 yellow fever outbreak. Responding to discourses that sought to produce a dichotomy of domestic well-being and foreign infirmity, Brown characterizes the individuals fleeing as fugitives exiled from the city of Philadelphia. In essence, he domesticates the diasporic movement of peoples that was said to transmit yellow fever to Philadelphia. Bill Christophersen notes that discussions of fever in the 1790s paranoically blamed African Americans and Caribbean refugees for bringing the fever northward. Such racism reinscribed in medicalized language white anxiety over ‘black insurrection’ in the West Indies, particularly the revolt led by Toussaint L’Ouverture in San Domingo (Haiti) from 1791 to 1803 (Christophersen, 1993, p. 106). American anxieties that Black Jacobins would bring revolution and disease – and 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




for some those are always synonyms – as the French and English waged war in the Caribbean recalled the other major event of 1793, ‘the Reign of Terror that devastated Paris and flooded Philadelphia with refugees’ (Samuels, 1996, p. 29). Brown’s fugitives mark Philadelphia as groundzero for the epidemic: I pursued the track which I had formerly taken, and entered Highstreet after night-fall. Instead of equipages and a throng of passengers, the voice of levity and glee, which I had formerly observed, and which the mildness of the season would, at other times, have produced, I found nothing but a dreary solitude. (1962, p. 132) Walking amid the empty streets of the city like a last man, Mervyn marked the presence of illness symptomatically by the exodus of the citizenry. During his approach, Mervyn discovered illness to be curiously fleeting, like something left behind and brought along in the form of stories told to all passers-by. Leaving the battle with infirmity behind, the fugitives he encountered transformed illness into a narrative or an epidemic of talking about infirmity. The difficulty Brown faced as he entered into the yellow fever epidemics is here figured by Mervyn’s elliptical account of what such a scene of infection looks like and the difficulty of representing in words what was such a catastrophic event for living bodies. Brown introduces the eponymous narrator by noting, ‘my constitution has always been frail’ (1962, p. 15), a reference which is at once medical and social in its allusion to an American constitution that seemed far too fragile just two decades into the young nation’s life. Owing, furthermore, to some ‘defect in the constitution of our mother that has been fatal to all of [my siblings] but me’ (p. 15), Mervyn’s sense of himself is always informed by his potential unsoundness. Mervyn’s chronic concern for his own well-being shares with Adrian’s English Malady a somatized expectation of the approaching dissolution of health. Brown’s description anticipates a similar account of hypochondria in Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812) by Benjamin Rush, the prominent Philadelphia physician and politician. Rush notes that hypochondria needs to be separated from the region of the hypochondrium because while that region is affected by the malady, other disorders such as yellow fever also strike there: It is true the hypochondriac region is diseased in it; so it is after autumnal fevers, and yet we do not designate the obstructions 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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induced by those fevers by that name. It would be equally proper to call every other form of madness hypochondriasis, for they are all attended with more or less disease or disorder in the liver, spleen, stomach and bowels, from which the name of hypochondriasis is derived. But I have another objection to that name, and that is, it has unfortunately been supposed to imply an imaginary disease only, and when given to the disease in question is always offensive to patients who are affected with it. It is true, it is seated in the mind; but it is as much the effect of corporeal causes as a pleurisy, or a bilious fever. Perhaps the term tristimania might be used to express this form of madness when erroneous opinions respecting a man’s person, affairs, or condition, are the subjects of his distress. (Rush, 1962, p. 75) Arguing that hypochondria is always a melancholic hypochondria (tristis means sorrowful), Rush notes that it is the body that is frequently forgotten by those who would rush to affirm, it’s all in your head.14 Of all the things a hypochondriac might be, disembodied is not one of them, he claims. Translating Rush’s affirmation that hypochondria exhibits a melancholy, that is to say incomplete, disavowal of body into the field of fictional representation, Brown imagines a sense of health that is characterized by Mervyn’s simultaneous abstraction of the body and insistence upon its materiality in the form of a gothicized narrative of disease coursing through the body. Mervyn’s entrance into the capital of the United States provides him with a lesson in civic health and an opportunity for Brown to elaborate upon the significance of hypochondria for the unhealthy nation. Entering the boarded-up home for which he has been searching, Mervyn remarks, in a passage of high drama: I mounted the stair. As I approached the door of which I was in search, a vapour, infectious and deadly, assailed my senses. It resembled nothing of which I had ever before been sensible. Many odours had been met with, even since my arrival in the city, less supportable than this. I seemed not so much to smell as to taste the element that now encompassed me. I felt as if I had inhaled a poisonous and subtle fluid, whose power instantly bereft my stomach of all vigour. Some fatal influence appeared to seize upon my vitals; and the work of corrosion and decomposition to be busily begun. (Brown, 1962, p. 137) Mervyn does not know what to make of himself having been infected by this home. Upon arriving in Philadelphia for only the second time 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




in his life, Mervyn recalls at this moment how the streets and houses had ‘formerly been … brilliant with lights, resounding with lively voices, and thronged with busy faces’ (p. 133). Now, however, the city becomes a space devoid of human life. Instead of peering into the houses as he once did, Mervyn can now see only that windows ‘were closed, above and below; dark and without tokens of being inhabited’ (p. 133). Searching among these lifeless dwellings, all the more vital for being so strangely occupied by diseases rather than people, Brown evokes the presence of the fever. At this moment in which the ‘lot of sickness was drawn’ (p. 137), Mervyn appears considerably confused. He consumes this pestilential vapour he recognizes as ‘infectious and deadly’ without being able to taxonomically classify it in relation to anything ‘of which I had ever before been sensible’. Reflecting the reanimation of pre-modern concepts such as ether and vital fluids underway in Romantic debates on life, this strangely sensible ‘subtle fluid’ is at once unlike anything Mervyn has encountered before and yet circumscribed by a certain familiarity. He has, in a sense, been preparing for this moment his entire life. Mervyn’s hypochondriacal narration of the corrosive progress of a hidden and fatal disease into his body marks the apparent realization of the illness he has always awaited. Echoes of this remarkable capacity to self-diagnose, moreover, can be heard in a rather lurid remark made by Rush in a discussion of hypochondria indebted to Blackmore’s Treatise. Recalling the sufferer’s capacity to misinterpret the state of the body, he notes that one of his own hypochondriacal patients ‘believes himself to be dead’ (Rush, 1962, p. 82).15 In contrast to this extreme case, Mervyn does not attempt to will himself away, a gesture that can only reconsolidate a subjectivity grounded by the individual’s performative acts, but his body does begin to seem strangely alien. Mervyn ‘suffers’ from a hypochondria that has the uncanny effect of sharpening and invigorating his mental and physical faculties. Brown underscores Mervyn’s unexpectedly vigorous powers of perception in a scene in which the narrator is surreptitiously knocked unconscious by an assailant and then nearly carted off as one of the dead. This scene of mistaken maladies, in which his ‘insensibility might be mistaken by observers for death’, is straightened out by the appearance of the narrator’s friend Estwick, who asks the immensely complicated question: ‘Art thou sick?’ (Brown, 1962, p. 141). Anxious not to ‘receive the best treatment which the times will afford’ at the Bush-Hill Hospital, a converted house that was seen by many Philadelphians at the time as ‘a contagious and abhorred receptacle’, Mervyn replies to his friend ‘I am not sick’ (p. 142). And yet Mervyn is sick in this scene in which health 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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and illness ‘are so easily confused’ (Christophersen, 1993, p. 118). He is sick in a way that is simultaneously enabling and compromising. Like a hypochondriac, he hopes his declaration will make it so, yet he can sense the disease sapping his strength already, as though being sick made his body more powerful. As we have seen, Shelley will recall this moment when Lionel returns to consciousness and is asked to affirm his health with a declaration that is every bit as untrue. At once sick and strangely vigorous then, Mervyn’s response to Estwick’s question seemingly amounts to a promise to get better that routes infirmity through language in a manner that he hopes will successfully abstract his illness. Mervyn acts the part of a photo-negative hypochondriac who musters a focused swerve from studying the body too closely in an effort to make the real imaginary once again. But, as David L. Clark has noted in a different context, treating hypochondria with a curious ‘negative attention of refusal or abstraction’ involves a repudiation of the body ‘which is never complete’ (2001, p. 271). The simple declaration of health Brown drafts here is plainly unfinished. Mervyn can declare himself to be healthy only by continuing to harbor hypochondriacal tendencies and to deploy them to vividly imagine health where there may be none. And if the proposition that Mervyn might will himself into good health is as likely as any other for a hypochondriac, he can nonetheless only promise to do so in a scene when the disciplinary stakes of assuring those around him of his health could not be more pressing. While hypochondria may always be partially a pathological expression of a will that has been compromised by ‘a debility of resolution’ (Reid, 1817, p. 16) – a will insufficiently pure because the very workings of it are symptomatic of a deeper illness – Brown shows that a hypochondriacal tendency to develop abstractions of the body may also be the only way amid an epidemic to express the possibility of a future. As Shelley writes of Adrian, ‘he called up the image of health and life to be found, where we knew not – when we knew not; but if ever to be found, for ever and ever to be sought’ (1996, p. 258).

Grasping at health Shelley’s narrative is indebted to Brown’s depiction of epidemic disease transmission that takes the form of a first-person narrative of infection. Both works are structured by the complicated destruction of national health and its effects upon individual bodies in a manner that poses questions as to the significance of volition, abstraction, sensibility, and language for cultural efforts to imagine the health of the nation. 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




Shelley demonstrates the impossibility of any longer imagining the nation as a zone that could be effectively policed, a prospect Lionel had once sought in the miniaturized world of Windsor Castle: ‘its forest should be our world – its garden afford us food; within its walls I would establish the shaken throne of health’ (1996, p. 205). Always premised upon imaginative and literal acts of repudiation and patrol, the nation is, for Shelley, defined by borders that consistently fail to halt the transmission of bodies and disorders. Yet if this is the conceptual endpoint of Shelley’s understanding of national well-being, it also does not stop her from trading in violent metaphors of the original foreignness of disease that infects England, metaphors which prioritize the destruction of European societies over aboriginal ones and neatly elide all of the disease that had been transmitted for centuries from the old world to the new. In a scene that has received much commentary for the way it associates disease with a foreign and abject body, Shelley represents Lionel on the threshold of his home, joining a crowd assembled around a body fallen ill: The spectators saw me, knew me, and in awful silence divided to make way for me. I snatched a light, and rushing up stairs, and hearing a groan, without reflection I threw open the door of the first room that presented itself. It was quite dark; but, as I stept within, a pernicious scent assailed my senses, producing sickening qualms, which made their way to my very heart, while I felt my leg clasped, and a groan repeated by the person that held me. I lowered my lamp, and saw a negro half clad, writhing under the agony of disease, while he held me with a convulsive grasp. With mixed horror and impatience I strove to disengage myself, and fell on the sufferer; he wound his naked festering arms round me, his face was close to mine, and his breath, deathladen, entered my vitals. For a moment I was overcome, my head was bowed by aching nausea; till, reflection returning, I sprung up, threw the wretch from me, and darting up the staircase, entered the chamber usually inhabited by my family. (1996, p. 265) Recalling Brown’s description of a similarly sensuous narrative of infection as well as Shelley’s own earlier description of the blackened body of the sailor from Philadelphia, the dying black man is a barely human embodiment of disease who marks the presence of plague. In terms of national discourse, the passage confuses ‘the sufferer and the cause of suffering’, marking this man as dangerously other and asserting his 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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foreignness despite the large number of Anglo-Africans living in Britain by ‘performatively alienat[ing] … him with the label, “negro half-clad”’ (Melville, 2007, p. 169). As an account of disease transmission, this moment clearly demonstrates the ways in which the nation relies on abject others for its self-construction and its sense of domestic security. Yet this scene also affirms the central truth of national health: the rhetorical fantasy of national well-being – an imagined community of health, if you will – relentlessly draws the nation into communication with diseased others, and thus paradoxically imbricates it in a web of possible infection in order to secure its singular well-being. The passage has frequently been identified as the source of Lionel’s apparent resistance to the plague that enables him to survive to become the last man. Lionel’s absolute neglect of a suffering human being becomes, then, disturbingly enabling as his ‘fearful embrace of colonial encounters’ (Bewell, 1999a, p. 313) might be said to inoculate him against the plague and enable him to outlast the rest of humanity because the black man transmits the plague ‘into him’ (Plug, 2003, p. 160).16 Lionel incorporates a strain of the plague into himself, according to these accounts, in the form of an antibody. Yet this criticism relies upon and trusts Lionel’s sensational intuition of the progress of disease within him, a remarkable self-awareness which effects an immediate loss of health. How are we to read Lionel’s hyper-awareness of his own well-being at this moment, particularly given Adrian’s own suspect self-diagnosis? While the ‘convulsive grasp’ of the black man might represent a source of infection and even inoculation as critics have stressed, Lionel’s equally phantasmatic grasp upon his own infirmity – a grasp not unlike Adrian’s ‘feeble hand’ – affirms something more elusive. Lionel’s encounter with the plague sufferer appears so much, almost too much, to be modeled on the conventions of national narratives of infection in which foreignness is a plague upon the natural health of England. Its excessive normalcy, its predictability, registers a figural level of interest in how medicalized discourses produce the effect of a threat to Lionel’s health that is linked to colonial disease. Thus, if we conclude Lionel is infected at this moment, such a claim accords with assumptions of the foreignness of disease and his own all-too-English hypochondriacal sensations and reactions to the prospect of ill health. Shelley follows Cheyne’s lead by linking colonialism and hypochondria here: the clutching grasp of a diseased black man prompts Lionel’s hyper-awareness of disease and his unreserved confidence in his own vigorous powers of self-diagnosis, which assume the form of a melancholic hypochondria that leads to an automatic and viscerally unwilled response producing 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




the nauseous and dizzying effects of plague, all in anticipation of its arrival. Exhibiting the traces of a lived experience of the physical effects of disease, this scene has all the trappings of such a physically devitalizing close encounter with sickness and death. Yet it also turns upon Lionel’s abstract idealization of illness that takes the form of a prescient and surprisingly immediate comprehension of disease, a gothic power that expels the abject black man in a flourish of sensationalism of which Brown could have been proud. Approaching this overdetermined scene from the subtle perspective of Lionel’s hypochondriacal intuition of his sudden deterioration, this moment ceases to be one of infection and inoculation and becomes instead a scene in which the compulsion of hypochondria has the effect of postponing the presence of sickness of the body, even as it seems most identifiable, precisely because the penetration of disease has been imagined to be absolutely identifiable. Thus, even as it introduces the conserving proposition of the foreignness of disease, it also questions whether or not Lionel is unproblematically healthy. In this reading, hypochondria undoes a presumption of English health and foreign disease with the complicated unsoundness of the narrator. Significantly, if this Romantic configuration of the English Malady resists normalizing the foreignness of disease, it is a critique unpromisingly predicated upon the utter neglect of a dying black man. That infirm bodies are most obviously enmeshed in representation at the moment they are also most physical asks the reader to consider where the conceptual ground lies for understanding health in the Romantic period. Certain bodies recede and become phantoms at the very moment when they seem ready to burst from the page, suggesting a complex fort-da movement between the corporeal body, an idealization of it, and its irrepressible return. This scene is, then, yet a further instance in which the imagined community of ill health in The Last Man is constituted by incomplete disavowals of corporeal infirmity. The reader is confronted by a scene in which Lionel’s encounter with a plague examines the rhetoric upon which normalizing attributions of health rest, yet it also risks reinscribing the violence of such idealizations precisely because health appears relentlessly to be a concern of epistemology and not ethics and thus the novel’s interest in national well-being risks replacing the body, ethics, pain, and indeed humanity with the words of the last man.

The end of hypochondria The Last Man takes seriously a question it asks early into the spread of the epidemic: ‘Where was the plague?’ (Shelley, 1996, p. 215). Shelley 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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rigorously refuses to locate the plague in one location or even conceptual terrain. The plague is viewed as foreign, though its foreignness is suspect because the plague is utterly global in its spread and its effects; it is a ‘Destroyer of man’ (p. 215), yet it is also part of a textual pandemic of reiterated scenes of infection; it is part of American and British national discourses of self; it is a symptom of contemporary English anxiety regarding the effects of colonial enterprise, though it is also a symptom of contemporary hypochondria. Because well-being is a metaphor for something that cannot be totalized and brought into visible sight or confirmed absolutely, it is readily remapped as a potent figure for so many social, cultural, and political concepts, and that volatile availability to new inscriptions is only heightened amid representations of epidemic disease. To ask after the presence of disease is also to ask after those bodies that end up under foot and that one human body that outlasts even the narration of the end. The question of where disease resides must be referred to the corporeal body and to a critical theoretical project that involves the ‘linguistic idealism of poststructuralism’ (Butler, 1993, p. 27) and continues by asking how does the well-being of the subject become materialized socially and what sort of remainders are produced by such materializing effects? How do we recover the body amid such idealizations without reducing it to a simplistic alterity as if it were wholly present in its flesh, in a violent domestication of the body’s otherness and a denial of its resistances? Shelley’s descriptions of disease in which she reiterates significant scenes and details from Arthur Mervyn mark the extension of her powerful desire to understand disease according to a logic of temporality in The Last Man – a logic which is affirmed as much by these moments of anxiously anticipated infirmity as it is by a discourse of finality – to also include an understanding of disease in spatial terms. Mervyn’s entry into Philadelphia was marked by a geography of despair that he traverses and which anticipates his encounter with yellow fever as he enters the physical space of the boarded-up house he sought. Similarly, Shelley miniaturizes the global pandemic as she depicts Lionel’s parallel introduction to the pestilence by emphasizing both the placement of the deceased and the infected neighborhoods fled by those desperately trying to stay alive. As concerned as both of these moments are with a temporal scene of a character’s intuition of impending disease, they also mark a desire to conceive of disease in terms of space, in a manner that recalls Foucault’s description of the quarantined plague town that would become the frightening dream of total order for modern governments in order to hallucinate the disorder that was also associated with the spatialization of disease. 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




Shelley’s elaboration of a particular strain of mournful hypochondria adapts from the English Malady a characteristic deferral of a proper recognition of a body’s punctual health or illness and does so in a manner that reminds us that the dream of perfectly contained, isolated, and knowable bodies in a period of epidemic disease remained a fantasy, in part because the efforts to monitor health were not centrally coordinated or given over to a full-scale medical police capable of enforcing proper hygiene with repressive mechanisms, and because the period’s efforts to guard against infirmity would always be frustrated by medical limitations that made it difficult to discern its absolute presence. The English Malady that Shelley repatriates from Brown is significant then, not only because it marks a disorder in attributions of ill health but also because it insists that well-being must be understood among a foreshortened geography of illnesses in which no malady was exclusively English anymore, and no place was secure against the threat of illnesses of another climate. The tropical invalids who emerge ‘as a new kind of subject in the medical discourse of the Romantic period’ and whose presence was a cautionary ‘reflection upon the feasibility of empire’ (Bewell, 1999a, pp. 285, 283) are recast by Shelley as the entire domestic citizenry of England, no longer safely out of reach of colonial strife and disease. She punctuates her description of England’s vulnerability with a description of health anxiety that travels across the Atlantic, and makes it nearly inconceivable to imagine something as fleetingly constituted as national health, or if it is, then it can only be done so as an expression of something like Munchausen syndrome by proxy in which its state of well-being is always imbricated in the health of others, in an altogether other health. Part of my motive in this chapter has been to show how the hypochondria elaborated by Shelley raises questions of temporality as well as geography simultaneously in a way that must be continuously understood in relation to imperialism. For Beddoes and Coleridge, hypochondria raised questions of medical perception and its exploration and mapping of the body’s dark zones. As early as Frankenstein, Shelley was thinking about monstrous and disordered bodies in spatial terms. That novel is framed by Walden’s attempt to chart a northwest passage and Frankenstein’s scouring search after his creation first across Europe and then into the Arctic. In The Last Man, space becomes an expression of etiological time, an effort to pursue health to the very ends of the earth, ends which also double as the phantasmatic beginnings of British imperial culture in the Mediterranean. Temporality is always a geography, not just in the sense that the same place cannot be occupied 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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in the same way at different times, but also in that much more imperial notion of modernity in which geographies have implied a temporality of progress.17 When Lionel comments upon his fugitive journey into the Alps, ‘we should find health, if in truth health were not herself diseased’ (Shelley, 1996, p. 308), he expresses a desire to locate health that implies a rhetoric of imperial exploration in a manner that reminds us there is always a scene of contact, a scene which does not end with infection but which marks the emergence of an epistemology that asks not just where something is but what it is as well. But what of another question than this one that desires to possess health? How might health be experienced otherwise or to other ends? Is it only or necessarily a salvation? The prospect that health might be diseased would suggest that this is a question worth asking. Coleridge certainly found a life in sickness that was worth living, even if it was not easy – as if challenges are antithetical to life rather than its very basis. Could health be found outside of the body? Lionel is searching for something that he can only write into being, while surrounded by the bodies of his fellow survivors. The materiality of the body is consistently troped as a disavowed but also melancholically preserved other to the ultra-textuality of the plague’s epidemic of signification. While it would be disingenuous to assert, by contrast, that Victor Frankenstein was at least chasing a body – given the ways in which the creature embodies so much of its creator’s own repressed psyche – the reversal is intriguing. The Last Man is fascinated by the limits of an idealist epistemology that would, according to a coarse reading of idealism, reduce the body to rhetoric. How to speak about the end of all healthy bodies, an end that happens, significantly, in language only because the narrative fails to depict the death of its author? How can the novel speak about the fragile health of contemporary British bodies thanks to the unwelcome returns of imperialism without, in a different way, reproducing the very disappearance of flesh and blood within its own pages? The problem is unavoidable from the start, yet The Last Man nonetheless marks an effort to theorize these fictions of the body as fictions and as representations always in need of supplementation. As perpetual foreigners traversing stark landscapes of epidemic disease and death, Shelley’s hypochondriacs abstract the body into something imagined at a moment when it seems nearly impossible to do so and almost unavoidable. They become the ultimate figure for all discourses of health and their tendencies to replace real bodies with illusory representations of them. If the hypochondriac emerges as a last man, a figure whose sickness or soundness promises to arrive in some 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




future event of the body’s finality, we might add that hypochondria is the last health of the body, in the sense that it exemplifies a body that ‘never stays put long enough to form self-identity’ (Ronell, 2003, p. 180).18 It is the ungraspable finitude of well-being. Describing the ways in which the subject is related to its essence, Jean-Luc Nancy notes that finitude refers to the ways ‘we are infinitely finite, infinitely exposed to our existence as a non-essence, infinitely exposed to the otherness of our own “being”’ (1993, p. 155). Thus, even as the novel attempts to materialize the untranslatable foreignness of being embodied with an expression of hypochondria, Shelley casts suspicion upon the sufficiency of the malady’s ongoing embodiment of the insight that there is ‘no epistemological stronghold, no scientific comfort or medical absolute by which to grasp your body once and for all, as if it were ever merely once and for all’ (Ronell, 2003, p. 180). In the end, the body is beyond linguistic narration. As Lionel traverses the plague-wrought desolation, he notes, ‘we read the death of the world upon the dark fane, and hugged ourselves in the remembrance that we possess that which was all the world to us – in the meanwhile – ‘ (Shelley, 1996, pp. 263–4). The effects of disease will always produce scenes of reading even as they participate in the irreducible singularity of death that causes Lionel and his few remaining compatriots to hug each other and affirm their physical presence. Significantly, Shelley ends her paragraph with a fragmentary nod to elsewhere, suggesting both the greater dissolution of health in the future notes and the acknowledgment that this possession exceeds narration. The text is poised at precisely this risk for the future of the body, a risk far older than even the English Malady. Shelley’s critique of empire is also a critique of a national politics of health that risks dematerializing the body and making disease purely rhetorical. The Last Man asserts disease is rhetorical, excessively rhetorical, but it also challenges us not to lose the body in such an understanding. The text is under no illusions about the difficulty of separating the fictional from the real and this point only becomes clearer when a novel claims it is not one. Indeed, when Shelley renounces the spectacular ill health of Arthur Mervyn as just a novel and incomparable to real life, she succeeds in pathologizing her text’s own gesture of renunciation as a further indication of the novel’s interest in idealizations of infirmity. Shelley’s sufferers are always dispersed into language in a way that is further complicated by the text’s acknowledgment of bodily experiences of sickness or soundness that refuse to be fully translated into representation. What remains within such incomplete disavowals of the body’s raw matter is 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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a phantom presence. Unshakeable corporeality will always be mediated by language and The Last Man recognizes that the representation of disease is the risk upon which a critical politics of health are founded: in the end, well-being cannot be divorced from the body any more than the presence of the body can be imagined without abstraction.




Multiple Personality: De Quincey’s Political Economies of Infirmity

In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) Thomas De Quincey notes that were it not for his forced attempts at sociality during his years at Manchester Grammar School he ‘should certainly have become hypochondriacally melancholy’ (1992, p. 48).1 De Quincey understood hypochondria to be a disease of attention afflicting those who became morbidly possessed by aspects of health which ‘under a different direction given to the thoughts, become evanescent’ (2000a, p. 86). He offers what is possibly the most thoroughly modern understanding of imagined infirmity that we have considered thus far. For the opium-eater, the malady disorders the individual’s apprehension of health and marks a failure to exercise sufficient willpower over those thoughts that concern the body. Hypochondria, moreover, was something he professes to have mastered and thus his insistence upon its absence is a sign of his selfpossessed body. Yet despite his claims, hypochondria promises to disorder his assured and reductive assertion that he is the cool ‘spectator’ (p. 82) of his own well-being rather than a ‘self-observing valetudinarian’ (p. 86) in this ‘extract from the life of a scholar’ (1992, p. 1).2 In Confessions, De Quincey records ‘a remarkable period’ in the life of his body (1992, p. 1), a period in which he experimented with opium, but also experienced ‘the extremities of hunger’ which led to a protracted ‘derangement of the stomach’ (p. 6). He insists that his ‘wretched’ well-being merits the considerable attention he affords it in this text because it attests to the dubious ‘value of the body’ (2000a, p. 81), yet he also admonishes himself for so indecorously anatomizing his complexly unhealthy body before the public. In his 1822 ‘Appendix’, which formed the final section of Confessions when it was published in book form, De Quincey confirms this hope that he not be seen to play the role of a hypochondriac, or one who attends to the malfunctioning 120



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of his own body with the lush attention a scholar might grant to more conventional matter. Even if he is not immodestly preoccupied with his own body, he is in another sense unable to look away from hypochondria. In this chapter, I consider how De Quincey returns again and again to consider this disorder here and in ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ and ‘The Last Days of Immanuel Kant’ as well. His interspersed reflections upon hypochondria assemble an un-quarantine-able group of unruly bodies who include De Quincey, the abject Malay who arrives at his cottage, and a morbidly obsessed Immanuel Kant. That De Quincey will give such deliberate attention in these works to a malady of fixation he claims to have avoided, and to a cast of others who do not seem so lucky, alerts us from the outset that hypochondria poses a particular set of interpretive questions that reverberate beyond a strictly personal experience of the infirmity, just as the malady had for Beddoes, and differently for Coleridge. If we are to believe De Quincey, or at least take seriously the possibility that his interest in hypochondria is not exhausted by a rhetoric of indulgence, then it means examining this other rhetoric of value and his calculations of health for the ways in which they prompt a consideration of how health naturalizes an embodied recognition of self-possession in the Romantic period.3 Reading De Quincey from this perspective means thinking through the intersection of liberal discourses of possessive individualism and Romantic health which combine to produce and reinscribe an idea that well-being is an individualizing property of the body one is said to possess. Just as one’s capacity to work is a measure of autonomy – man is ‘master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and the actions and labour of it’, as Locke wrote (1967, p. 316) – so too is health a property of the body in the sense that to have a cold or to have the measles is not just an expression of an abstract health but an understanding that well-being reinscribes the subject’s possession of the body as his or her own. This understanding of well-being draws upon a Romantic-period reconstruction of an idea that work was both natural and desirable for the vocation it conferred. Work was ‘rewritten from that which a true gentleman does not have to do, to the primary activity informing adult identity’ (Siskin, 1990, p. 310). One’s occupation took hold of the laboring body, constituting and regulating the individual’s comprehension of the self and its activities. For a political economist such as Adam Smith, whose An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) greatly contributes to the period’s understanding of the economic subject’s self-possession, well-being is a property of the body that improves the value of its labor. ‘It will be 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


De Quincey’s Political Economies of Infirmity


found,’ he writes, ‘in every sort of trade, that the man who works so moderately, as to be able to work constantly, not only preserves his health the longest, but, in the course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of work’ (Smith, 1937, p. 82). The value of moderate labor lies in part in preserving health, which will in turn benefit the tradesperson, apparently, by enabling him or her to work more than other, less healthy bodies. As an economic and political concept, possessive individualism is useful primarily to the extent that it inaugurates a concept of the autonomous individual who is able to enter into relationships with others and with structures outside the self. That is, self-possession socializes the subject amid relations of exchange with other similarly distinct bodies. For De Quincey – at least the De Quincey who never tarried far from concerns of the flesh in his work – what is interesting about the ways in which discourses of health and political economy mutually support a notion of possessive individualism is the possibility that they also unwork each other when the logic of what it means to possess health is pushed beyond its obvious intelligibility. In his observations upon several hypochondriacs, in Confessions and elsewhere, De Quincey shifts the ground of an opposition between health and illness into an opposition between his own ostensible ability to know health and the inability of pathological hypochondriacs such as the Malay and Kant to know their respective healths. While these works show De Quincey to be well schooled in the pathological others of normal Romantic health, and are significantly oriented toward the disciplinary strategies and moral policing of well-being, they simultaneously avow and repudiate hypochondriacal impulses and thus introduce a malady of interpretation that confesses the possibility of a significantly less calculated ethic of health. These hypochondriacal avatars of De Quincey provide the opium-eater with several figures in which to rehearse and examine this form of hypochondria that could radically unwork notions of possessive individualism while also avoiding charges of pathology that always potentially attend hypochondria. He writes of hypochondria as both a pathology of others and a reflection upon the political and economic unconscious of the healthy body which asks in particular whether or not health is something that can ever be said to be possessed by the self.

Algebra of health The idea that health is not simply something a body naturally and punctually has is crucially important for a Romantic writer like De Quincey, 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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who was intensely fascinated with the ‘wretchedness’ of his own body even as he was haunted by phantasms of the political efficacy of discourses of well-being. De Quincey complains of the ‘worthlessness’ of his own body, noting this ‘despicable human system’ could scarce ‘have been meant to be seaworthy for two days under the ordinary storms and wear and tear of life’ (2000a, p. 81). As Paul Youngquist has recently argued, De Quincey is a sort of ‘critical physiologist’ (1999, p. 350) who investigates the possibility that pathological disturbances within his body might coalesce into an entirely idiosyncratic form of ‘health impossible to reproduce in the manufactory of public hygiene’ (p. 357). In keeping with the assumptions of normative Romantic discourses of well-being, such a reading of De Quincey’s body grounds its argument within the terrain of possessive individualism in the sense that this ‘crazy’ and complexly unhealthy body is finally and uniquely De Quincey’s (2000a, p. 81). Norms of embodiment work to make wellbeing appear individual, or something one is said to possess as if it were their own. We have already seen how Thomas Beddoes deployed an economic argument to show how commercial and military expansion was affecting the health of Britons. He had argued that the mercantile class was trading its health for luxuries and that by abandoning labor to other bodies at home and abroad, they were losing their hearty vigor. His argument is rooted in a concept of health that is not simply a descriptive metaphor for economics but a way of grounding the acquisitive activity of the bourgeoisie in the body. By participating in speculative schemes and ‘scenes of trade at London or at Bristol’ rather than awaiting ‘the reward of regular industry’, Beddoes moralizes, their avarice is sacrificing the good health of the class. As their physical activity decreases, their tendency toward nervous hypochondria increases, and they become ‘exceedingly subject to insanity’ and are ‘apt to suffer from terrific illusions’ regarding their well-being (1802, 10: 77). Beddoes relies on a notion of embodied well-being, and the possibility of an imperialism that could produce sickness at home – while also being careful to make no mention of the infirmities produced abroad by mercantilism – to capture the essence of the economic subject and the basis for its refashioning. Adam Smith worked similar terrain in The Wealth of Nations as a means of documenting the unhealthy ways in which the British economy was then organized. He writes: the monopoly of the colony trade, besides, by forcing towards it a much greater proportion of the capital of Great Britain than what 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




would naturally have gone to it, seems to have broken altogether that natural balance which would otherwise have taken place among all the different branches of British industry. The industry of Great Britain, instead of being accommodated to a great number of small markets, has been principally suited to one great market. Her commerce, instead of running in a great number of small channels, has been taught to run principally in one great channel. But the whole system of her industry and commerce has thereby been rendered less secure; the whole state of her body politic less healthful than it otherwise would have been. In her present condition, Great Britain resembles one of those unwholesome bodies in which some of the vital parts are overgrown, and which, upon that account, are liable to many dangerous disorders, scarce incident to those in which all the parts are more properly proportioned. (1937, p. 566) Writing before Beddoes, Smith deploys a language that similarly maps imperial and economic questions onto the questions of well-being. Much like Cheyne did earlier in the eighteenth century, Smith uses the figure of health as a means of gauging the narrowly conceived domestic consequences of the presently monstrous and unhealthy proportions of British trade. These efforts to ground possessive individualism in a language of the healthy body are given a decisive turn in De Quincey’s writings, though not perhaps where one might at first expect. Critical commentary upon some of De Quincey’s most spectacular representations of sickness have noted the importance of the intersection of imperialism and health upon De Quincey’s work. The opium-eater’s life was ‘terrorized by the fear of an unending and interlinked chain of infections from the East, which threatened to enter his system and to overthrow it, leaving him visibly and permanently “compromised” and orientalized’ (Barrell, 1991, p. 15). Whether it was his anxiety about the ‘cancerous kisses’ of Egyptian crocodiles (De Quincey, 1992, p. 73) or the Malay’s ingestion of enough opium ‘to kill three dragoons and their horses’ (p. 57), De Quincey consistently associates the East with forms of disease and destruction in Confessions. The terrible specter of Asia as a place so ‘swarming with human life’ that ‘man is a weed in those regions’ (p. 73), disorders De Quincey’s nights and harasses his sleep. In the hazy clarity of the dream, he claims he would ‘rather live with lunatics, or brute animals’ than endure the tortures of Chinese ‘modes of life’, only to find himself further preyed upon by crocodiles and all the ‘unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud’ of the animal kingdom (p. 73). While these feelings of xenophobic dis-ease form 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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part of ‘an externalization of an internal psychic anxiety’ (Barrell, 1991, p. 17), they also participate in broader discourse of Romantic well-being that abjects certain bodies, and especially colonial bodies, as sick. De Quincey’s concerns with orientalized infirmity are symptomatic of a broader interest to think through well-being alongside questions of possessive individualism, a concern which no doubt haunts these fears of Eastern contamination but which is also least explicit in the opiumeater’s generalized anxieties surrounding the Orient. It is in his turn to address political economy in Confessions that De Quincey first refines his thoughts upon the ways in which health grounds possessive individualism. These reflections are part of a trajectory in which he tests the possibility that well-being, in its disruptive uncertainty, might dispossess the subject of a body it can recognize and claim as its own.4 De Quincey read David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1819) the year it was published and began to integrate its theories in a number of his works in the 1820s, including Confessions, in which he hailed Ricardo’s text as a ‘work of profound understanding’ (1992, p. 65). De Quincey’s fascination with political economy led him to endeavor to popularize it in forms such as his serialized ‘Dialogues of the Three Templars’ which appeared in 1824 in the London Magazine. In this text, De Quincey sought to introduce Ricardo by means of a Socratic dialogue in which the three lawyers discuss primarily the economic principles of value in use and exchange. De Quincey contended that ‘he who is fully master of the subject of Value, is already a good political economist’ (2000c, pp. 69–70). While his approach might seem like the Romantic equivalent of Political Economy for Dummies, De Quincey was in fact saving that text for 1842 when he published ‘Ricardo Made Easy: or What is the Radical Difference between Ricardo and Adam Smith, With an Occasional Notice of Ricardo’s Oversights’ in Blackwood’s Magazine. This text would be expanded into The Logic of Political Economy (1844) two years later. These works were motivated, at least in part, by De Quincey’s position that political economy, as a ‘science of regular proportions’ (1992, p. 65), was being so terribly communicated that for many readers, the ‘subject itself is a sufficient opiate’ (p. 66). Was political economy the real opiate of the masses? While it might not be appropriate to suggest that political economy gave De Quincey a buzz while it put everyone else to sleep, it clearly did have unique effects upon him. Taking on the task of popularizing Ricardo’s work, De Quincey announces in Confessions that his own texts of political economy ‘would express or illustrate [Ricardo’s ideas] more briefly and elegantly by algebraic symbols’ eschewing ‘the usual clumsy and 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




loitering diction of economists’ (p. 66) – a strange proposition for such a well-known flâneur who was every bit the loiterer he accuses Ricardo’s prose of being. De Quincey’s most substantial examination of political economy in Confessions comes precisely as an effect of milling about. On Saturday nights De Quincey would watch as the working poor, who had just received their wages, congregated at druggists in order to purchase opium rather than alcohol, due, as he notes, to ‘the lowness of wages’ and the relative inexpensiveness of opium compared to alcohol (p. 3). De Quincey observes what he calls the ‘pleasures’ of the working poor, ‘their consolations of spirit, and their reposes from bodily toil’ (p. 46) – that is, he observes the working poor indulging in the pleasures of opium. Observing and recording this spectacle of a Saturday night, De Quincey is less concerned ‘for the well-being of the poor’ (Barrell, 1991, p. 2), than he is interested to record the effects of poverty upon their health. Injecting the concerns of an economist into this scene, he notes, ‘if wages were a little higher, or expected to be so, or the quartern loaf a little lower, or it was reported that onions and butter were expected to fall, I was glad: yet, if the contrary were true, I drew from opium some means of consoling myself’ (De Quincey, 1992, p. 47). What is particularly noteworthy about this illustration of a discourse of political economy, in which he converts a loitering diction into the lively observations of a loiterer, is his attention to the body. Assembling those Britons for whom labor is an absolute necessity, De Quincey routes these early thoughts on political economy through considerations of the health-effects of a capitalist system of wage-labor. More than just providing the ground for sympathetic identification, concerns with health also differentiate the transient economist from his subjects. That is, distinctions in well-being reinscribe the class difference between the flâneur and the laboring bodies among whom he walks. De Quincey might claim to feel the pain of the working poor, but his health will not be affected by the fluctuating cost of basic commodities in the same measure. He is sympathetic to the working poor but, as he reminds his readers, they are not finally his concern. He can always turn away from them and their troubles to find consolation in opium. Even De Quincey’s avoidance of the pains of extreme poverty – that is, his ability to drive it from his mind by means of the consumption of opium – affirms his position as a subject able to dispose of his body as he chooses. Indeed, the strange ‘unfreedoms’ of opium, or the habituation and compulsions that typically characterize De Quincey’s rhetoric of drugs in Confessions, unfreedoms which also characterize the state of London’s working poor, mark De Quincey as 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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similar to yet crucially different from the laboring bodies with whom he mixes. Like the working poor, perhaps, De Quincey turns to opium as a means of relieving pain. Yet De Quincey’s pain is not that of the working poor. His discomfort arises from ‘the pains of poverty I had lately seen too much of’ (1992, p. 6; emphasis added). And one wonders, with De Quincey mimicking the opium use of the laboring classes and himself nearly destitute, whose poverty is this that he observes in the crowds around him? The work of political economy can be painful, De Quincey discovers. If reading about it could be like an opiate, observing its lived effects makes him yearn for a similar numbness. De Quincey’s illustration of political economy relies on a trope of embodiment to distinguish between classes, and assign value to certain bodies over others. It provides a clarifying optic that enables him to underscore fundamental differences between bodies as an implied difference in health. Health is, in other words, a measure of selfpossession, and the well-being of the working poor is not at all the same as De Quincey’s even if it would seem to be subject to similar analgesics. He cares for his well-being; they care for theirs. Despite the powerful similarities between De Quincey and the working poor – their shared poverty and consumptive patterns – a logic of well-being separates the body that labors from the body that walks the streets observing others. One has a body affected by the price of wheat and the other has a body that need not wait until Saturday for opium. But this does not mean health is necessarily possessed by the body, only that it appears to be and provides a means with which to differentiate bodies. When De Quincey attempts to write like a political economist and not just enliven their loitering diction he remains interested in the ways in which a logic of health naturalizes possessive individualism. Writing his Logic of Political Economy many years later, he continues to estimate political economy with this algebraic variable of the healthy body. While his purpose here is not explicitly to examine how a discourse of health profoundly shapes what it means to have a body, his text offers a remarkable scene that reverberates back to his analysis of the value of his own dispossessed body in Confessions. Once again assuming the role of the flâneur, De Quincey illustrates questions of value by imaginatively walking amid ‘the slave market at Constantinople – not in its now ruined state, but as it existed at the opening of this 19th century’ (2001, p. 229). He turns to the figural to bring economics to life and invents a scene in which life has become subject to an economic logic without reserve. Walking amid this market, De Quincey considers a range of factors by which bodies become more or less valuable and 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




pays particular attention to ‘marked differences as to health, strength, and age’ (p. 229). Under the glare of political economy and its calculating logic, health has value not simply as a desirable and proper state of being, but also as a crucial point of consideration when deciding ‘was the man worth five or eight years’ purchase’ (p. 229). The healthy laboring body is presumably more durable than an unhealthy one, and for De Quincey’s political economist well-being is a key index in the assessment of the relative value of these slaves at market. In this example, health is a measure of dispossession, or a mediating principle of exchange that brings bodies together as comparable, if not equivalent, amid the buying and selling of humans. Health gets attributed to the body as if it speaks for it at the same time that it is an expression of the body’s absolute worth. Soundness emerges as a means with which to gauge value, a form of measurement by which to determine the relative worth of certain bodies over others. Thus, if any of De Quincey’s enslaved bodies are healthy it is not a state of well-being that they can claim as their own. Rather, it belongs to the body to the extent the body can and must have a value amid systems of exchange. While it is rarely illustrated so revealingly, De Quincey’s political economy shows the moral ideal of proper health to be as calculating as it is dehumanizing. Health is a discursive mechanism by which bodies can be fitted into a system of evaluation and comparison and thus at the same moment that it grounds the individual in a self-possessed and unique body it also strips the body – and especially these enslaved bodies – of the veneer of autonomy that liberal discourses of selfpossession afford. The scene of the slave market needs to be remembered for the ways in which its logic denaturalizes health. What would otherwise be difficult to comprehend as a possession of the body, is here obviously included among those things that a slave, as property not a person, simply does not possess. De Quincey’s amble through this market turns on notions of identity and difference, much as his interactions in London had, and in each case well-being emerges as something more than a metaphor chosen simply to animate discussions of economics. This political economy of well-being, an economy which is formed out of the intersection of discourses of political economy, imperialism, and health, raises compelling questions as to how real and metaphorical bodies are used, disposed, possessed, and indeed, what the body can be said to possess. That health occupied a privileged rhetorical role as a way of understanding self-possession also prompts the possibility that alterations in understanding health may beckon significant changes in economic calculations of subjectivity. And what, moreover, does it 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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mean to imagine health not as a property of the body but as something that circulates between and among bodies?

De Quincey included his ‘Appendix’ to the first edition of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, a volume which followed the initial periodical publication of ‘Confessions’ in the London Magazine the previous year. In this newly added text he reflects upon the propriety of circulating his ‘wretched’ body among the reading public. Having taken pains to chronicle his ill health and subsequent experiments with opium – experiments which caused as much putative illness as they alleviated – De Quincey is anxious he not be perceived as a self-obsessed hypochondriac. He doubts ‘whether opium had any connexion with the latter stage of my bodily wretchedness – (except indeed as an occasional cause, as having left the body weaker and more crazy, and thus predisposed to any mal-influence whatever)’ and consequently declares he shall ‘willingly spare my reader all description’ of his dejected well-being (2000a, p. 84). A noble declaration, but a disingenuous one nonetheless. De Quincey’s ongoing concern with his well-being continues in the ‘Appendix’, but in the form of careful reflections upon the relation between his own self-possession and a hypochondriacal fascination with his body that structures Confessions. Having drawn the readers’ attention to ‘so truly base a subject as my own body’, he is anxious the reader not so far misapprehend me as to believe it possible that I would condescend to so rascally a subject for its own sake, or indeed for any less object than that of general benefit to others. Such an animal as the self-observing valetudinarian I know there is; I have met him myself occasionally, and I know that he is the worst imaginable HEAUTONTIMOROUMENOS; aggravating and sustaining, by calling into distinct consciousness, every symptom that would else perhaps, under a different direction given to the thoughts, become evanescent. (2000a, p. 86) At risk here is De Quincey’s authority to narrate his body with an objective and keen eye, but also the public circulation, in print, of his disordered body.5 He is concerned that his Confessions not be seen as a self-indulgent narrative of suffering, but instead be read as a ‘useful and instructive’ medical report (1992, p. 1). Such claims of utility show ‘how nervously am I alive to the reproach of this tendency’ toward 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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‘gratuitous self-humiliation’, as De Quincey notes in the opening pages of Confessions (p. 1). Perhaps belaboring the point, he admits his attention to his ‘moral ulcers or scars’ indecorously violates ‘that delicate and honourable reserve’ of the English reading audience (p. 1), a phrase as rich with irony as it is with genuine distress regarding how his text is interpreted. Ironic or not, De Quincey cannot stop attending to his body or to the identity that such attention entails. The ‘Appendix’ attests to the extent to which the opium-eater’s self-understanding is mediated and shaped by the normalizing identity of the pathologized hypochondriac, an identity which implied his attention was dangerously captivated by his well-being. De Quincey’s negative care for his body was both attentive and rigorous – if not always in the putative best interests of health – and he feared that hypochondria was a complicatedly appropriate designation after the publication of Confessions, yet he hesitates to declare himself to be what he fears he is. Indeed, his reflections in the ‘Appendix’ address his readers in a manner that amounts to an injunction regarding his own health, compelling them to decide what to do with this body which they do not know and know all too well. At these moments, Confessions is poised to turn health into an ethical imperative which forces the reader to acknowledge the uncertainty that underwrites a moral economy of normative well-being. This was the path Coleridge, for one, took as he attempted to repudiate the pathologizing impulses of this malady and reinvent it as something irreducible to identity. De Quincey, however, opts for a different course. He adds his voice to the ongoing abjection of hypochondria and hopes that his vociferous denunciation will not be profoundly self-implicating. This ongoing abjection of hypochondria expresses a powerful and pervasive anxiety about the feminine in Confessions. De Quincey seeks to differentiate his account of the body from those written by ‘indulgent sensualists’, or those feminized individuals who are ‘vulnerable to the immediacy of their sensations’ (Logan, 1997, p. 96). The hypochondriac of the ‘Appendix’ reiterates an earlier representation of a self who is subject to the sensations of the body, a feminized and thus also implicitly orientalized self which posits as a concern whether or not De Quincey ‘possesses a masculine independence from his bodily sensations’ (Logan, 1997, p. 96). He negotiates this threat of effeminacy primarily by offering strong readings of his own body, always careful to enforce a certain separation from its sighs and moans, just as he had from the bodies of the working classes. He hopes to avoid having his text lumped in with so many novels of sensibility and his labor interpreted as the indulgent work of a hypochondriac, primarily by emphasizing the text’s utility. Against 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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the tendency of his body-centered narrative to whet the reader’s appetite for effeminate novels of pleasure and ‘defective sensibility’, he insists his text will prove ‘not merely an interesting record, but, in a considerable degree, useful and instructive’ (1992, p. 1). And yet here he is, offering up the literary labors of well-being and the strange workings and failings of his body in a manner that, at the very least, objectifies his body as much as it consolidates his own position as the self-possessed observer of it. In the ‘Appendix’, moreover, he disavows this feminized regard for the body in the form of an explicit examination of hypochondria which is modeled upon an anxious individual who is unable to reflect patiently and critically upon felt sensation. Noting the hypochondriac is a person he had ‘met with occasionally’, and perhaps never more so than when reflecting upon Confessions, De Quincey asserts that he has nothing but contempt for ‘this undignified and selfish habit’ of immoderately attending to the body (2000a, p. 86). He constructs hypochondria like a misogynist or homophobic epithet and hurls it at those individuals who are, in his mind, too preoccupied by the body to reflect upon it. Addressed to his readers, however, this comment enables De Quincey to perform his rejection of hypochondria as a means of distinguishing himself in his so-called independence from those pathological others whose differential claims know the body he cannot even acknowledge, let alone recognize. Mapping conventional gender distinctions onto his understanding of the unhealthy body, De Quincey’s hypochondria reinscribes normalizing diagnoses of the pathological subject whose complex interest in the well-being of the body is reduced to a symptom of a disordered individual. Defined against the hypochondriac possessed by his health, De Quincey appears orderly and collected in his observations upon a body that does not seem beyond his reach or in excess of his ability to know it and its functions. And if De Quincey’s assured disavowal of a hypochondriacal fascination with ill health stopped here at these comments in the ‘Appendix’, then his abjection of this malady as an undesirable and feminizing pathology might appear entirely sufficiently well-contained by these declarations. But the thought of hypochondria is not finished by this crucial consideration of the ways in which the malady and effeminacy are intertwined in Confessions to produce an autonomous narrating subject. The disorder marks a form of effeminacy, but that is not its only function in the text. De Quincey cannot muster the strength of mind to turn away from his body, to give a ‘different direction to the thoughts’. He continues to probe hypochondria and his own infirmity in comments which follow immediately from these and his text begins to mark a tension between 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell



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But as to myself, so profound is my contempt for this undignified and selfish habit, that I could little condescend to it as I could to spend my time in watching a poor servant girl, to whom at this moment I hear some lad or other making love at the back of my house. Is it for a Transcendental Philosopher to feel any curiosity on such an occasion? Or can I, whose life is worth only eight and half years’ purchase, be supposed to have leisure for such trivial employments? (2000a, p. 86) If we follow De Quincey’s analogy through, clearly he is quite willing to condescend to the concerns of the flesh, particularly given the attention he affords to events going on behind his house. The humorous irony of De Quincey’s inability to stay focused, even if he does remain at his writing desk, coyly signals he is not entirely convinced his relationship with hypochondria is one of occasional acquaintance. Indeed, his hate and ‘bitter ridicule and contempt’ for his flesh exhibits a negative and unrequited love for ‘the phenomena of his own body’ (p. 86). Structured by such complex forms of longing and anxiety, this passage bears patient scrutiny, beginning with a consideration of what it might mean not to resolve well-being into proper health or deviant illness. Perhaps felt with the same intensity of desire as those behind his house, De Quincey’s ongoing regard and care for his body in Confessions includes his attention to his ‘most painful affection of the stomach’ which had ‘originally been caused by the extremities of hunger, suffered in my boyish days’ (1992, p. 6). Noting that this derangement continued and that the ‘callousness or defect of sensibility in the stomach’ was ‘increasing’, De Quincey wonders whether this pain ‘might imply a scirrhous state of that organ, either formed or forming’ (2000a, p. 82). His simultaneous determinations and indeterminations of his ‘physical anguish’ and his very public examination of this body in pain lead his text toward a form of hypochondria, but only obliquely (1992, p. 16). These comments upon his own disorders reveal an implicit understanding that hypochondria designates a form of indeterminacy in judgments of well-being and thus cannot be resolved into presence except as an enduring tension between having and not having the disorder. They point toward, but also fall short of, a recognition that he cannot simply 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


a strategy of pathologizing the hypochondriac as the other to his rational self-possession, and a compelling interest in the possibility that it may not be possible to readily locate health in any body. De Quincey’s remarks upon hypochondria continue:

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abject something as fugitive as hypochondria. De Quincey distills and displaces this potential insight back into a turn toward the economic in which he imagines he can calculate his well-being with utter precision. While the economist in De Quincey might have been drawn to record the sounds of the reproduction of the modes of production behind his house, his recognition he is worth only eight and half years’ purchase is startling. He consigns his own body to the calculations of the slave market in Istanbul, thereby translating the normalizing pressures of well-being into a language of political economy. Just as he would in The Logic, he considers health not as a property of the body but as a means by which his body’s value can be determined and distinguished from other bodies – perhaps first and foremost those bodies who are not sufficiently self-possessed to have the luxury of hypochondria. De Quincey turns algebraic symbols back into numbers here as he imagines a health that might dispossess the body, as if it were something owned by others. And this must have been how it felt to walk, not in the slave market of Istanbul, but among the booksellers of London and find his complexly infirm body up for sale in the form of a book. Confessions commodifies a fictional body and a body that suffers from fictions of the body. This publicly circulating hypochondriacal body that confesses itself is well beyond his control, regardless of what he might offer in the ‘Appendix’ to shape the reader’s perceptions of it.6 His efforts to constrain how it is read only further underscore the myriad interpretations to which this body is subject. Nonetheless, De Quincey counters the readers’ interpretations of his own well-being, interpretations over which he has no control, with a fantasy born of the economizing logic of the slave market. Calculating himself with the crude imprecision of economics, he suggests that his disordered health diminishes his worth to ‘only eight and a half years’ purchase’. His health is terrible, he intimates, and offers a precise – though seemingly arbitrary – calculation of how it drives down his value. He is a bad risk, looking long-term. As it turns out, however, this forecast is far from accurate. His hatred for his body – a labor he could perform endlessly despite his assertion ‘I had no labours that I rested from’ on Saturday nights (1992, p. 46) – compels him to live and work, right up until age 74, well past his purchase price. Not knowing whether he is sick or healthy, whether disorders are formed or forming, De Quincey cannot properly assess himself according to a coarsening measure of health. His best guess might be eight and a half years from 1822, but it turns out he’s wrong by at least another 29 years. He might be a hypochondriac; he might not be. This is an unhappy 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




experience, and even a potentially awkward one. De Quincey suffers from such severe and irrepressible fictions of the body’s materiality that he does not recognize it when he sees it years later – years earlier – in the streets of Istanbul. Confronted by his body’s double and its other, he fails at the most basic task which health is supposed to guarantee – that we recognize the body as our own. His body has in a sense wandered away from him. At the end of Part One of Confessions, when he writes of someone who did indeed disappear from his life, De Quincey insists if he sees Ann the prostitute again ‘I should know her amongst a thousand, if I saw her for a moment’ (1992, p. 34). The truly absent body possesses a certain mournful finality that here makes its materiality unmistakable. His own melancholic body proves to be much more of a stranger. Failing to embody the role of the cool spectator he claims to be, De Quincey is confronted by his own ambivalent insights into his wellbeing which trouble his self-assured possession of his body. But De Quincey does not resolve this tension between the pathological identity of the hypochondriac he would like to disavow and the potentially much more troubling ambivalence hypochondria raises for questions of well-being and the subject’s ability to know its health, and thus recognize itself as an embodied being. He might want to repudiate hypochondria and be done with it, but cannot. It holds some further insight for him, waiting for him, making noises, drawing him toward an idea that health might fail as the terrain with which to differentiate self from other.

De Quincey’s economy of the philosopher’s body De Quincey’s most lurid abjection of the hypochondriac as a pathological figure comes in his depiction of a morbidly obsessed Immanuel Kant in ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, a portrait of the philosopher’s cherished attention to his body which De Quincey had come to know as he translated Ehregott Andreas Christoph Wasianski’s ‘The Last Days of Immanuel Kant’. De Quincey published ‘On Murder’ and ‘The Last Days’ together in the February 1827 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine, and while they concern very different subject matter, they share an investment in the normative policing of Kant’s health. That De Quincey endeavors to regulate the health of a dead man suggests rather spectacularly the extent to which these texts express De Quincey’s, and not Kant’s, recurrent interest in questions of hypochondria and the circulation of Romantic well-being. Much of the compelling recent criticism on De Quincey frequents the scenes of his real 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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and imagined interactions with Kant in which the philosopher forms a larger-than-life specter who haunts his writing and self-knowledge.7 Clark astutely contends that De Quincey’s translation of Wasianski’s biography restages certain concerns with the opium-eater’s own flesh as a way of ‘interpreting, chastizing, and protecting facets of his own personality that had been laid bare by drugs and by being-on-drugs’ (2003, p. 263). ‘The Last Days’ amounts to ‘confession by other means’ (p. 264) in the sense that it provides De Quincey an opportunity to examine questions pertinent to the circulation of his own morbidly conceived body, but do so by appearing to attend to and recirculate the phantasmatic body of a dignified philosopher who, unlike De Quincey to be sure, paid ‘anxious attention to his health’ (De Quincey, 2000d, p. 83). Looking for and finding hypochondriacs all around him, De Quincey’s strange economy of abject hypochondria receives further development in this text and ‘On Murder’. The particular concerns raised by his representation of Kant’s supposed hypochondria posit a relationship between Kant and a form of dis-ease but also between Kant, hypochondria, and himself as well. And while De Quincey does not admit his own dis-ease in the hypochondriacal desires of Kant, he does confess an expression of well-being that cannot be said to belong to either Kant or himself and which speaks to the place of normalizing representations of dis-ease amid a larger discursive investment in hypochondria in De Quincey’s writings. His narrow portraits of Kant as a walking embodiment of a pathological concern for his own well-being are not without their basis in Kant’s ongoing and abstemious attention to his body, as Susan Meld Shell has so richly demonstrated, but it is also grossly reductive to say that Kant simply was a hypochondriac. The author of the three Critiques had always contended that he had a disposition to hypochondria but was able to master these morbid thoughts to such an extent that he viewed his health as a work of art, wrought upon ‘the medium of his own body’ (Shell, 1996, p. 265). As a concept that mediates his consideration of the mind’s faculty of abstraction, hypochondria is not simply a disorder of the body. It describes a range of practices and concepts that form part of Kant’s sustained thinking upon questions of judgment. Kant developed a capacious understanding of hypochondria throughout his life, beginning with his Investigation Concerning Diseases of the Head (1764) and running right up until his late essay ‘On the Power of the Mind to Master its Morbid Feeling by Sheer Resolution’, which was published in 1798 and then included as the final section of The Conflict of the Faculties (1798). In these texts and others, Kant examines hypochondria as a form 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




of indeterminacy troubling judgment as well as matters of epistemology, an everyday disorder of the body, and a dis-ease troubling his age.8 After Kant’s death, however, the biography written by his former student and confidant Wasianski translates the philosopher’s critical interest in hypochondria into an anxious and private concern Kant felt for his own well-being, as Clark has demonstrated (2003, p. 262). The Kant that De Quincey invents with Wasianski’s able assistance, moreover, is less concerned with thinking critically about dis-ease than with ritualistically preparing for an ideal night’s rest by swathing himself in sheets and blankets ‘like a mummy’ (De Quincey, 2000d, p. 81). This Kant so fretted over his well-being as to ‘disapprove of walking or riding alone; the double exercise of thinking and bodily agitation, carried on at the same time, being likely, as he conceived, to press too hard upon the stomach’ (p. 80). These words are De Quincey’s own addition to Wasianski’s text, which he appends in the form of a footnote in order to challenge Wasianski’s assertion that after his regular dinner party, Kant would habitually take a walk for exercise and he would do so alone, ‘partly, perhaps, because he thought it right, after so much convivial and colloquial relaxation, to pursue his meditations’ (p. 79). De Quincey seizes on this moment of obvious uncertainty on the part of Wasianski to demonstrate his own intimate knowledge of the philosopher’s habits and to further confirm that Kant is a hypochondriac whose attention to his health pervaded even the most everyday activities. If De Quincey sought to mock Kant as a man in possession of an ‘exquisite health’, a man so self-involved that he is ‘like the silk worm in his cocoon’ spinning regimens with which to stave off his disposition to hypochondria (p. 81), he also sought to attack him philosophically in the same issue of Blackwood’s Magazine. In ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ De Quincey turns his attention momentarily from the philosopher’s body to target his intellectual work instead. He ridicules Kantian aesthetics in this essay by perverting Kant’s ideal ‘community of enthusiasts’ who are united by their aesthetic judgments of taste into a ‘Society of Connoisseurs of Murder’ (2000e, p. 112).9 If the imagined occasion of the text, the ‘Williams Lecture on Murder’, named in honor of John Williams who murdered the inhabitants of two London households in December of 1812, is an extended parodic insult to Kant’s work on aesthetics, as O’Quinn and others have noted, De Quincey also finds himself unable to direct his gaze away from a hypochondria that he would swear is Kant’s.10 De Quincey continues to follow Wasianski’s lead, then, when it comes to imagining Kant. His lecturer presents the philosopher as a pathologically self-involved 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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For health’s sake, Kant imposed upon himself, at one time, a walk of six miles everyday along a highroad. This fact becoming known to a man who had his private reasons for committing murder, at the third milestone from Konigsberg, he waited for his ‘intended,’ who came up to time as duly as a mail-coach. But for an accident, Kant was a dead man. However, on considerations of ‘morality,’ it happened that the murderer preferred a little child, whom he saw playing in the road, to the old transcendentalist: this child he murdered; and thus it happened that Kant escaped. Such is the German account of the matter; but my opinion is – that the murderer was an amateur, who felt how little would be gained to the cause of good taste by murdering an old, arid, and adust metaphysician; there was no room for display, as the man could not possibly look more like a mummy when dead, than he had done alive. (2000e, pp. 124–5) In an elaborate joke De Quincey suggests that Kant’s hypochondria almost precipitates his demise not because of imagined disease or reckless self-administration of medicine, but because his disciplined regimen makes him an easily available target for murder, a regimen which for De Quincey is already a stand-in for Kant’s philosophy and actions as a public intellectual. De Quincey offers the readers of Blackwood’s Magazine a further indictment of Kant’s hypochondria by insinuating that Kant is led by his daily pursuit of health to travel some distance from an awareness of the very real threats against his embodied life that awaited him. Or at least this is the German account of the matter, which De Quincey claims to have taken from an anonymous biography ‘of this very great man’ (p. 124). His own version claims to simply add another layer. He contends that Kant’s hypochondriacal attention to his well-being led him to live perhaps too long, and certainly too temperately, as ‘the man could not look more like a mummy when dead, than he had done alive’. Oriental disease staggers toward De Quincey, its arms extended, having taken possession of Kant’s body in advance of his actual demise. De Quincey’s anxiety may not be of the East, however. His rebuttal of this particular narration of Kant’s near-death – or what De Quincey caustically calls his life – raises questions as to just how sure-footed De Quincey is in his description of Kant as a hypochondriac. 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


scholar of his own body and a man whose attention to the body nearly cost him his life. This at least is what De Quincey imagined in a brief episode in which he recounts how the bumbling philosopher narrowly escaped being murdered even if he never knew his life was at risk:


His comments here retrace the ground of an earlier rebuttal of Wasianski from ‘The Last Days’, and given that De Quincey does not substantially alter Wasianski’s biographical details (Rzepka, 2000, p. 93), these two very similar corrections deserve some consideration for the ways in which they interact upon one another.11 Both of these confident assertions that he knows better than the German originals upon which he claims to draw involve questions of Kant’s habits of perambulation. Perhaps because De Quincey so clearly self-identifies as a flâneur he felt particularly expert in questions of walking and indeed the walking habits of others. What is strange, however, is that the two narratives potentially contradict one another. On the one hand, De Quincey reminds his readers that for health reasons Kant did not walk alone, lest he double his bodily labor with mental exertion that would have been better diverted in polite conversation with a companion. Yet given this correction, it is surprising that De Quincey does not qualify this unattributed account of Kant’s near-murder in a similar manner. Or would that have made the story less plausible? Would Kant have still been vulnerable to murder had he been walking with a companion who could provide at least the illusion of safety in numbers? Yet murder is really not the point here at all, except perhaps in the mode of character assassination. If De Quincey’s clarification in ‘The Last Days’ reinforces an image of Kant as a hypochondriac who perpetually estimates the effects of his actions upon his health, excluding these humanizing details from ‘On Murder’ bolsters his depiction of a pathologically disordered philosopher. These details about Kant’s tendency not to walk alone, and certainly not to walk alone habitually, are not excluded, however. They are just not present in ‘On Murder’. The uncanny resemblance of this scene to the description of Kant’s exercise regimen in ‘The Last Days’ draws these two moments together irresistibly in the form of each other’s other. When it comes to Kant’s habits of walking, who is right? This is not an answerable question, particularly given De Quincey’s uneven deflection of his description of a pathologically obsessed Kant onto his putative German sources. Indeed while he conceals his own malice behind the kindly insults of Wasianski, he also joins in this concerted assault upon Kant’s reputation by affirming his own power to reconstruct Kant’s life in his note in ‘The Last Days’. De Quincey’s supplemental comments upon Kant in both of these works form a complex web of authority in which De Quincey’s possible deflection of authorship is complicated by parallel claims to authority. The interruption by a German narrative in ‘On Murder’, an interruption which De Quincey in all likelihood invented himself, treads upon similar terrain as it once again provides him with an opportunity to 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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declare Kant’s sorry failure to exhibit the necessary life-signs to merit even the attention of a murderer, let alone the attention of his readers, he implies. But the precise terms of De Quincey’s correction of the story are significantly ambivalent in how they represent Kant and are, I would argue, under-examined. Having noted that the murderer redirects his grisly attention at the last possible moment to a child, De Quincey’s lecturer concludes, ‘the murderer was an amateur, who felt how little would be gained to the cause of good taste by murdering an old, arid, and adust metaphysician; there was no room for display, as the man could not possibly look more like a mummy when dead, than he had done alive’.12 The vitriol of De Quincey’s final comments tends to draw much of the recent critical consideration of this passage. O’Quinn notes, for example, that the lecturer refutes the German account in order to consider ‘which killing would be the most aesthetically satisfying’ (1999, p. 45).13 Similarly, Nigel Leask suggests that the murderer is ‘a man of discerning taste’ (1995, p. 103), which again follows De Quincey’s suggestion that the art of murder ironically saves Kant from a death more real than life. Yet what is the significance of the lecturer’s initial delineation of the murderer as an amateur? Would a more seasoned murderer have followed through on his plan, perhaps seeing a certain beauty and grace in Kant’s embodied care of the self?14 The suggestion of the murderer as a mere dabbler introduces a significant cleavage into De Quincey’s pathologization of Kant. While the text does not positively affirm the complex and elusive vitality that would make Kant an appropriate object of murder – the kind of liveliness that would require a more discerning eye than this amateur possesses – it does nonetheless open itself to this reading.15 De Quincey certainly seemed to think Kant was worth murdering, as he expends considerable energy trying to ‘murder Kant’s dignified reputation’ in this issue of Blackwood’s Magazine (Clark, 2003, p. 263). With Kant’s memory and legacy abandoned by Wasianski in favor of spectacular details about his daily regimen, De Quincey finds Kant to be a prime target for murder walking all alone on the high road. But De Quincey cannot pull the trigger, as it were. And not for lack of trying. Shades of the amateur political economist who hopes not to anesthetize his readers, De Quincey seeks to supplement the sources upon which he draws, only to find himself much less certain about the hypochondriacal disorders of body he sought to anatomize. His analysis of Kant’s hypochondria within and between these two texts does not tend to some resolution of the interpretive tension it instantiates. That De Quincey does not resolve this tension is perhaps the most noteworthy thing about it. The at times smug and 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




knowing tone with which De Quincey repudiates the German versions of events in ‘On Murder’ and ‘The Last Days’ conceals an indeterminacy that flows between these two moments and which poses questions as to whether or not Kant, even in this illusory form, possesses the health De Quincey imagines he does. Despite the obviousness of his sketch of Kant drawn in the ink of pathology, his portrait of the hypochondriac as an old man, and his possible self-portrait of the hypochondriac dressed as the transcendentalist, does not yield a singular image of disordered health. Instead, his pathologization of Kant reenacts the bodily uncontainability of hypochondria that it is meant to stymy. His elaboration of Kant’s hypochondria preserves as uncertain a health that cannot be claimed as a property of the philosopher’s body anymore than De Quincey can take possession of it in a gesture of literary grave-robbing.

Murdering to dissect The ambivalent hospitality with which De Quincey receives and attends to hypochondria in ‘The Last Days of Immanuel Kant’ and ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ replicates the consideration he offers the Malay who knocks at the door of his cottage in Confessions. Before examining this scene it is worth pausing to consider the ways in which Romantic hypochondria implies a structure that continually reasserts itself. For Shelley, hypochondria linked The Last Man to Arthur Mervyn, and this structure of reliance upon another text was internally replayed in a hypochondria that represented the novel’s consideration of the ways in which proper health or illness is always deferred by an unintelligible well-being. Similarly, the hypochondria troubling Beddoes’ efforts to reform a medical marketplace by anxiously differentiating his ‘professional’ text from competing works was replayed within his description of a nervous bourgeoisie differentiated from the working classes and the aristocracy. Hypochondria implies a structure of understanding, but more than that, it implies a structuring relationship to alterity that is, metaphorically, overridden by anxiety as to its own presence. It continually tries to assert itself only to fail to do so absolutely. Shaped by competing and divergent versions of what hypochondria is in the Romantic period, the disorder consistently fails to bring itself into being fully and finally. While its clinical diagnosis is aligned with the imagination and problems of fixation, as a cultural event, its manifestations are characterized by irrepressibility, returns, and incompletion. De Quincey may have understood this better than any other 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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commentator or acquaintance of the disorder, continually revisiting and revising his attachment to the malady in ways that acknowledge the instability of hypochondria itself. Neither Kant nor the Malay are treated well by De Quincey, yet their well-being is of tremendous concern for the opium-eater. They are both figures whose disorders prompt De Quincey to further examine his own hypochondria and further contemplate just what this malady represents and portends for his understanding of the body. The Malay arrives at De Quincey’s cottage door almost like hypochondria itself: unanticipated and strangely familiar, he is a terrifying threat to what De Quincey thinks he knows about bodily well-being.16 His arrival is as starkly unsolicited as it is seemingly random: ‘one day a Malay knocked on my door. What business a Malay could have to transact amongst English mountains, I cannot conjecture: but possibly he was on his road to a sea-port about forty miles distant’ (1992, p. 55). Whatever his business may have been that brought him past De Quincey’s cottage, the Malay very rapidly finds himself a part of the opium-eater’s flourishing trade in discourses of well-being. De Quincey, who was upstairs at the time of the Malay’s knock, descends at the behest of the servant girl who thought ‘there was a sort of demon below’ (p. 56). The opium-eater does not tell his readers if the Malay’s arrival had interrupted anything in particular. Coleridge had certainly been interrupted by a similarly unexpected guest, when the banal knock by the man from Porlock interrupted his record of the opium-induced reverie ‘Kubla Khan’, leaving the text permanently unfinished. The Malay’s much more exotic arrival similarly interrupts De Quincey: he disturbs De Quincey’s efforts to write as if he knows his own body. De Quincey’s hallucinated scene of colonial encounter – if not itself a hallucination, then a hallucination of those other far more consequential scenes of encounter happening across the empire between British subjects and others – is framed by questions of intelligibility. De Quincey jokes that his knowledge of ‘Oriental tongues is not remarkably extensive, being confined to just two words – the Arabic word for barley, and the Turkish for opium’ (p. 56), but he is nonetheless prepared to interpret what he can from the scene he confronts as he enters his kitchen. As Bewell has noted, this scene stages the potential infection of non-colonial England by the effects of global commerce, in the form of a narrative of racialized sexual predation by the Malay who ‘had placed himself nearer to the girl than she seemed to relish’ (p. 56). The threat posed by the Malay is both a fear of degeneracy as well as an epidemiological concern with ‘tropical fever and its threat to 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




a domestic England’ (Bewell, 1999a, p. 159). The latter is made all the more threatening by the Malay’s disruptive arrival at Dove Cottage – the former Grasmere home of Wordsworth and figural hearth of Britain, in which De Quincey at that time resided. And while the Malay embodies the threat of colonial disease, his presence also potentially disorders the disciplinary effects of normalizing discourses of health or disease. Upon entering the kitchen, De Quincey immediately recognizes the Malay as a man of Eastern origin whose skin appears ‘veneered with mahogany’ from long exposure to ‘marine air’ and who has suffered a deeply ‘solitary life’ as a consequence of being able to communicate only in what ‘I suppose was Malay’ (1992, pp. 56–7). The initial clarity with which De Quincey perceives the Malay fades quickly, however. He qualifies his narration, noting the Malay must have suffered such solitude, that is, ‘if he had travelled on foot from London,’ a fact of which De Quincey cannot be certain (p. 57). And perhaps the appearance of his veneered skin was more of an effect of standing next to such dark wood ‘panelled on the wall’ of the kitchen (p. 56). De Quincey’s mind whirs upon seeing the Malay, as he begins to freely associate everything he can think of with this being before him. Or rather, his mind wanders, as he used to on Saturday nights, when he would either attend to the working classes or retire to performances at the Opera House. More than just inventing a knowledge he does not possess about the Malay, De Quincey experiences a mode of indecision which presages a species of non-knowledge he had encountered before and which seemed to return in the form of this kitchen tableau: ‘the group which presented itself, arranged as it was by accident, though not very elaborate, took hold of my fancy and my eye in a way that none of the statuesque attitudes exhibited in the ballets at the opera house, though so ostentatiously complex, had ever done’ (p. 56). With this domestic scene reminding him of the ballet, De Quincey travels back to a space where he encountered very similar difficulties in communication. At the Opera House he was immersed, he notes, in a language he could not understand and not just ‘the musical sounds’ which are ‘to me like a collection of Arabic characters’ (p. 45). ‘Over and above the music of the stage and the orchestra’ De Quincey had all around him the incomprehensible ‘music of the Italian language talked by Italian women: for the gallery was usually crowded with Italians’ (p. 46). Admitting himself to be ‘a poor Italian scholar’, De Quincey suggests that he understood only ‘a tenth part of what I heard spoken’ in the Opera House (p. 47). While a one-tenth ratio is considerably better than his knowledge of Eastern languages, De Quincey’s experience of attending productions at 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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the Opera House, hearing strange music and the stranger music of the Italian language, models a form of partial understanding of which he is reminded by the challenge of communicating with and making sense of the Malay. This difficulty in understanding is heightened in the kitchen of his cottage, however, by virtue of the almost total alterity the Malay represents for De Quincey. Incapable of comprehending the Malay, De Quincey tries speaking Greek to him in an attempt to ease this interpretive tension, proposing it as a medium of communication because ‘it came geographically nearest to an Oriental one’ (p. 57). But the only person who understands Greek in the kitchen is De Quincey, which as it turns out is exactly the person to whom he is speaking. As Barrell has noted, this scene within the kitchen marks a moment of literal ‘domestication’ of the Malay in service of a process of anxious self-consolidation by De Quincey (Barrell, 1991, p. 19). The Malay becomes alternatively a commodity – mahogany – which is recognized by the amateur political economist, or a body suffering from some form of disease which might, unsurprisingly, benefit from the opium De Quincey has ready-to-hand. But De Quincey is not entirely sure either interpretation adequately translates the Malay into something intelligible, and his thoughts are consequently haunted by this other scene of incomprehension at the Opera House. The effect of this uneven and incomplete process of naturalizing the alterity that confronts him in his non-interactions with the Malay is such that De Quincey reconstitutes the puzzling threat of the East in the form of a hypochondriacal threat to his ability to know the body. As Bewell notes, De Quincey’s Malay embodies a ‘nightmare encounter made possible by colonialism’ (1999, p. 159), but this orientalized terror also reveals a decided English Mala(d)y.17 The scene with the Malay gives De Quincey yet another body to examine, another body which he possesses – though not his own – and which presents with the complex signs of Romantic hypochondria. These symptoms of hypochondria are several, and reflect the extent to which political and economic discourses shape what it means to possess health. Anticipating a table that would dance on its head, De Quincey’s Malay embodies an allegory of the imperial subject who turns, whirling like De Quincey’s opium-drenched mind, into a commodity. Reproducing his own anxious concerns about circulating his body for public consumption, De Quincey finds himself looking into an exoticizing mirror, and what he finds reflected back is his own decidedly English hypochondriacal policing of his commodified body in the form of the Malay. Reading the Malay as part of a colonial rather 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




than domestic economy of the English Malady, the mahogany-paneled Malay represents the commodities of imperialism, and models them coming to life and endangering the health of the English at home as Beddoes had feared. Indeed, the Malay already seems infected with the hypochondria that is fantasized and cultivated as a product of British mercantilism and civilization. In the ultimate misjudgment of the body’s future well-being, the Malay not only accepts the quantity of opium that De Quincey offers him as a means of quelling the pain he fancies the Malay suffers, but the visitor ingests it all at once, ‘enough to kill three dragoons and their horses’ (1992, p. 57). His arrival was unexpected and now his successful departure from the English mountainside seems every bit as unlikely. But the Malay leaves, and he does not turn up dead any time soon after his departure from De Quincey’s cottage, or at least ‘I never heard of any Malay being found dead’ (p. 57). The opium-eater rationalizes: clearly his guest ‘was used to opium: and that I must have done him the service I designed, by giving him one night of respite from the pains of wandering’ (p. 57). Perhaps. De Quincey first imagines he alone possessed an understanding of what lay in store for the Malay, and then hypothesizes a special clarity of insight into the workings of his own body that only the Malay could possess. This characteristic ambivalence in De Quincey’s text turns the discussion away from a portrait of the Malay as a pathological hypochondriac whose well-being is lost to himself, and instead toward the tricky task of interpreting the Malay’s certain loss of health, and the equally certain loss of an ideal health in which health and illness are opposed to one another – rather than internalized in the same swallow. Rzepka contends that this scene with the Malay embodies De Quincey’s exchanges with an anonymous reading public whose interpretations of his textual offering he cannot control.18 What this scene reveals most pointedly, however, is that De Quincey’s ongoing anxieties surrounding interpretation are routed through a hypochondriacal fascination with a form of well-being that resists economizing impulses that neatly oppose health to illness. That also means the ‘reciprocal opacity of the opium-eater and the Malay’ (Rzepka, 1995, pp. 5–6), in which neither is entirely visible to the other and neither is speaking the same language, represents a greater opacity within the self that De Quincey understands via a rhetoric of hypochondria. The ambivalent and difficult to determine well-being of the Malay disrupts the familiar imperialist logic with which De Quincey initially comprehends this foreign presence. It provides De Quincey with a form of hypochondriacal uncertainty that stalls his efforts to produce the 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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pathological body of the Malay as an object against which he constitutes his own moral well-being. This dis-ease threatens well-being with a form of indeterminacy – was he healthy or sick? De Quincey is never sure, of himself or of the Malay or Kant. In the undiscovered body of the Malay, De Quincey anatomizes a malady which forces him to confront his inability to calculate well-being, even and especially the abject infirmity of the Malay whose non-communicating body literally invites De Quincey to project meaning upon it without disruption. The malady and the Malay fascinate De Quincey. They present to him an uncannily familiar body about which he cannot speak knowledgeably, however much he tries to, and a body he cannot dispose of as he chooses because he possesses so little mastery over it, if he possesses it at all.

Final steps Despite the uncertainty of hypochondria that always seems ready to infect Confessions, De Quincey nonetheless is certain he possesses his own well-being enough to offer it up for study once more in the ‘Appendix’. He invites ‘the gentlemen of Surgeons’ Hall’ to take possession of his body if they ‘think that any benefit can redound to their science from inspecting the appearances in the body of an opium-eater, let them speak but a word, and I will take care that mine shall be legally secured to them – i.e., as soon as I have done with it myself’ (2000a, p. 87). If some value can be gained by examining his well-being post-mortem, much as Coleridge had also imagined of his own body, De Quincey is more than ready to sign over his body to the surgeons. He humorously desires, moreover, that they postpone their possession of this wretched body until he is finished with it. This must have provided some measure of comfort. Deeding possession to the surgeons, he can at least ensure his physical body is not subject to the whims of grave-robbers and thus, in death, exercise some measure of control over a confessing body that during its life was subject to the dispossessing impulses of readers trained in the conventions of sensational fiction. Yet if the value of his textual body was always potentially lost to his readers, can De Quincey be sure that his corpse will not end up as the object of study for an investigation into hypochondria instead of opium usage? Regardless of their intentions, the gentlemen at Surgeons’ Hall would still do well to perform a title search on this body before they sign the papers, for De Quincey’s body is perhaps the least self-possessed body of the Romantic period. De Quincey knows the healthy body is foremost a legible body. But he also knows the opposition of health and illness is itself opposed 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




to a hypochondriacal illegibility in which the body cannot be said punctually to have a health. Contemplating numerous sufferers of this malady, De Quincey examines a form of Romantic well-being which no longer operates as a clarifying regulatory ideal that polices the desirability of certain bodies according to their normative health. He marshals his hypochondriacs for recursive explorations of the territorial limits of Romantic well-being. The result is a composite portrait of the patiently anxious flâneur of Romantic health, a multiply embodied figure who surveys health amid the high road outside Königsberg, the English mountainside, the streets of London, and even the corners of the British empire. Alternatively, this radically imagined composite hypochondriac is out looking for a body: the undiscovered body of the Malay, Ann who has disappeared, De Quincey’s body lost to himself amid hypochondria, the body of the philosopher missing from a portrait of his disorders. De Quincey’s interest in the hypochondrias of others introduces the possibility to a radically imagined ethic in which well-being is no longer imagined as something the singular body has, but rather is the interpretive field within which bodies are formed and related to one another. For Shelley, hypochondria expressed, in part, a desire to think about the devastating effects of colonial commerce upon Britain. What De Quincey maps here is differently spatialized, though it is similarly invested in the rhetorical art of disposing, sometimes ruthlessly, of bodies. De Quincey’s sense of a health that constitutes an interpretive injunction among and between bodies maps out an ethical terrain of well-being. He understands health as a form of relationality to others rather than a mode of punctually materializing the body. While it is clear that De Quincey has almost entirely abandoned any pretense to treating other bodies ethically or anything more than projections of his own anxieties and discomforts, the scene of well-being that his pathologization of others imagines is one in which health can be thought ethically, or unethically, and not just in terms of epistemology. Such a health begins just outside of hypochondria’s window, as it were, and thus it is enmeshed in questions of the subject’s determination and intemperate fixation upon health as an object of concern. But as De Quincey successively transplants this malady into so many others, he also constructs a zone of otherness marked by violence and his own failure to care that places health as a conduit of activity between bodies. The dehumanization and pathologization of certain colonial, feminized, or philosophizing bodies that we can glimpse in De Quincey’s consideration of hypochondria is terrible. But we would be mistaken to read in them an affirmation of De Quincey as an actor and agent of this 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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violence, if that means that he dehumanizes others in order to affirm himself. Always undercutting himself and blurring the lines between self and other in ways that produce so many more differences within each, he develops a hypochondria that dispossesses everyone, himself included, of their capacity to bring the self into presence and possess it as his or her own. The extensively revised Confessions that De Quincey published in 1856 continues to address concerns with the embodied presence of the author who closely attends to his ‘physical economy’ (2000b, p. 255). In a passage that reflects upon the work of retelling this narrative as much as it does a temporality of self-difference, De Quincey acknowledges the pressing difficulty of stabilizing the self in print that is undiminished by the opportunity he has to create himself anew and as an other: Even the character of your own absolute experience, past and gone, which (if anything in this world) you might surely answer for as sealed and settled for ever – even this you must submit to hold in suspense, as a thing conditional and contingent upon what is yet to come – liable to have its provisional character affirmed or reversed, according to new combinations into which it may enter with elements only yet perhaps in the earliest stages of development. (2000b, pp. 169–70) Insisting upon an unalterable finitude of existence, De Quincey notes that the work of refashioning himself that he has undertaken in the course of producing this expanded edition does not bring him any closer to making his experience and selfhood unconditionally present. He hesitates before the prospect of an autobiographical effect that would materialize the body in the moment and turns instead to contingency in a manner that subjects himself to the same self-difference that he sought to locate in some other bodies. De Quincey did not include the 1822 ‘Appendix’ in his revision of Confessions, but he did include a commentary that shows he had not, by that time, abandoned this mode of complicating distinctions and favoring contingency over simplicity either. Commenting upon his arrival home after quitting his studies at Manchester Grammar School, De Quincey notes: My mother was predisposed to think ill of all causes that required many words: I, predisposed to subtleties of all sorts and degrees, had naturally become acquainted with cases that could not unrobe their 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




apparellings down to that degree of simplicity. If in this world there is one misery having no relief, it is the pressure of the heart from the Incommunicable. And if another Sphinx should arise to propose another enigma to man – saying, What burden is that which only is insupportable by human fortitude? I should answer at once – It is the burden of the Incommunicable. (2000b, p. 170; emphasis in original) De Quincey’s ‘nervous derangements’ were far from incommunicable and, much like his opium-eating, they were addressed compulsively in ways that helped to establish his public impropriety and his literary reputation (p. 174). But his hypochondria also bears traces of something not fully communicable, a concept that continued to compel his interest as he recast Confessions. Perhaps if it were entirely communicable, his ongoing considerations of his nervous ailments, displaced into the disorders of so many others, would cease to represent an alterity that always inhabits health and illness and which cannot be said to belong to any individual. If it were communicable, even to himself, he might not need so many others present to parse and embody his thoughts on well-being. But the incommunicable can be subject to desire and not just a desire for overcoming. The incommunicable opens onto a world of ‘subtleties of all sorts and degrees’ that he can confidently claim to be his domain as he stands here on the verge of the rest of his life. It is a sign of intellectual labor that is conceptually opposed to a nervous fixation, recalling Coleridge, upon ‘the incommunicable parts of our nature’ that feminizes the individual – which is here signaled by the attendance of De Quincey’s mother. Never simply a sign of autonomy overheated and gone awry in misfirings of willfulness, De Quincey’s hypochondria represents the somatization of the possibility of thinking beyond narrow economies of the presence or absence of disease and the assumption that well-being is to be found in just one singular body. It is a malady that invites us, in short, to wonder if health can be conceived of without turning to a discourse of possessive individualism, and its investments in histories of imperialism and prejudice, that so powerfully give rise to the impression that health and illness ought to be claimed as one’s own, however alien or unwelcome such experiences may be.



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Performance Anxiety: Illness and The History of Mary Prince

In Chapters 3 and 4, I introduced the necessity of situating Romantic hypochondria in the contexts of British imperialism and the effects of colonialism. I want to make this point more persuasively here by examining the ways in which Mary Prince articulates a form of hypochondria that shows the disorder to be profoundly and deeply connected to questions of performance and the social, political, and cultural conditions that stabilize and make legible the experience of being sick. When Prince dictated the narrative of her life as a West Indian slave, her body bore the marks of a cruel life as much as her story would. Her rheumatism had become debilitating and her back was ‘distinctly scarred … with the vestiges of severe floggings’ (1997, p. 130), all adding to a worsening ‘disease in the eyes’ which was approaching total blindness (p. 129). Prince’s bodily infirmities and pain are rooted in the treatment she received as a slave and The History of Mary Prince (1831) operates at one level as a catalogue of how an otherwise healthy girl grew to become an enfeebled woman whose body could not match her intellectual and moral vigor. One of the most significant things about The History is that it documents and narrates the deterioration of her well-being, something which could not be acknowledged by a system of slavery that aggressively neglected her complaints of infirmity and forced her, as she notes repeatedly, ‘to go about my usual work, though my body and limbs were so stiff and sore, that I could not move without the greatest pain’ (p. 69). The composition and publication of the text documents a process of retroactive self-fashioning in which Prince reimagines herself as an individual who could be and indeed was sick. What follows from Prince’s effort to represent her infirmities – disorders which had been neglected and discounted by the perpetual labor of slavery – is less a narrative of self-diagnosis than an act of giving an account of 149



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herself and her relationship to health in the Romantic period. The History is a text in which descriptions of the author’s infirmity are also part of a performative creation of the self as a subject who merits care and compassion, which is also to say a politicized account of how one becomes a healthy or unhealthy individual and a consideration of what it means to live beyond the purview of such norms. Attending to Prince’s pervasive rhetoric of health and the power of discourses of well-being to produce and police subjectivity involves asking at least two related questions. First, what does it mean for a slave to perform infirmity in an age in which the sick-role had become epidemic? Part of what makes The History such an intriguing intervention into medicalized discourse in the Romantic period is the manner in which Prince’s insistent attention to her body – attention it could not previously attract – borders on becoming incessant, even pathological. While Prince’s claims of illness reflect her desire to have her infirmities acknowledged by those around her, they also participate in a larger movement of cultivating sickness and exist as a complex symptom of the Romantic period’s epidemic of hypochondria. Considering the ways in which Prince presents herself as a subject fixated upon ill health means understanding how her turn to medicalized discourses is more than an articulation of an emancipated subjectivity – to be healthy or sick, with all the freedoms and unfreedoms such normalizing constructions imply. This chapter traces how Romantic hypochondria, which is always a complexly ambivalent liberation from proper well-being – from being either healthy or sick – opens Prince’s text to the possibility that it fails to articulate herself as an unhealthy body. This prompts a second question: What does it mean for Prince to use a form of hypochondriacal attention to her body as the ground for an account of herself? To ask this is to query the manner in which the self appears as a product of social and political norms which govern how one can become legible and what can be said about oneself. It means thinking about hypochondria as a figure for how Prince’s narrative of her life is never purely or simply her own, but is instead shaped by compulsory forms of social regulation. If these questions can be answered, it will be by thinking through how Prince gives an account of herself as an unhealthy subject and how such a narrative production of the self is made possible. By reading The History of Mary Prince as a text concerned with how the self negotiates idealizations of well-being and how it participates in a larger and continuous project of producing an ethical subject, this chapter contends that we need to examine carefully Prince’s infirm body, about which the text is so vocal.1 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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Illness and The History of Mary Prince 151

Like many Romantic-era slave narratives, Prince writes a text which stakes a claim to membership in a human community via the performative liberation of herself in print that rejects prior representations over which she had no control and which had enabled and sustained her bondage. According to Thomas Pringle’s introduction to Prince’s text, ‘the idea of writing Mary Prince’s history was first suggested by herself’ (Prince, 1997, p. 55). This act of re-creating herself in print emerges as part of a highly codified act of giving an account of herself and her life as a slave, in which she will publicly define herself in relation to the ideals of the abolitionist movement as well as dominant discourses of West Indian slavery.2 Giving an account of herself, as Prince does here, is by no means a ‘free’ act of self-constitution. It is the form given to a complex and ongoing interaction with the limits of those subjectivities which she can viably and legibly occupy. Even this declaration of her intent comes from the voice of another. And not just any other. It comes from the white patron whose considerable authority paradoxically establishes Prince, who is his employee at the time of composition, as the author of the text. Whether Pringle’s assertion of Prince’s purpose reflects her own or not, it nonetheless stands as an aspiration of the text he has published and for which he, and not Prince, would be legally accountable. One way of approaching the question of how The History is structured by forces beyond Prince’s narrative control, a question which goes to the core of what it means for Prince to fashion herself as a healthy subject, is to consider the history of how the text was composed and the events that followed from its reception. The text is the product of an extensive dictation to Susanna Strickland. It opens with an address by the text’s sponsor Thomas Pringle which considers the importance of this scene for establishing the veracity of the text that follows. Pringle, who commissioned Prince’s narrative on behalf of the Anti-Slavery Society, introduces the narrative by noting that wherever ‘practicable’ the text retains Mary’s exact expressions and peculiar phraseology. No fact of importance has been omitted, and not a single circumstance or sentiment has been added. It is essentially her own, without any material alteration farther than was requisite to exclude redundances and gross grammatical errors, so as to render it clearly intelligible. (1997, p. 55) Pringle’s reconstruction of a scene of composition lends an aura of immediacy and authenticity to the text and makes it seem as though



Self-fashioning and the work of others


the pages that follow will be as close to a seamless dictation by Mary Prince as possible. The nuances of this scene are important because, as Pringle notes, this is explicitly not a scene of uninterrupted dictation. Despite its feel of immediacy, the text is a ‘peculiar’ event. It is a recollection of a speech act that bears the invisible traces of how Prince’s speech has been normalized and rendered intelligible, and her narrative purged of redundancies which is also to say purged of the psychological and political significance of narrative moments that recur for reasons we may never know. Pringle’s comments construct a narrative around the creation of The History of Mary Prince and allude to another text, a recounting which did not become this history and this purportedly fully intelligible text. In this sense, Pringle’s claim of clarity ushers in its opposite: the haunting possibility that Prince’s life history is anything but intelligible, especially for an English audience, and introduces the possibility that this is a narrative invested in forms of not knowing as much as it is in making plain the events of her life up to that point. There are practical reasons as to why the text begins with anxious claims of authorship. Prince was illiterate and thus unable to write her narrative as other ex-slaves had done before her. But this may not be the reason for the text’s concern with its own authority. Even the attractive authenticity of a self-penned biography, for all its power, is greatly complicated by the status of authorship in the genre of the abolitionistsponsored slave narrative. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, for example, reads at times like a Christian conversion narrative because this was one way of making his life intelligible to an anti-slavery audience that valued piety. Whether or not Prince controlled every stage of the composition of the text is a misleading concern, then, to the extent that every Romantic-era author of African or West Indian descent had to conform to certain norms of what was appropriate and what sort of a text would be comprehensible. The question of authorship that arises from the outset of Prince’s text, while never wholly distinct from these generic complications and Pringle’s editorial hand, is quickened by the scandal and legal battles that followed the publication of The History. Prince’s narrative was the first by a West Indian woman and testified to a life of slavery and treatment that was as painful as it was ordinary in its cruelty. Yet Prince is not held to legal account for her very public airing of the ‘atrocity’, as Pringle puts it, of her treatment by several slave owners (1997, p. 56). Instead, the two libel trials that resulted from Prince’s narrative were between Prince’s former owner John Wood and Pringle, and between Pringle and Thomas Cadell, the publisher of Blackwood’s Magazine.3 While Prince was called 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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to testify as to the veracity of The History, she is never named as a defendant or plaintiff in either case. In the context of this legal narrative, her performative creation of herself is deemed insufficient, as if it failed to adequately deliver the person whose history it solicits. Even when Prince is called to testify and is available, in person, to verify her text and confirm herself as the author of these serious accusations, something quite the opposite to a recognition of Prince as a full and legally responsible subject happens. Her testimony during the trial of Wood v. Pringle received reassuring laughter in the courtroom when the lawyer for Wood encouraged her to report an incident during a period of supposed prostitution in which ‘she slept with [Captain Abbot] sometimes’ (1997, p. 147). This particular event involved Prince returning home to find ‘another woman in bed’ with Abbot and, in a turn which the courtroom found amusing, Prince repeatedly assaulted the other woman who ‘had pretended to be a friend of witness. (Laughter)’ (p. 147). This particular representation of Prince shows how efficiently her narrative’s discussion of sexualized abuse during slavery could be repackaged as evidence instead of ‘“low” comic violence’ associated with oversexed African women (Temple, 2003, p. 204). Pringle had a text which needed to be buttressed by official abolitionist discourse and factual reporting if it was to be taken seriously and perform the sort of persuasive work it was designed to accomplish. This winding story of the publication and reception of Prince’s text, a narrative which begins in Pringle’s ambiguous assertion of Prince’s dictation and continues in the courts and even in the multiple appendices added to each new edition of The History which further confirm Prince’s narrative, amounts to a public narrative of The History which always threatens to overwhelm the account Prince authors of herself. What this other narrative of Mary Prince demonstrates is that her own text does not stand on its own but is in constant negotiation with other texts, other desires, other investments in her narrative and in someone named Mary Prince.4

Slavery, sickness, and work If the scene of Prince’s narration is shaped from the outside by forces beyond her control, the manner in which she refashions her identity similarly involves navigating preexisting social and medicalized discourses which determine the limits of who she can claim to be. Slavery was a brutalizing experience which never stopped destroying Prince’s body. The manner in which she subsequently attends to the physical and psychic harm she suffers as a result of the consistent denials of 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




care she faced demonstrates the extent to which she must continue to operate within and against colonial norms of medicine. The worst parts of her mature life began when she was sold and sent to work in the salt ponds of what is now the Turks and Caicos Islands. Life under Mr D– was torturous, and the daily violence of slavery, combined with the physically taxing work of extracting salt, led Prince to complain ‘my tasks were never ended. Sick or well, it was work – work – work!’ (1997, p. 73). With boils on her feet continually infected by the sand, Prince received no reprieve or rest, often working ‘all night, measuring salt to load a vessel … as fast as we could, and go on again all next day the same as usual’ (p. 73). Yet being unable to work was as bad as the work itself, Prince recalls: if ‘we were ill, let our complaint be what it might, the only medicine given to us was a great bowl of hot salt water, with salt mixed with it, which made us very sick’ (p. 73). In addition to describing her own infirmity, she highlights the inhumane treatment of slaves and underscores the anguish of a life in which she was denied the possibility of medical care. What passes for treatment, she notes, doubles as a form of disciplinary attention that would soundly discourage future pleas for medical attention. As her narrative continues, she recalls how she received no more compassion for her worsening ills under Mr and Mrs Wood in Antigua. It was the Woods who brought Prince to England and, in her words, ‘drove me out’ because she was too frequently ‘sick, and therefore unable to please my mistress, who thought she could never get work enough out of her slaves’ (pp. 88–9). This is a constant refrain by Prince in reference to her time with the Woods. Before she would gain her freedom from the Woods – a freedom in person if not in law at the time of the narrative’s composition – she suffered severe and recurrent cases of rheumatism that made her too sick to work.5 While her role with the Woods involved less physically demanding domestic service, Prince blames the work of washing clothes in a cold pond for her rheumatism which left her ‘so very lame that I was soon forced to walk with a stick’ (p. 79). Further to this, she adds: I got the Saint Anthony’s fire, also, in my left leg, and became quite a cripple. No one cared much to come near me, and I was ill a long time; for several months I could not lift the limb. I had to lie in a little old out-house, that was swarming with bugs and other vermin, which tormented me greatly; but I had no other place to lie in. (p. 79) Neglected by the Woods, she was cared for by a neighboring slave. Prince recovers from this illness, but like so many others, never for long, and she 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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becomes a disappointment to Mr Wood who flogs her mercilessly as if to remind her ‘whether sick or well, I had my work to do’ (p. 85). Prince’s account of life under the Woods is always turning back toward the topic of her infirmities and the punishment she receives when she is slowed by her physical pain. Reflecting her daily distress, Prince’s narrative becomes preoccupied with her rheumatism and its flare-ups. Even her description of her trip to England is colored by this preoccupation with her ill health: I was willing to come to England: I thought that by going there I should probably get cured of my rheumatism, and should return with my master and mistress, quite well, to my husband. My husband was willing for me to come away, for he had heard that my master would free me, – and I also hoped this might prove true; but it was all a false report. (p. 86) Whether in retrospect or in the narrative moment, Prince prioritizes the possibility of better health ahead of the prospect of gaining her freedom on English soil. There are a number of reasons why this may have been the case, not the least of which is that by the moment of telling her story Prince has gained at least limited freedom. Why does her text turn to the body so insistently and compulsively? All of this talk of well-being seems to bear the weight of so much more than just her health, which is also to say that it is impossible to discuss Prince’s health without also addressing how discourses of slavery are medicalized. As Prince repeatedly returns to her bodily infirmities, her readers are left to wonder at the ways in which a state of being free and being healthy might be closely connected in her narrative. While illness can always seem like a form of unfreedom, whether feeling pain, a sense of alienation from oneself, or beset by a condition over which one can exercise no volitional control, what is at stake in Prince’s narrative is how being sick is actually a performative assertion of her own humanity. It is a declaration of her sickness and a demand that she be recognized as unhealthy and as a subject who merits care. This is radically different than the life under slavery she describes in which she is effectively denied the subjectivity that comes with being sick. This is not to say she was not sick. She was, and she knows this well enough to include in her recollections precise diagnoses of rheumatism and Saint Anthony’s fire, a burning sensation in the limbs caused by ergot. But her experience of illness is characterized by the refusal of those around her to acknowledge her infirmities. As Prince repeatedly informs the reader, there was no sympathetic auditor to her troubles. 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




Prince isolates these dyadic scenes of being forced to labor through infirmity as moments of recognition, or misrecognition, which powerfully inscribe her status as a slave body. She is hailed, and compelled to respond in her own name but not with a body that feels the pain she feels. These constitutive scenes are replayed in Prince’s narrative in an attempt to elicit another parallel scene of recognition among antislavery readers of her ill health as part of her performative assertion of herself as a body that legitimately deserves medical care. In order to proceed further in this line of thinking, it is important to note that the idea of caring for slaves and tending to their infirmities is a concept which received considerable attention and debate in the Romantic era. While Prince’s experience is typical of an institution that neglected or aggressively undermined the health of those it enslaved, there is a considerable body of texts concerned with issues of health in the colonies and which attest to a growing concern for the well-being of slaves, particularly in the years following the end of the Atlantic slave trade when planters could no longer depend upon a renewable supply of labor. The period’s medicalized economic discourse concerning the West Indies bears witness to these competing ideologies of, on the one hand, continuing to extract the maximum economic value from slaves and casting aside those bodies that inevitably became useless, and on the other, of attempting to ameliorate the worst excesses of forced labor so as to preserve this so-called resource. The demography of slave populations in the West Indies in the early part of the nineteenth century is remarkable in comparison to the southern United States in the same period. Slave populations increased in the United States despite the end of the slave trade, while populations in the Caribbean declined because planters continued to be ‘careless of slave lives’ and refused to alter a system of slavery predicated on their capacity to ‘simply import new workers as their predecessors died’ (Kiple, 1984, p. 105).6 Thus, it came as no surprise when a Privy Council report on the slave trade, delivered to the House of Commons in 1789, concluded slavery was a structurally unhealthy institution. Yet if this declaration is something more than obvious given the ongoing need for new slave labor in the West Indies, the reasons for this unsoundness that were tabled in the report are not. The report creates a picture of African degeneracy rooted in cultural practices. Slaves are said to ‘either perish or are rendered invalids by fevers, fluxes, and pleurisies, occasioned by their habit of rambling to what are called Negro Plays or nocturnal assemblies, in distant parts, where they dance immoderately, drink to excess, sleep on the damp ground in open air, 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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and commit such acts of sensuality and intemperance, as bring on the most fatal distempers’ (Parliamentary Inquiry into the Treatment of Slaves in the West Indies – Jamaica, in Bewell, 1999b, p. 189). This description of African habits in Jamaica was produced by three men: James Chisholme, a physician and plantation owner on the island; Edward Long, an author and supporter of slavery; and Stephen Fuller, who also actively defended slavery. As practitioners of moral medicine, they documented the infirmities associated with slavery in the West Indies and explained to the House of Commons that ‘no care, attention, and endeavours, are wanting’ in the maintenance of slave health (p. 189). Slavery gave the appearance of caring for the bodies it enslaved. Each plantation had a sick house or hot house under the supervision of a doctor who might visit once a week or once a day depending on the contract with a planter. In addition to the white physician, or sometimes instead of one, plantations often had slave doctors or midwives. Owners like Chisholme could claim to take particular care of those he enslaved, without for a moment having to confront the ways in which physicians were pressured by overseers to discharge all but the most deleterious cases. While slavery was poor at implementing strategies for ameliorating the cruelty of daily life even when it became economically absolutely necessary to do so, as early as 1764 the physician James Grainger was advocating for a more humane treatment of West Indian slaves. As a relatively early advocate for amending the living conditions of slaves in the West Indies, Grainger included ‘An Essay on the Management and Diseases of Negroes’ as part of An Essay on the More Common West Indian Diseases, and the Remedies which that Country itself Produces (1764), a text which instructed plantation owners and managers in methods of treating and curing diseases among slaves.7 Grainger gives instruction on the construction of a ‘sick house’ including notes about ventilation and regular cleaning, the training of black nurses, and even the planting of herbs ‘more commonly used in physic’ around the perimeter of the building (qtd in Bewell, 1999b, p. 291). While his plans for a ‘pump and bathing place’ as well as a path ‘round the square, for the convalescents’ border on the luxurious by West Indian plantation standards, Grainger is careful to note the economic basis of his seemingly enlightened managerial practices: ‘the health of the gang would fully repay the expense’ (p. 291). Other writers were not so sure. As David Collins notes in his slave manual, Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies (1803), the lack of medical attention offered by overseers could be justified and even be made to seem economically necessary. For Collins, the 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




sick house was a site of dissimulation, where the physician and overseer constantly confronted the difficulty ‘of distinguishing real from affected illness; for when labour presses, all would be ill, to escape the field; and it is not at all times in the power of a doctor to discover this imposition’ (qtd in Bewell, 1999b, p. 300). This notion of feigning illness to escape labor, or what another writer referred to as an epidemic of ‘shamming’ (Madden, 1970, p. 118), held considerable currency. In Domestic Manners and Social Conditions of the White, Coloured, and Negro Population of the West Indies (1833), A. C. Carmichael asserts, ‘Negroes have more imaginary disease than any set of people I ever was amongst: they are fond of quackery, and often defeat the whole treatment of their medical attendant by taking nostrums of their own’ (1969, p. 204). Reading Carmichael now, with the attention she gives to ‘lazy or ill-deposed negroes [who] come into the hospital’ and to domestic slaves ‘coming up of a morning, with their heads tied up, their eyes half shut, dragging one leg after another, and groaning as if they were in agony’, it is difficult not to imagine this is the sort of text Mrs Wood might have written of her experience with Mary Prince (p. 204). This phantasmatic transposition of a discourse of working-class dissipation onto West Indian slaves is disturbing not just for the way it alleviates the planting classes from being responsible for the infirmities produced by slavery, but also for how it constructs a portrait of the slave whose well-being should be aggressively ignored and devalued as the product of willful hallucinations of disease and disorder. These texts contribute to a shifting set of Romantic-era norms surrounding health and illness which produce health as a state of productivity proper to the slave and ill health as an undesirable acting out that merits discipline and correction. In the context of the West Indies, these norms map a morality onto health and produce the slave as ideally healthy when productive, irrespective of the lived experience of the body. Conversely, when a slave fails to work sufficiently because of ill health it is because she is pathological and intemperately libidinous or prone to hypochondriacal fantasies of illness rather than because she is infirm. The full force of these norms comes through in Carmichael’s portrait which so ignores the physical and psychic realities of slavery as to appear campy and playful in its description of illness. The History of Mary Prince, on the other hand, shows how painful and debilitating this life could be. Interestingly, Prince does not abandon these norms of well-being which had so effectively dehumanized her. She works to show how medicalized discourses of well-being contribute to a systematic dehumanization of West Indian slaves, but she also goes to great effort to recall and, 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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more importantly, perform her ill health in this narration of her life, a decision which attests to the power of these discourses to furnish her with the materials out of which to produce herself as a body that now merits humane care. These discourses are productive, she recognizes, and can be used otherwise to make herself into a legible and vulnerable subject whose humanity is a concern for others.

The incitement to discourse The combined effects of fantasies of West Indian deceitfulness and the economic logic of reaping labor-value from bodies as quickly and callously as possible led Prince to live under a system of slavery that aggressively ignored her ill health. Her narrative bears traces of her continuing infirmities and attention to the difficulties of living under norms which consistently abjected her ill health, and perhaps nowhere more so than in her remarkably spare description of traveling to England as a domestic slave with the Woods: The steward of the ship was very kind to me. He and my husband were in the same class in the Moravian Church. I was thankful that he was so friendly, for my mistress was not kind to me on the passage; she told me, when she was angry, that she did not intend to treat me any better in England than in the West Indies – that I need not expect it. And she was as good as her word. When we drew near England, the rheumatism seized all my limbs worse than ever, and my body was dreadfully swelled. When we landed at the Tower, I shewed my flesh to my mistress, but she took no great notice of it. We were obliged to stop at the tavern till my master got a house; and a day or two after, my mistress sent me down into the wash-house to learn to wash in the English way. In the West Indies we wash with cold water – in England with hot. I told my mistress I was afraid that putting my hands first into the hot water and then into the cold would increase the pain in my limbs. The doctor had told my mistress long before I came from the West Indies, that I was a sickly body and the washing did not agree with me. But Mrs Wood would not release me from the tub so I was forced to do as I could. I grew worse and could not stand to wash. I was then forced to sit down with the tub before me, and often through pain and weakness was reduced to kneel or to sit down on the floor, to finish my task. When I complained to my mistress of this she only got into a passion as usual, and said washing in hot water could not 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell



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This is one of the more remarkable descriptions of the middle passage in Romantic literature. Albeit, it is a simulated re-creation of the middle passage that is experienced in reverse and with none of the brutality of the slave ship, but it remains a forced movement across the sea which dislocated Prince from her husband and family ties. Prince’s narration of crossing the Atlantic leaves a significant historical narrative untold, and in its place tells another story of the impact of new domestic tasks on an already burdened body.8 That she turns to narrate the infirmities of her body once again stands as an indication of the extent to which her ill health is intimately connected with slavery and the primal scene of brutalization and absolute neglect of African bodies transported in the holds of ships coming to the Americas. Given the attention Prince pays to her bodily ills, it bears asking: does the text deteriorate into a narrative of introspection and hypochondria? It certainly reads like one at times. Indeed, another reading of Prince’s middle passage might find fault with her decision not to take this opportunity to discuss the history of the slave trade prior to 1807 to an English audience which, in her words, still needed to be convinced slaves ‘are disgraced and thought no more of than beasts’ who ‘have the halter round their neck and whip upon their back’ (1997, p. 93). Where, for this Prince, is the biting critique of what it means to step onto English soil and breathe English air and yet remain a slave treated no ‘better in England than in the West Indies’?9 Prince turns to her body, instead, much as a hypochondriac might, as if she is unable to redirect her attention to the larger significance of this event. I say ‘as if’, because Prince is not a feigning West Indian slave of the sort routinely mentioned in slave manuals. While hypochondria can never be reduced to a simple affectation in the Romantic period – because it medicalizes and mediates so many cultural, philosophical, and political questions – her sufferings clearly do not amount to a banal indulgence in the body and its vicissitudes. One of the most intriguing moves of Prince’s narrative is that she turns a history of associations of West Indian deceit into its other: a form of dissimulation that was epidemic in Britain among the upper and middle classes. Prince mobilizes this pathologized attention to the body as a racialized other to phantasmatic suggestions of African deceitfulness, in order to articulate a sense of herself and do so in a manner which shows the possibilities for ethical self-fashioning held in reserve by the very discourses which made her well-being vanish. 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


hurt anyone; – that I was lazy and insolent, and wanted to be free of my work; but that she would make me do it. (1997, pp. 86–7)

Mary Prince is, in an obvious sense, the furthest thing from a hypochondriac imaginable. Her ills are not imagined. Nor are they exaggerated. If Prince’s position as the embodiment of pure labor makes her an unlikely candidate to suffer from a bourgeois malady, her sex makes her even less likely, at least according to those descriptions of the disorder that suggest it is an ailment that afflicts only men. Yet if Prince is an unlikely hypochondriac, the term is still perhaps more accurate than the label of hysteric, in the sense that she exhibits a generalized attachment to sickness rather than particular nervous tendencies. As the physician William Perfect comments in Cases of Insanity, the Epilepsy, Hypochondriacal Affection, Hysteric Passion, and Nervous Disorders Successfully Treated (1785), hysteria referred to a so-called affliction of the womb, which presents itself in episodic ‘fits’ or a ‘sudden commotion of the mind’ and ‘disturbance of the spirits’ which do not carry with them associations of a disorder of the will or the sufferer’s overweening and searching attention to signs of ill health (1785, p. 74). These characterizations of nervous disorders and who is and is not affected by them, are, of course, deeply partial descriptions that have as much, if not more, to do with disciplining class and gender distinctions as they do with defining a state of disorder. Medicalized care and attention were certainly gendered, as De Quincey makes clear, but it was not always consistently or uniformly so. Perfect – whose name bespeaks his role as a moral manager and promoter of proper health in an era of normalization – underscores the tenuousness of the distinction he had just made when he reminds his readers of the challenge of diagnosing nervousness, noting it is ‘almost impossible to describe and enumerate the variety of symptoms’ that attend cases of hypochondria (p. 75). Prince attests to the definitional flexibility of the disorder because she is plainly not a typical sufferer of the malady, yet she experiences a hypochondria characterized by an abiding and desirous relationship with her ill health. It is never a fantasy of ill health that brings Prince back to the body again and again. It is her rheumatism and increasing troubles with her vision, not to mention the other physical disorders which plagued her during slavery, that make Prince’s ill health an ever-present topic in her narrative. And if Prince’s pain is real for her, it was not for her masters. Her narration of infirmity recalls a time in which she experienced what might be called a socialized hypochondria, or a process of mediation by which she comes to represent her bodily pain as something absent to all those around her but felt with utter sincerity by herself. The malady names a certain temporal and social lag in the experience 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




and the recognition of infirmity, such that she can now, years later, narrate disorders that were, in a different context, illegible and unutterable. The malady involves an avowal of illness even in the absence of illness. The enunciation of hypochondriacal impulses brings into being an illness that would otherwise not exist. Like a declaration of independence or an emancipation proclamation, this act of speaking – whether in the form of ceaseless and indecorous public speech about one’s bodily ills or in a private concern for one’s health – inaugurates what it describes. As strange as it may seem, for the reading classes of the Romantic period declarations of hypochondria may be the example par excellence of a form of speaking that brings about what it describes. Whereas De Quincey and Coleridge found in hypochondria a language in which to theorize the potential illegibility of the body, Prince finds there a discourse that will quite literally materialize a sick body that was otherwise taken to be invisible. J. L. Austin classed such speech as performative speech acts, or highly codified utterances which bring about that which they describe. According to Austin, speech acts are governed by conventions and norms which make their utterance meaningful. For example, if I am to christen a ship with an act of naming and a swing of a champagne bottle, it works because I am citing a convention by which ships are named and because I have, presumably, the authority to do so. Yet a strange paradox lies at the heart of these pronouncements. Performative speech is only readily intelligible if it re-creates a prior performance according to certain rules. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, recalling Derrida’s critique of Austin, performative speech ‘offers itself in the form of transparent self-referentiality and pure self-presence, while its force actually depends on a tacit citation of the past and future’ in the form of conventions – such as a wedding ceremony which concludes ‘I now pronounce you …’ – which make the speech act meaningful rather than random (2003, p. 75). Its claims to do something in the instant of the act of speaking are overstated, though not untrue. The pure spontaneity of the act is deferred into the simultaneity of its making sense within a particular and highly regularized context. The performative utterance is characterized by a certain negotiation among repetition, presence, and absence. This structural tension poses questions as to the originality and uniqueness of a performative speech act and the ways in which it is embedded in social discourses and norms in order to produce something meaningful. Prince’s particular declarations of hypochondria are intriguing because they evoke these same concerns with how the body to which they refer 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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becomes legible or illegible. Her rather surprising performance of a disorder she does and does not have – for isn’t she like Coleridge in the sense that who can say if Prince, who pays so much attention to her bodily deficiencies, is not a hypochondriac even though she does not imagine her ills? – her hypochondria draws attention to how the malady is always performative. It must be. Hypochondria is profoundly communicative. (For even if I never tell another of my disorder, of my despair and my suspicions, I must at least have this conversation with myself.) The complex desire embedded in the hypochondriac’s attention to the body presents itself as an incitement to discourse about the body which is one means by which the speaker possesses it and claims it as her own amid continual denials that she has a health that merits care or attention. Prince’s text is framed, at least in part, by her insistence that her health matters in ways not acknowledged during slavery and aspires to the humanizing effects of such a meaningful recognition of embodied life. She places particular emphasis upon the generosity of the Moravians who took her in and nourished her after she had been turned out by Mrs Wood. Prince notes with surprise the remarkable event that followed from this unexpected act of hospitality: they ‘sent for a doctor to see me, and sent me medicine, which did me good, though I was ill for a long time with the rheumatic pains’ (1997, p. 90).10 This significant affirmation of her corporeal body is complicated in ways that suggest the incitement to discourse associated with hypochondria may also do more than formulate a demand for the care and social recognition she receives here. By the conclusion of her narrative, Prince is no longer seeking immediate medical attention or the relief of the body-breaking labor of slavery. She is still subject to ill health at the time of composition – slavery effectively destroys any future state of well-being for her as she now lives in a state of chronic pain – but she is no longer actively seeking out the care she so desperately requires within the period of her life covered by The History. The ends of her intense attention to the body in The History lie elsewhere than in a conventional plea for medical attention.

Illness as metaphor / illness as ethics Prince offers up the truth of what her body has suffered under slavery to her readers as a political critique of the failure of colonial practices to care for human life and an assertion of her humanity. This unusual and even radical deployment of hypochondria seizes the liberatory potential of being recognized as an unhealthy subject – rather than suffer the 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




voided non-health enforced by discourses of slavery – and does so in a manner which refuses to stabilize what ‘health’ means. Often with great difficulty and risk to her character, her discourse on the infirm body articulates a politics of health that does not hypostatize the ground of its utterance. In this respect, The History is – unexpectedly, and perhaps only for us now – an exemplary instance of theorizing well-being in non-dualistic terms. Prince and her contemporaries might never have expressed the idea in this critical vocabulary, yet the significance of this deviation from norms of health or illness needs to be recognized and indeed recovered for our own time. Instead of reaffirming the moral valences associated with the propriety and impropriety of health and illness, Prince considers how an understanding of the self as dispossessed by well-being, as an effect of the bipolar uncertainties of hypochondria, might provide a means of living with and thinking through a subjection to health. Against a morality of well-being conceived of as rules and norms enlisted to maximize the productivity of West Indian plantations, an understanding which disciplined Prince and others as lying shammers, Prince creates herself as an unhealthy subject capable of reflecting upon the unforgiving structures of intelligibility which govern her life. Yet, The History does not conclude with the successful rehabilitation of a subject who had been previously rendered abject and assigned an unlivable existence. Indeed, after Prince had been turned out of the venomous Woods’ household and had recovered physically, thanks in part to the care of some Quaker women who ‘sought me out, and gave me good warm clothing and money’ (1997, p. 91), when she has every reason to claim victory, her narrative reaches something of an anticlimax as she finds herself unable to find work, despite her health. Initially this period in Prince’s life seems to mark a triumph of normative self-sufficiency and integration into London society: I got into service with a lady, who saw me at the house where I sometimes worked as a charwoman. This lady’s name was Mrs Forsyth. She had been in the West Indies, and was accustomed to Blacks, and liked them. I was with her six months, and went with her to Margate. She treated me well, and gave me a good character when she left London. (pp. 91–2) This is one version of how Mary Prince’s narrative ought to end. She escapes the cruelty of slavery for the benign service of domestic labor, is living in good health and working for a woman who is in every sense the opposite of Mrs Wood. But this ideal turn of events is quickly 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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replaced by the realities of domestic service and the capriciousness of the urban labor market following Forsyth’s decision to move from London. Despite the character reference she now possesses, Prince must now contend with the racism she did not face in Forsyth’s household. After 11 weeks without work Prince had run out of money: I was forced to go back to the Anti-Slavery office to ask a supply, till I could get another situation. I did not like to go back – I did not like to be idle. I would rather work for my living than get it for nothing. They were very good to give me a supply, but I felt shame at being obliged to apply for relief whilst I had the strength to work. (p. 92) This is Prince’s final trial before she goes ‘into the service of Mr and Mrs Pringle’ (p. 92), thus returning the reader to the scene of sponsorship and composition with which the text opens. Prince notes that it is during her service to the Pringles that she is given the opportunity for a religious education, but she has in this immediately preceding period of unemployment received an equally powerful education in the unnatural manner in which health and morality are entangled. Of her more than 11 weeks without work, what is most remarkable is that she was able to work but unable to find employment. The lesson which had structured her life up to this point was a phantasmatic bond between health and productivity and that association is suddenly meaningless in the context of her life in London. Prince stages a certain bewilderment at the fact that her experience now attests to the strangeness of a moral association between good health and industry which had always possessed the force of something absolutely natural under the logic of slavery. What emerges starkly here from Prince’s lesson is that her identity continues to be subject to forces beyond her control, but that these norms are social and historical rather than natural, even and especially as they are routed through the corporeal body. As a woman who is subject to health, the ‘I’ of her narrative is an effect of a set of relations or a set of medicalized norms which regulate the terms within which her ‘I’ can legibly exist. While that ‘I’ was once unable to claim to be healthy or sick, it now exists in relation to other selves who are composed, at least minimally, in relation to ideas of health and illness. What this means is that the ‘I’ is not strictly and absolutely unique, but is instead the product of forces and discourses that shape what that ‘I’ can be and can be seen to be. To give an account of oneself, as Prince does, is to consider the ways in which the self is not a purely free or spontaneous invention but is instead part of an ongoing 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




process of crafting the self in relation to unchosen norms which govern the emergence of subjectivity. This means that one is always an individual policed and governed by structures outside of oneself. Any account of the self will always be partial – if not, in one sense, wholly untrue – because it can never entirely account for the imbrication of the self in others and in norms which govern and make possible the emergence of the subject. Giving an account of oneself means becoming ‘dispossessed in the telling, and in that dispossession an ethical claim takes hold, since no “I” belongs to itself’ (Butler, 2005, p. 132). The subject is given over to a scene of address which necessarily positions the self in relation to others and to the social norms and customs by which that self becomes legible. In the context of The History and its reflections upon an imprisoning freedom from health, the account Prince gives of herself offers a compelling reflection upon the social production of the subject and the alterity to which such processes necessarily obligate us. Prince’s desire to be recognized as an unhealthy subject places her in relation to others, but also in relation to regimes of knowledge and power which govern what can legitimately be recognized. Thus the story of her life must confront what it cannot narrate, or a scene which happens before Prince can claim to speak as an ‘I’. As such, The History will necessarily fail to give the truthful account of the life of Mary Prince which it promises and which Pringle and the Anti-Slavery Society expect. In particular, her body, which is such a powerful metonym for Prince herself, is beyond her capacity to know it in its singularity. This narrative of a deteriorating body can only capture belatedly the presence of Prince’s corporeality in the representation of traces of a body forced to conform to norms of legibility. When it fails to be legible, as it was during her enslavement, it becomes properly unnarrativizable, and the body ‘appears’ in its absence via the trauma and the psychic torture of having to live under such conditions. Prince is ‘deprived of having a full recollection’ of her life and is instead granted the knowledge that ‘there is a history to my body of which I can have no recollection’ (Butler, 2005, p. 38). The forgetting Butler posits here is an expression of how the self is always displaced in part into a sociality that preexists and conditions subjection. Faced with an impossible task, Prince does the only thing she can do: fictionalize her body, or engage in what might be better termed a practice of re-creating the body out of fictions of its health with the disorienting and at times unpromising materials of hypochondriacal desire. This gesture toward reconstructing the body as formally beyond her capacity to know it – which is also a desire to know the body as unknowable – reverberates in the opening pages of The History where 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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she first registers her concern with what she can and cannot say about her life in slavery now that she has an audience who will listen to, rather than ignore, her complaints. She states her youth was ‘the happiest period of my life; for I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave, and too thoughtless and full of spirits to look forward to the days of toil and sorrow’ (1997, p. 57). This recollection of the most enjoyable period of her life is framed by questions of interpretation and perception, anticipating her fuller consideration of what it means to have sickness rendered imaginary. That she notes that the happiest period of her life was in her youth shows how the effects of slavery linger in Prince, still unfree even among the Moravians in England. She remains separated from her husband, and the destruction of her body by slavery continues to be the source of daily pain, her increasing vision difficulties only exacerbating these long-standing infirmities. Removed from the economies of slavery which make her pain unpresentable, Prince’s retelling of a life in bondage depends for its legibility upon a form of hypochondria which, while it qualifies as an intelligible orientation toward one’s body, is also a way of acknowledging the difficulties and even necessary failure of being able to give a full account of herself. For Prince, hypochondria is a figure of desire for a body which slavery had almost succeeded in dispossessing her of and an avowal of the disorientation of the self in relation to that body. The purpose of this public display of opacity is not to engage in what Butler pejoratively terms a celebration ‘of a certain notion of incoherence’, but is instead to note that such incoherence is social in that it establishes ‘the way in which we are constituted in relationality: implicated, beholden, derived, sustained by a social world that is beyond us and before us’ (2005, p. 64). This dispossession of the body makes an ethical claim upon Prince as it exposes her to a trace of what exceeds the self and the inability of the ‘I’ to belong to itself. To put this conjunction another way, the coterminous other of Prince’s bodily uncertainty is an address to the reader, an address which calls for a certain vigilance to the task of reading. From the outset of The History, the reader is asked by the silences and removed redundancies of Prince’s text to engage in acts of interpretation to fill out this portrait of a life which is at times literally unimaginable. The reader, moreover, is obligated to attend equally closely to Prince’s vociferous and even tiring attention to her infirmities because this concern for well-being is not just the material landscape of the injustices of slavery; it is also the material out of which Prince articulates an account of herself which does not rely on dualistic and 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




normative understandings of health or illness, understandings which have heretofore produced her as a body insensible to disorder and pain. Such a text offers little in the way of closure, endlessly and necessarily exposing itself to readings yet to come and to forces outside of itself. Indeed, the text’s internal resistance to closure may be one reason why the finality of the text is continually deferred in an expanding list of appendices and revised editions that continues to grow today.11 The postscript to the revised edition details the worsening of the ‘disease in her eyes’ (1997, p. 129) and is an intriguing moment to consider how The History works strenuously to remain unfinished. This notation regarding her growing blindness reinscribes Prince, the author, with a health as unsound as that of Prince, the subject of The History. This move unites one version of Prince who appears to be gaining her health with another who remains the pitiable object of Moravian and now potentially the readers’ sympathies. But this movement to consolidate the multiple and inconsistently healthy Mary Princes of this text fails from the outset because her health is too uncertain and heterogeneous and far too imbricated in relations to what it is not. After all, these eye problems are simply a recapitulation of ‘I’ problems with which the text is never finished, a way of persistently seeing the body as something which will always have a remainder of unintelligibility or a form of intelligibility that is sustained by the subject’s constitutive relations with others and with norms outside of itself.12 Her account of herself shows a domestic English audience the violence of discourses of subjection and the power of norms to make the well-being of certain bodies unthinkable, and that discourses of well-being are moral and political as much as they are medical in their conception and application. Prince re-creates so many crippling and traumatic scenes as part of an ongoing process of first recasting and then renegotiating the norms which govern the intelligibility of her life. Rooted in a public performance of infirmity, in which sickness must be avowed in order to exist as such, Prince creates a model of ill health that is fundamentally hypochondriacal and ethical in its failure to produce a subject who could be calculated with the narrow utility of a morality of health. Her text invites the reader to consider the impossibility of reading this body and the impossibility of re-creating in health the performative violence of slavery in its ongoing criminal abjection of some life as property.13 Rather than recalculate Prince amid the new terms of her nearly emancipated life, the text produces a volatile scene of the relations of address which leads to other provocative questions. How does Prince’s concern with her own well-being, a concern which forms the 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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basis for her claims to humanity, bear upon questions of responsibility? In short, can a dispossessed self be considered responsible? Such questions haunt The History at every turn, but have primarily been construed to belong to a legal framework governing libelous speech and the text’s status as a lightning rod for abolitionist and pro-slavery sentiment at a time when Britain was on the verge of abolishing slavery in the colonies. Prince’s lack of self-possession in legal terms marked her as unable to bear responsibility and thus not a full human subject. Her experience of health proposes another way of proceeding and asks, can a responsible subject be anything but dispossessed?




Anatomy: We ‘Other Hypochondriacs’

Lamenting the state of knowledge upon the subject of English health and the devastating effects of habits deleterious to well-being, Thomas Beddoes invited the establishment of a systematic effort by medical practitioners to catalogue the pathological figures whose affronts to health are particularly instructive. Toward the end of his chapter on nervous disorders in Hygëia, Beddoes called for ‘a set of sketches, contrasting our customs with those of savages, in their tendency to disfigure, enfeeble, and demolish the human frame’ (1802, 8: 120). These portraits of infirm English bodies, with accompanying explanations, should be offered to the public in all shapes, and at all prices – from that of Poor Richard’s Almanack, to the style of magnificence, in which the engravers of different countries have degraded their skill to deck the senseless effusions of the fanatic, Lavater. An infinity of subjects present themselves on the first glance. What is there, for instance, in the refined Briton with his features all obliterated and his face all carbuncles, that renders him unfit to be a companion to any tattooed antarctic savage? If the East can produce its Faquirs with their legs and arms distorted and rendered useless by constant confinement to the same position, cannot the West match them with figures, equally disabled by their own endeavours? For my part, I know no right our crippled bacchanalians have to set the pleasures they derive from the process, by which they have been reduced to their present state, above the satisfaction the Faquir finds in being followed and feasted by his countrymen and countrywomen. (1802, 8: 120–1) Aspiring to attain the popularity of Johann Kaspar Lavater’s physiognomy, which fascinated the English reading public at the turn of the 170



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nineteenth century, Beddoes’ comparative physiology of health would juxtapose visions of English and orientalized degeneracy. Adapting a colonial rhetoric of oriental infirmity that attributes disease to what is deemed to be un-English, uncivilized, and undesirable, Beddoes suggests that the English Bacchus who neglects his health in the pursuit of pleasure is no healthier than the ever-infirm Faquir. The value of such a colonial encounter lies in its tendency to reinforce the norm in the shape of an image ‘representative of ethical errancy that can provide a moral lesson for what others should avoid in order to remain healthy’ (Wallen, 2004, p. 5). What Beddoes may have failed to realize was that these portraits were being drawn all around him, just not necessarily by artists trained exclusively in anatomy and not always in the same disciplinary spirit that inspires Beddoes’ efforts to patrol British well-being. Indeed, the literary and cultural artists of the Romantic body often turned to hypochondria, and what they found there was a malady afflicting how the body was perceived and what sort of information could, reliably, be produced from it whether by observation or direct experience. The malady disordered the lives of so many in the Romantic period, and the portraits these individuals produced of it capture the range of meanings the disease could produce in the body and on the page. The complexly rendered portraits of lives defined by hypochondriacal pressures that I have examined in these pages have, in many cases, begun as personally experienced disorders that were both psychologically and physiologically stressful. Yet what marks all of the works studied here has been the manner in which the representation of these maladies stretched beyond diagnoses of pathology, and became rhetorical imaginings that brought as if to sight, and at times painfully, a non-knowledge of the healthy body. Romantic hypochondria coincided with material and epistemological anxieties that were taking on new vigor at the end of the eighteenth century and which were not always or readily acknowledged by medicalized efforts to police the moral well-being of subjects. Nervousness was a lived symptom of the upheaval and uncertainty of the social world within which bodies come to exist legibly. The future of the empire was troubling and never more so than when Britons contemplated how their economic and medical security was threatened by the prospect of colonial disease and the growing awareness of the inhuman treatment of slaves. In addition to characteristically Romantic concerns with the adequacy of language to convey experience, philosophies of perception were taking on new weight, and whether it was questions of a medicalized or aesthetic gaze, forms of sensory assessment remained 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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disconcertingly attached to expressions of irrationality and the unseen. Medicine, meanwhile, had entered an age of reform in which rationality persistently challenged antiquated beliefs and practices, though not always with results that we could recognize as modern. To all of this is appended a notion of the post-Enlightenment individual that was articulated, in part and unequally, as an effect of moral, physical, and mental norms of well-being. Hypochondria cannot be ignored if we are to understand the project of normalizing Romantic health because it was a disorder that afflicted the era with such provocative force and power to disorder not just bodies but medicalized discourses of wellbeing too. It crucially reminds us that the normalizing ambitions of some medicalized discourse had to compete, and frequently disavow, the desirous relationship so many individuals had to states of sickness and soundness, hypochondriacal attachments that invested the body in unpredictable ways for a range of both real and rhetorical modes of being in health. How to avoid hypochondria? The Romantics found it increasingly difficult to do so, yet they also failed to avoid it in a manner that says as much about the compulsively figural nature of the disorder as it does about what it would mean to be a hypochondriac. Hypochondria was an almost necessary development in an age in which so many discourses, interests, and politics became significantly invested in notions of health and illness. Its anxieties are frequently shared by other modalities and ways of handling or knowing the body, even ones that investigated life and Natural History rather than the embodied concerns of the middle classes, for example. Early evolutionary theorists such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck considered all life to be governed by appetence, or a longing to live that takes the form of a native sensibility capable of responding to environmental stimulation in a manner that enables the individual organism to evolve. At the level of the species, the flesh underwent states of decomposition and recomposition, eventually producing new and more perfected forms over time. In Zoological Philosophy (1809) Lamarck contended that when the will guides an animal to any action, the organs which have to carry out that action are immediately stimulated to it by the influx of subtle fluids (the nervous fluid), which become the determining factor of the movements required. This fact is verified by many observations, and cannot now be called into question. Hence it follows that numerous repetitions of these organized activities strengthen, stretch, develop, and even create the organs necessary 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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to them. We have only to watch attentively what is happening all around us, to be convinced that this is the true cause of organic development and changes. Now every change that is wrought in an organ through a habit of frequently using it, is subsequently preserved by reproduction, if it is common to the individuals who unite together in fertilization for the propagation of their species. Such a change is thus handed on to all succeeding individuals in the same environment, without their having to acquire it in the same way that it was actually created. (1963, p. 124) The ‘evolution to more complex forms’ required ‘variations that produce them’ and thus Lamarck asserted that the habits of one generation became hereditary in the next and thus the appetency that prompts an organism to respond to sensible and perceptual data leads to the development of a species (Carlson, 2001, p. 130). Contrary to initial speculations regarding the discovery of unknown creatures in the fossil records, Lamarck contended that species did not simply disappear over time; they changed organically, and in a pre-evolutionary arena these ideas compellingly insinuated a moral logic of degeneracy within scientific explanations of the deterioration of some parts and the continuation and alteration of others. One of the primary implications of this understanding of evolution was that irritability and responsiveness to sensation were discovered as a principle of improvement. At the height of Lamarck’s chain of being was man and his considerable perceptual sensitivity, a sensitivity which replayed species improvements at the level of the intellect: the most fully developed individuals were those most capable of extraordinary acts of sensibility and ‘vision’ (De Almeida, 1991, pp. 240–63). Erasmus Darwin literalized this understanding of artistic sensitivity in his leering description of the moment of generation: I conclude, that the imagination of the male at the time of copulation, or at the time of the secretion of the semen, may so affect this secretion by irritative or sensitive association, as described in No. 5. 1 of this section, as to cause the production of similarity of form and of features, with the distinction of sex; as the motions of the chisel of the turner imitate or correspond with those of the ideas of the artist. It is not here to be understood, that the first living fibre, which is to form an animal, is produced with any similarity of form to the future animal; but with propensities, or appetences, which shall produce by accretion of parts the similarity of form, feature, or sex, corresponding to the imagination of the father. (1794, p. 519) 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




This phallic appetency, itself subject to Darwin’s desirous insistence that the decisive power of generation belongs to the male of the species, inscribes the overarching power of the mind and its perceptual potency to encourage the development and refinement of organisms over time. What then of those with degraded or degenerate capacities to perceive and intuit the body’s operations? What, in particular, of all of those artists whose sensibilities became not just responsive but over-responsive and indeed too creative for their own – or their species’ – well-being as they imagined states of the body that might not have been present? There is, perhaps, another history waiting to be written here of hypochondria and its evolutionary significance. Reframing the question of healthy perception and its consequences, early evolutionary thought and Romantic-era considerations of life form a rich area of research that has yet to consider how hypochondria might be thought at a species level – in terms of life rather than embodiment, as I have done – and whether this malady that so frequently worries about bourgeois civility and its others is a uniquely human consideration given how evolutionary terminology imagines the increasing complexity and perfection of life as it approaches the realm of the European bourgeois human. Does hypochondria install a worry about the borders of the human – as it gets pressed upon by other ‘less perfect’ animals in an evolutionary chain – within Romantic medicine and its interventions into the life of the organism? As an embodied language on the subject of health, hypochondria was never simply a pathology and could not help but become a mode of addressing so many of the social and cultural horizons within which individuals experienced well-being and the embodiment in general. While we do not speak of hypochondria in the same capacious manner now, having reduced it to one psychopathology among others, much of what we say and do in an effort to determine and secure health happens within the bounds of this cultural hypochondria. I write this now, living in a world transformed by cancers, HIV/AIDS, emerging and spectacular epidemics of avian influenza, SARS, H1N1, and the looming presence of as yet undiscovered diseases. Globalization has produced ever greater disparity in access to health care and radical differences in how gravely the same sickness is experienced in different bodies, in different locations, or by different classes or races or genders. Biomedical emergencies are now also social catastrophes that fracture along varying social, ethnic, and cultural fault-lines. Health and what it means to be healthy or sick is irreducibly complex, and to the extent that Romantic hypochondria marks a pressing need to theorize the conceptual unfolding 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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of well-being, we live in its shadow. As the recent past has disturbingly shown, normalizing attributions of health and illness remain powerfully convincing and thus require constant undoing and rescripting. Thankfully, the force of moral norms of well-being has been challenged by affected communities who have fought to understand infirmity otherwise. The AIDS pandemic is perhaps the most powerful example of a social activist response to widespread efforts to use the unexpected ravages of disease as an opportunity to reinvigorate forms of oppression. To suggest that we can and indeed must ‘see’ health and illness otherwise than narrowly enabling or disabling, and that the lived physicality of well-being might powerfully resist being economized into knowledge, are two closely related points of this study. The health anxiety of the Romantic age I have examined here is a malady and a figure of rigorous, and sometimes painful, hesitation. The malady designates a troubling difficulty in ever knowing the healthy body and thus in addition to a lived disorder, it is a figure for the body’s failure to be punctually healthy or sick. Hypochondria, if there is such a thing, we might say. Alongside those tangible individual experiences of hypochondria, and its effects upon discussions of slavery, the nation, economics, subjectivity, and so many other areas of Romantic sociability that concern the body, there is another hypochondria that continually asserts its resistance to being brought into being as, finally, something. This hypochondria is a mode of encountering the world and working with and against knowledge. It is a form of interpretation or reading, broadly conceived. If Romantic hypochondria entails a reading practice, and that would be difficult if not impossible to affirm given its constitutive elusiveness, it is a practice that begins in the body and an affective relation to knowledge that participates in a hermeneutics of suspicion. Paranoid reading has become one of the most influential critical strategies of the past 40 years and seeks to reveal the hidden violence and relations of power that underlie forms of knowledge, whether they be linguistic constructions or understandings of history, culture and social practices. Such paranoia has been remarkably effective for feminist, queer, poststructural, deconstructive, new historicist, post-colonial, Marxist, and psychoanalytic criticism. Its pervasive and largely productive effects have also led to the unintended outcome of propagating a need for itself. Paranoid reading has become less of a ‘diagnosis than a prescription’, in the sense that it is, in the words of Eve Sedgwick, a critical mode imbued with the force of ‘a mandatory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities’ (2003, p. 125). There are ample reasons for such paranoia, and its suspicions are shown to be well 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell




deserved with depressing regularity. But Sedgwick’s point is a good one, and the value of a paranoid reading practice is diminished greatly if it becomes a necessary precursor to doing work that is and can be understood to be critical. To put it another way, a reading practice is not very paranoid at all if it is not asking after its own conditions and concerned about the unintended and intended effects of its elaboration. Paranoid reading can and must always be more paranoid. The hypochondriacal mode of reading that I work with here adapts this interpretive hesitation and resistance to positivism. The risk that haunts hypochondriacal reading is not exactly the imperial tendency that might be associated with the thought of paranoia as it seeks to mandate its own absolute necessity, however. As a hermeneutic of suspicion, a reading strategy that begins as a form of hypochondriacal fascination with presence, volition, abstraction, and their others, it always risks reproducing a new terrain of confident visibility. Tilottama Rajan sums up the problem thus, in reference to the refusal of Foucault’s deconstructive methodology in The Birth of the Clinic to materialize sickness absolutely: it ‘unsettles any sense that we can grasp the meaning of disease through structural, still less cultural, analysis. Such a positing of disease would simply replicate the positivism of the medical gaze itself’ (Rajan, 2001, p. 83). Hypochondria elicits a mode of interpretation oriented around suspicion but does so without being capable of revelation and conclusion. It cannot offer more than further illusions. This is not a poststructural nihilism, it should be noted, but a condition of working with bodies alongside their materialization in language in which there will always be a remainder that haunts visibility and presence. What a hypochondriacal reading practice also notes, though, is that this insight will always entail its opposite: a lived truth of the body that is as real as flesh despite being illusory. Under the gaze of the hypochondriac, fiction and truth unwork each other and thus even as it draws attention to the social and political investments in the body, it also documents the ways in which the malady can serve normalizing ends when it is taken to be a fashionable disorder. The malady might refer us, in part, to a critical failure to know but it never does only that. It names a form of interpretation that is not finally producing an alternative knowledge of the body, but a knowledge of the body’s borders, as Coleridge recognized, if only fleetingly. It is a mode of interpretation that asks after its own conditions of possibility. The hypochondriac’s failure to know the self is such a compelling figure because it is the beginning of an interrogation of the subject’s relations to others and to the social as such. The experience of hypochondria might be unremittingly painful but it is not 10.1057/9780230277373 - The Age of Hypochondria, George C. Grinnell


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singularly personal. Romantic hypochondria calls for a consideration of how knowledge comes into being and the impossibility of stabilizing a knowledge of the body’s well-being as such. This insight may still be too tethered to the privileged image of the hypochondriac studying his or her own body. Acts of interpretation prompted by hypochondria are not hypochondria and thus it is not finished and self-satisfied at the prospect of infusing anxiety into knowledge – an anxiety about its own incompleteness which it can never disavow. As a form of reading that focuses upon the intersection of embodiment and interpretation, hypochondria imagines the legibility and unreadability of the body and thus it examines the difficulty of reading as such and the relations of address – institutional, personal, political, and so on – which constitute such fraught scenes of reading. It savors interruption and uncertainty as the opening to an insight into how we perceive and come to know the body. In response to normalizing pressures to produce a knowledge of embodiment, it asks, how not to see the body? How not to know it as something we immediately recognize and hail as familiar, as legible to us and for us? As soon as this question is asked it becomes meaningless, because it is impossible to stop the body from meaning for us. We cannot imagine a body that would exist purely before or beyond knowledge. Even the material body takes as part of its rhetorical force and sway its difference from the linguistic contingency of embodiment. We cannot strain enough to find a vantage point where we might experience the body as utterly alien to us. It is still worth remembering that the familiarity of the body is an effect and an unnatural one at that. And if we cannot stop the body from meaning, then the knowledge of the body need not be normalizing and it need not, or not only, value understanding and coherence. Such knowledge could, with effort, appreciate the ways in which the body is always a social entity before it is a personal and physical one, and is always in excess of our designs upon it. But what this knowledge will be and what sort of work it will perform is properly unknowable for us at this moment, if we are to take seriously the task of not knowing the body that is put to us by hypochondria. As if we have any other choice. Between the promise of legibility and the terror of utter illegibility we twist and turn and are made sick, but without knowing the causes of our nausea we are left to doubt our perceptions of illness.




Introduction: Interpreting Romantic Hypochondria 1. With characteristic modesty, S. W. Fores advertised ‘the most complete collection of humourous, political, and satirical prints and drawings ever exposed to public view in this kingdom. To the works of Hogarth, Bunbury, Sayer and Rowlandson is added every caricature print executed by other hands’ (qtd in Falk, 1949, p. 115). This was a considerable compliment for Rowlandson to be advertised alongside William Hogarth. While Rowlandson certainly had the artistic ability to appeal beyond a popular audience, he was driven by poverty to produce for the public and etch works designed by other artists, such as The Hypochondriac, which was designed by James Dunthorne (Falk, 1949, p. 115). 2. Rowlandson’s commentary underscores the idea that this crisis in the proficiency of medicine cannot be reduced to a local conflict of the faculties, in this case between the effectiveness of the physic’s pharmaceutical artistry and the MD’s diagnostic skill. Both approaches offer substantially the same treatment – drugging the hypochondriac with ‘potent charms’ or a ‘bolus’ – suggesting that this staged debate was less about a conventional competition between regular and irregular medicine. Instead, this minor dispute between practitioners recognizes the extent to which hypochondria is a significant challenge to the legitimacy of all branches of an emergent professional medicine as much as it is a profound disturbance in the body of the sufferer. 3. George S. Rousseau describes how the ‘magisterial presence’ of Cullen and his work on nerves drew students from across Europe in the 1770s and 1780s and taught a generation which was ‘prepared to rethink mankind as if converts to a new sect’ (Rousseau, 2005, p. 35). 4. Addressing the difficulty of distinguishing hysteria from hypochondria at the end of the eighteenth century, Foucault notes that the varied accounts of these disorders ‘never reached the point of perceiving that particular coherence, that qualitative cohesion which gave mania and melancholia their unique contour [by contrast]. All qualities were contradictorily invoked, each annulling the others, leaving untouched the problem of what was the ultimate nature of these two diseases’ (Foucault, 1988, p. 138). 5. While I cite Shell’s translation, this passage can be found in Gregor’s translation of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant, 1974, p. 82).

Chapter 1: Occupational Hazard: Beddoes and the ‘Great Dark Threat’ of Romantic Medicine 1. Beddoes’ Hygëia is a three-volume work divided into 11 essays each with distinct pagination. For clarity I refer in my citations first to the essay and then to the page number. 178



Notes

2. Thomas Beddoes has recently received attention alternatively as a medical practitioner whose German interests had ‘a decisive influence on’ his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Vickers, 1997, p. 56), or as an advocate of public hygiene ‘devoted to the value of health’ (Youngquist, 2003, p. 121). He represents the porous borders among discourses of well-being and politics and compellingly embodies a Romantic medicine that sought to produce health as a social ideal. I am interested here to underscore the extent to which his interest in the conceptual resources of hypochondria over his three-volume Hygëia orients his text toward a reflexive examination of the possibility of ‘health’ in Georgian Britain. 3. Until the recent biographies of Beddoes, one by Stansfield and another by Porter, the most prevalent image of Beddoes available to literary criticism was that of the experimenter and individual who supplied Coleridge with opium. Molly Lefebure’s characterization of ‘a limited but distinct drug-circle revolving around Dr Beddoes’ is perhaps the most common representation of Beddoes within criticism on Coleridge, for example (1974, p. 61). Discussed in this vein, Beddoes was vilified as the one who got Coleridge hooked, reproducing the very worst logic of addiction and drugs of America’s War on Drugs. Neil Vickers contends more recently in an essay about Beddoes’ influence on Coleridge, ‘we do not know when Coleridge became addicted to the drug or even whether the addiction was formed under medical supervision’ (1997, p. 73). 4. Smith notes that the ‘average price of a family advice book ranged from six shillings to half a guinea and above for the most detailed works (such as Buchan’s Domestic Medicine)’ (1985, p. 263). 5. Logan notes that Trotter’s comments come in response to Britain’s ‘response to the imminent danger of French invasion’ in 1805 (1997, p. 32). For Trotter, Britons have ‘projected the inundation of Essex, and hoarded up the current gold coin, as tokens of being afraid of the French. These alarms are to be considered as so many symptoms of a nervous temperament appearing in our national character’ (qtd in Logan, 1997, p. 32). Hypochondria and other nervous disorders emerge in Trotter’s A View of the Nervous Temperament (1807) as effects of bourgeois capitalism that function to pathologize individuals much more pointedly than they do in Beddoes’ Hygëia. 6. For some of the implications of the ways in which this anthropological impulse associated with natural history would increasingly mark a history of nature and being in the nineteenth century, see Rajan, 2003a. 7. Beddoes advocates vaccination – ‘the mode of inoculation lately introduced’ – within Hygëia (1802, 6: 51). For the contemporary politics of vaccination see Tim Fulford and Debbie Lee (2000) ‘The Jenneration of Disease: Vaccination, Romanticism, and Revolution’, Studies in Romanticism, 39, 139–63. 8. Reid similarly compares medical prescriptions to ‘cookery’, and speaks of the compounding of ‘dishes’ (1817, pp. 176–7). He comments, moreover, ‘a variety of drugs are often combined in the same recipe, each of which might be good, but the whole of which cannot’ (p. 177). Incorrectly compounding ingredients could lead to a poison instead of a therapeutic medicine. In light of this, Reid calls for experiments and trials of particular ingredients to better understand the efficacy of each (p. 177).



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Notes to Chapter 2

9. Roy Porter notes that, unlike many of his contemporaries, Beddoes did not think consumption came from eating too richly. Exploring Beddoes’ Brunonian position as to the proper balance of the healthy body, Porter notes that the doctor’s attitudes toward food ‘spell a reversal of earlier medical discourse. Late-Stuart doctors blamed consumption upon excess; Beddoes indicted deficit’ (1992, p. 105). 10. My comment here is indebted to David Farrell Krell’s reading of Schelling’s dialectical interest in poisoning in The First Projection of a System of Nature Philosophy (1799). Krell notes, ‘no poison does an organism harm unless that organism makes a move to ingest it. A poisonous mushroom does not attack us unless we attack it at the table. There is no poison “in itself,” Schelling notes, but only in and for us, as it were’ (Krell, 1998, p. 93). 11. See Kristeva, 1982, pp. 1–31. 12. Rajan argues that Foucault explores the difference between ‘signification and indication as a way of thinking beyond the visible to the invisible’ (Rajan, 2002, p. 150). Sign and symptom, then, each elude ‘a phenomenality of language in which the invisible achieves pure expression or self-evidence. Both seem to be involved in indication, pointing to something for which they cannot account and thus constituting the knowable on the trace of what exceeds it’ (2002, p. 155). 13. One wonders if this same spirit of reflexive interrogation in the basis of knowledge lies at the core of a recent recognition of Beddoes as a ‘champion of the responsible collection and dissemination of medical information’ and a leading light of medical reform in a notice inaugurating ‘The Thomas Beddoes Reviews’ in Dermatology Online Journal (Burrall and Huntley, 2002).

Chapter 2: Body Dysmorphic Disorder: The Self-Anatomy of Coleridge’s Aesthetics 1. In addition to the critical and biographical works I cite, there is a swelling interest in Coleridge, the body, and how matters of embodiment influenced his life and work. Nicholas Roe’s collection of essays Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (2001) testifies to this critical investment in the body as it is reconstructed as an object of inquiry by the life sciences. Yet this criticism on Coleridge’s life and work has not yet examined questions of well-being and hypochondria in relation to aesthetic discourse, which is what I attempt here. For clarity, Coleridge’s works are referred to with shortened titles (see List of Abbreviations) referring the reader to the appropriate collected volumes of his letters and writings. 2. Eagleton goes on to note that aesthetics distinguishes between ‘the material and the immaterial: between things and thoughts, sensations and ideas’ and ‘that which is bound up with our creaturely life as opposed to that which conducts some shadowy existence in the recesses of the mind’. If aesthetics ‘concerns this most gross and palpable dimension of the human’ (1990, p. 13), the aesthetic is perhaps not lived more thoroughly and painfully – at least among English Romantics – than in Coleridge’s life of hypochondria. 3. Wallen cites examples of Coleridge’s medical advice to his brother James as well as to George Coleridge (2004, pp. 54–5).



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4. Wallen does not have as his target Coleridge’s ‘Essay on Scrofula’ (1816). Instead he attends to Coleridge’s deployment of a rhetoric of scrofula during the years following 1800. 5. This is precisely the idea that Coleridge works with when he remarks in The Friend ‘if because an hypochondriac is positive his legs are cylinders of glass, all other men are to learn modesty, and cease to be so positive that their legs are legs’ (F, pp. 321–2). 6. A broader history of Romantic medicalized discourse should certainly also note Coleridge’s participation in a larger Romantic critical project that revolves around what Tilottama Rajan has called the ‘relation that illness bears to “life” in the exploration of life sciences’ (2003b, p. 399). Scrutinizing Coleridge’s Hints Toward the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life (1816), The Friend (1809–10), and the Essay on Scrofula (1816), Rajan underscores the intervention these works constitute into the spirited debates upon the question of life, debates which were shaped and fostered in Britain in part by the annual lectures held in honor of the British physiologist John Hunter and sponsored by the Royal College of Surgeons. In Theory of Life Coleridge defended the interpretation of life provided by John Abernethy in his 1814 Hunterian Oration, after it had been criticized by William Lawrence, the newly appointed professor of anatomy and surgery at the College. But while this work influences Coleridge’s sense of the ways in which ‘illness is the negative that explains life as health’ (Rajan, 2003b, p. 399), it is in discussions of hypochondria that he most palpably complicates an opposition of health and disease. 7. The Methodist John Wesley is even more dismissive of hypochondria in his recipe-like collection of medical advice for the home practitioner, Primitive Physic (1791). Under the heading of ‘Hypochondriac and Hysteric Disorders’, Wesley offers only two prescriptions, which I quote in their entirety: ‘Use cold bathing; Or, take an ounce of quicksilver every morning, and fifteen drops of elixir of vitriol in the afternoon’ (1791, p. 99). 8. As Redfield notes, the term ‘aesthetics’ shows up rarely in English in the early nineteenth century, ‘and then usually only in order to be mocked as Germanic philosophic jargon’ (2004, p. 10). Coleridge’s metaphor of taste suggests both a sensory process and a matter of a distinctly English common sense. 9. Coleridge’s former phrase originates in a passage in which he reflects upon the way in which aesthetics can degenerate into ‘the mere objects of the taste, smell and feeling’. He notes, ‘though the sensations from these, especially from the latter when organized into touch, may secretly and without our consciousness enrich and vivify the perceptions and images of the eye and ear; which alone are true organs of sense, their sensations in a healthy or uninjured state being too faint to be noticed by the mind’ (SW, pp. 376–7). For Coleridge, the reflections of the healthy subject will not unwittingly be disturbed or contaminated by meaningless sensations. The healthy individual would be able to ignore the faint stirring of benign sensation that preoccupy an unhealthy mind such as his own. 10. References here are to Coleridge’s excerpt of ‘Dejection’ in Principles. This version begins with the second stanza: ‘A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear’ (1). What I cite here as line 1 is equivalent to line 21 of (1962)




Notes to Chapter 3

‘Dejection: An Ode’, in Ernest Hartley Coleridge (ed.) The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1 (Oxford University Press). 11. Neil Vickers examines how George Berkeley’s Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) and Tom Wedgwood’s ‘An Enquiry into the Origin of our Notion of Distance’ influence Coleridge’s representation of the visual in ‘Dejection’ (Vickers, 2001, pp. 160–8). The primary alteration Wedgwood made to Berkeley’s thought was to argue that perception is aided by memory. In ‘Enquiry’ he describes ‘a series of experiments which show how memory helps compensate for missing perceptual data’ (Vickers, 2001, p. 162). Yet Coleridge was also suspicious of how memory could taint perception, citing in his notes the following example from the 1818 ‘Lectures on European Literature’: I remember, upon the occasion of my inhaling the nitrous oxide at the Royal Institution, about five minutes afterwards, a gentleman came from the other side of the theatre and said to me, – ‘Was it not ravishingly delightful, Sir?’ – ‘It was highly pleasurable, no doubt.’ – ‘Was it not very like sweet music?’ – ‘I cannot say I perceived any analogy to it.’ – ‘Did you not say it was very like Mrs Billington singing in your ear?’ – ‘No, Sir, I said that while I was breathing the gas, there was singing in my ears.’ (Lectures 1808, p. 210) Coleridge’s experience of nitrous oxide leads to confusion, perhaps deliberately or at least performatively so, because he incorrectly attributes it to an event at the Royal Institution rather than Beddoes’ Pneumatic Institute. Not only is perception tainted by memory, it is also, I argue, constituted in part by the body’s power to misperceive and thus it is complicated by what is a frequently disavowed memory of its own unintelligibility which here emerges in the form of the gentleman who assumed Coleridge was referring to the English opera singer Elizabeth Billington when he was not in fact doing so. 12. For more on the relationship between Coleridge and Allston see Gurion Taussig (2002) Coleridge and the Idea of Friendship, 1789–1804 (Newark: University of Delaware Press), esp. pp. 315–27. 13. Denise Gigante writes of a ‘melting subjectivity’ (2001, p. 507) that characterizes Keats’ self-consuming tubercular body in terms that resonate with my interest in Coleridge’s depiction of a dissolving body. For Gigante, such dissolution is indicative in part of a text completing itself upon the body of the poet. 14. Hamacher’s comments come in response to Hegel’s critique of ‘sense-certainty’ in the opening move of the Phenomenology.

Chapter 3: Phantom Memory: Nation and the Absent Body of Idealism in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man 1. A rhetoric of national health in the Romantic period builds, in part, upon the idea that physical and mental health functioned as ‘an early presupposition of knowledge posited only for its potential use in the understanding



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3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

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of sickness’ (De Almeida, 1991, p. 137). Health is defined by the relation it bears to disease, to the extent that it is the positive experience of the absolute ‘absence of its opposite’ (Wallen, 2004, p. 1). As William Keach argues, the term ‘constitution’ has a significant English legacy in the work of Burke and Wollstonecraft, both of whom deploy it in reference to the French Revolution. Keach further notes that while Percy Shelley utilizes the term to refer specifically to the United States constitution in A Philosophical View of Reform, the sedimented meanings associated with ‘constitution’ links him ‘to the Burkean constitutional rhetoric he politically opposes’ (Keach, 2000, p. 32). While Burke’s writings may have influenced the politics associated with a discourse of constitution in England more than the work of any other writer, Godwin’s deployment of the term, as well as Mary Wollstonecraft’s, both suggest that there is a dissenting politics embedded within this discourse and thus Shelley’s use of the term may not be exhaustively predetermined by Burke’s conservatism. I would like to thank Christopher Fleck for bringing this understanding of A Tale of Paraguay to my attention. Audrey Fisch argues that the emphasis of Lionel’s opening statement upon the ‘mental power’ (Shelley, 1996, p. 7) of England despite its small land mass forms ‘a tribute to the superiority of England’ (Fisch, 1993, p. 267). Julia Wright, on the other hand, suggests that this confident representation of England belies a geographical ‘anxiety of being physically inconsiderable’ (2000, p. 131). Lionel is a figure with whom Shelley unworks certain reassuring concepts of nation, Wright argues. Consonant with this viewpoint, I would argue that Shelley’s later interest in hypochondria demands that we treat Lionel’s suggestion of mental power with some trepidation, for the mental power of the hypochondriac to focus upon a tiny speck only confirms the superiority of that body in producing representations of itself. I am reminded here of Laura Brown’s analysis of Swift’s consideration of imperialism in Gulliver’s Travels, in which she argues, ‘the unpromising materials of misogyny enable us to perceive the critique of racism’ (1993, p. 199). Arguably, if Cheyne’s text implies a critique of imperialism it does so by reinforcing exclusionary norms of health and illness, norms which, like norms of gender, work to abject certain bodies. I owe this insight to Donald Goellnicht. He also notes that by ‘the end of the eighteenth century, melancholia had come to be recognized as a type of hypochondria, a nervous disease caused largely by the imagination and emotions’ (1984, p. 173). Anne C. Vila notes that both the Swiss physician Samuel-André-AugusteDavid Tissot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau glorified hypochondria ‘as the ennobling mark of a more refined sensibility’ (1998, p. 104) that was identifiably English. Similarly, epidemic disease in Arthur Mervyn bespeaks ‘a sickness of gender relations symptomatic of fundamental problems’ within the policing of social relations in the new republic (Traister, 2000, p. 3). Yet, I would argue that at a moment when attributions of well-being are vigorously deployed for political and philosophical ends, the very impossibility of something called health – embodied by hypochondria – is imagined by Shelley and Brown.




Notes to Chapter 3

9. Bewell’s comment that the meaning of ‘disease at any given time is not necessarily settled but is constantly open to negotiation, revision, and dispute’ (1999, p. 2) is significant for a conceptualization of the significance of imaginary infirmity in Romanticism. Indeed, perhaps the shifting figure of hypochondria is the somatic expression of a cultural understanding of disease that is never settled. 10. McWhir provides a thorough examination of the popularity of the Last Man as a literary and cultural phenomenon (1996, pp. xiii–xvi). Morton D. Paley provocatively remarks, moreover, that by ‘1826 the subject of the Last Man had come to seem not apocalyptic but ridiculous’ (1993, p. 107). Following works on the Last Man theme by Byron, Thomas Campbell, Thomas Hood, and a planned but never executed poem by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the very subject of Shelley’s novel was, if not cliché, certainly familiar to a reading public. Sharing in a contemporary fascination with how ‘the imagination resists the idea of Lastness, an idea that presupposes a recipient or reader whose very existence negates the Lastness not the narrating subject’ (Paley, 1993, p. 107), Shelley also reconsiders this theme in part in The Last Man by marking the ways in which questions of finality were compellingly medical as well as literary. 11. Perhaps the transmission from one text to another of a hypochondriacal fascination with disease could be described as a form of infiction. 12. Fascinatingly, the world depicted by The Decameron remained a reality for the Romantics, one felt too keenly perhaps by Shelley in particular: ‘How many gallant gentlemen, fair ladies and sprightly youths who would have been judged hale and hearty by Galen … having breakfasted in the morning with their kinfolk, acquaintances and friends, supped that same evening with their ancestors in the next world’ (Boccaccio, 1972, p. 58). 13. While my interest here is the particular meditation on Romantic hypochondria that is sustained by Shelley’s turn to Brown, I have little reason to doubt there are other strains of The Last Man that would become more palpably present in the text by returning to Boccaccio and Defoe, although this is work that must wait for another occasion. 14. Rush wrote several such accounts for the years 1793–96, noting the relative differences of each outbreak in the nation’s capital. Successively revising his early Account of the Bilious Remitting and Intermitting Yellow Fever as it Appeared in Philadelphia (1794), these smaller works were later collected as part of his Outlines of the Phenomena of Fever which formed the third volume of his fourvolume Medical Inquiries and Observations (1815). The final volume of this work similarly contains a series of ‘Accounts’ of the presence of the yellow fever in Philadelphia up to 1805. 15. Similarly, John Reid recounts a case in which this expression of life is again cached within the hypochondriac’s powers to perceive his immanent death. A student hypochondriac who ordered the church bells be rung announcing his death so that he might die was so insulted by how poorly this task had been accomplished that he was forced to get up and do it himself at which point ‘the skin having been relaxed by exertion, hypochondriasis evaporated through its pores’ (1817, p. 187). 16. Shelley was obviously familiar with the idea of vaccination first theorized by Edward Jenner in 1798. Jenner’s practice of administering a cowpox



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vaccine to prevent smallpox had become quite popular by the 1820s. For the contemporary politics of vaccination see: Tim Fulford and Debbie Lee (2000) ‘The Jenneration of Disease: Vaccination, Romanticism, and Revolution’, Studies in Romanticism, 39, 139–63. 17. As Anne McClintock argues, this means that certain spaces have been subject to the sort of dismissal Hegel made of Africa as a place outside of modernity. It also means that the historical unfolding of Western progress has always been experienced as a geographic event: ‘under the financial spell of the United States (and now Japan), the World Bank engineered one ecological disaster after another: the Indonesian Transmigrasi Program, the Amazonian Grande Carajas iron-ore and strip-mining project, the Tucurui Dam deforestation project, and so on’ (1995, p. 393). 18. Avital Ronell notes that because the body proves to be so irretrievably beyond presence – despite and because of its materiality – ‘our ancestors used to fastforward and just lose it, Trauerspiel-style, in favor of more ethereal forms and nebulous promises’ (2003, p. 180). Characterizing preferences for immateriality in a temporal logic opens another way of understanding the investments The Last Man makes in the body as such. Engagements with the body are always in part engagements with the proleptic temporality of the body and the dissolution of one’s physical self in the present.

Chapter 4: Multiple Personality: De Quincey’s Political Economies of Infirmity 1. Page references to Confessions of an English Opium-Eater are to Grevel Lindop’s 1992 Oxford Classics edition which reprints the original 1821 edition of Confessions. All other citations from De Quincey’s works refer to the date and page number of the recently published Works of Thomas De Quincey. I cite the 1822 ‘Appendix’ and the 1827 versions of ‘The Last Days of Immanuel Kant’ and ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’. 2. Roy Porter notes that Bernard Mandeville employs this same rhetoric when he describes a particular hypochondriac as ‘a crazy valetudinarian’ in his Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases (1730) (qtd in Porter, 2001, p. 159). 3. As John Barrell argues, much of De Quincey’s writing is structured by his ‘compulsive returnings’ to the loss of his sister Elizabeth in childhood. The returns of De Quincey’s writings are not nearly exhausted by his ‘myth of his own childhood’, however (Barrell, 1991, p. 22). Indeed, I argue that hypochondria theorizes returning as less a form of compulsory attention to an event or mournful state of the body than a reflection upon the gesture of returning in itself. 4. Youngquist attends to De Quincey’s body as a form in which the opiumeater practiced a care of the self, fashioning and attending to his well-being as a defining part of who he is. The recent critical interest in the possible disorders of De Quincey’s body is a product, in large part, of John Barrell’s The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (1991), which invited readers to reflect upon De Quincey’s understanding of the mental and physical soundness of his own body and the body of his




5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

Notes to Chapter 4 culture. Similarly, in A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing (1995), Alina Clej further specifies this concentration on the socially produced body by attending to De Quincey’s strategies of self-stylization, or the ways in which he constructs an embodied self in language. Like Clej, Charles J. Rzepka is also interested in De Quincey’s relationship to the textual commodity. His Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (1995) focuses upon the life of the textual body that circulates in excess of De Quincey’s intentions or power to shape it. In relation to this recent attention on De Quincey’s body, I argue that his considerations of hypochondria demonstrate a necessity that we reflect further upon the possessive when we discuss De Quincey’s body, or the body that belongs to De Quincey. If it cannot be known by him, can it be said to be his? De Quincey examines how hypochondria positively constructs a body that wanders away from itself and from the calculations of well-being that produce the body as an object of knowledge about De Quincey. Grevel Lindop notes that ‘heautontimoroumenos’ is the name of a play by the Roman comic dramatist Terence, and means literally ‘one who is afraid of himself’ (De Quincey, 2000a, p. 339). To what extent could this fear, I wonder, restage De Quincey’s paranoia that the Jacobin mob he likes to observe are also ‘watching out’, biding their time for ‘the moment to strike’ (Barrell, 1991, p. 3)? Is it possible that the self could become overpopulated, and similarly threatening? The economic and political circulation of well-being begs other questions regarding the circulation of representations. As Schneider has noted, the monetary and economic debates between 1805 and 1820, in which questions about representation and the imagination were given a pointedly economic spin following the Bank of England’s introduction of a paper currency that was no longer convertible to coin (1995, p. 85), are another place in which De Quincey thought through ‘the potential value of representation’ (p. 114). At the forefront of this criticism stands David L. Clark’s ‘We “Other Prussians”: Bodies and Pleasures in De Quincey and Late Kant’ (2003). Daniel O’Quinn’s two essays ‘Murder, Hospitality, Philosophy: De Quincey and the Complicitous Grounds of National Identity’ (1999) and ‘The Gog and Magog of Hunnish Desolation: De Quincey, Kant and the Practice of Death’ (1997) along with Paul Youngquist’s chapter ‘De Quincey’s Crazy Body’ in his Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (2003) round out the most compelling recent articulations of what it means to read De Quincey and Kant astride one another. On Kant’s exploration of the productive recesses of such indeterminacy see Clark, 2003. Nigel Leask has suggested that De Quincey’s ‘target was not so much German aesthetics as Coleridge’s particular interpretation of them’ (1995, p. 97). While this question is beyond the scope of my interest in De Quincey’s production of Kant as a hypochondriac, the possibility that De Quincey rewrites a Coleridgean aesthetic raises potentially compelling, if exceedingly complicated, questions as to the possible trade in aesthetic hypochondria between these two men. O’Quinn notes that De Quincey’s critique of Kant is not limited to aesthetic philosophy but also includes his moral philosophy, at least as it is minimally



186

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

present in the lecturer’s reference to Kant’s ‘On a Supposed Right to Lie from Altruistic Motives’ in which ‘Kant maintains the injunction against lying even at the cost of human life’ (O’Quinn, 1999, p. 140). In De Quincey’s words, Kant ‘declared it to be every good man’s duty’ to aid and abet a murderer ‘by pointing out his victim’s hiding-place’ (2000e, pp. 113–14). It is worth noting in further support of my interest in De Quincey’s supplementation of his German originals that the references to Kant as a Mummy in ‘The Last Days’ ‘happen to be De Quincey’s’ and not Wasianski’s (Rzepka, 2000, p. 94). I wonder could this child be read as an uncanny double of the child who admits the Malay to De Quincey’s cottage in Confessions? Without knowing whether this child is a girl at least, it is difficult to say for sure. Alternatively, is the child who distracts the amateur murderer another version of the servant girl who similarly distracts De Quincey in his ‘Appendix’? Is this moment further evidence that while De Quincey might like to reify the servant girl as beneath his interest she continues to haunt him? It should be noted that O’Quinn’s focus is on the question of how De Quincey interprets Kant’s contention that reflective judgment involves the suspension of moral judgment, and thus places Kant in the position of justifying murder, if it be committed with an eye to aesthetics. His attention is drawn to this moment, but specifically in order to show how Kant unwittingly becomes an accomplice to murder. The lecturer elsewhere distinguished ‘amateurs’ from ‘the character of a professional man’ (De Quincey, 2000e, p. 133). He cites the example of an English pugilist and fellow ‘amateur of our society’ who found ‘himself wearied with the frigid pleasures (so he called them) of mere amateurship’ and ‘quitted England for the continent – meaning to practise a little professionally’ (p. 127). Does such a reading also risk murdering, through neglect, the child who is murdered instead of Kant? Is the accomplice De Quincey, and his readers – myself included – who continue to focus on Kant? O’Quinn notes that De Quincey’s strange hospitality to the Malay is prepared by the return of De Quincey’s faculties (‘my brain performed its functions as healthily as before’) now on a regimen of only 1000 drops of laudanum per day. Reading Kant, and understanding him or fancying ‘that I did’, De Quincey girds himself up intellectually, so that if a man from Oxford or Cambridge should show up on his doorstep ‘I should have welcomed him with as sumptuous a reception as so poor a man could offer’ (1992, p. 55). But these appointees of the university do not arrive. Instead, sentences later, the Malay arrives, acting as a ‘surrogate for the men of learning who do not arrive’ (O’Quinn, 1999, p. 148). I read this scene in similar terms but I argue that the Malay marks a reconstituted hypochondriac, like Kant and the hypochondriac of the ‘Appendix’, and indeed like De Quincey. Noting particular pronoun shifts in De Quincey’s description of the Malay’s posture, O’Quinn argues that the text opens itself up to ‘misreading’ at this moment, by deploying opportunities to ‘turn on the Malay’ (1999, p. 151). I would add that it is not just a misreading the text facilitates but also a reading of the uncertainty and ambivalence that surrounds texts in general – and that text called the body, in particular. See Rzepka, 1995, pp. 5–6.




188

Notes to Chapter 5

1. Barbara Baumgartner offers a similar recognition that Prince’s narration of infirmity is tied to acts of self-definition. She contends Prince’s ‘physical disability’ is a ‘type of resistance’ as a ‘means of explaining and defending her inability (i.e. refusal) to work’ (2001, p. 258). Even putting aside the question of whether or to what extent Prince escapes from work because of her infirmity – and what sort of an escape it might be to undertake work in the house rather than field, a site of labor that makes her more susceptible to sexual abuse – the question remains: isn’t all of her talk about health itself a type of work, as strenuously undertaken as any other? In fact, discourses of well-being are, first and foremost, productive rather than disabling. It is the material out of which Prince will not just refuse a particular role, but define and redefine who she is. 2. While I am interested to place emphasis on the role of discourses of well-being in The History, it is important to recall also the very powerful role abolition plays in governing how Prince speaks and about what she can be vocal. Bound in part by the conventions of an abolitionist narrative of conversion to Christianity as she dictated her story, Prince represents herself as a ‘decent and docile slave’ and takes care not to provide any basis for the accusations that would come after the publication of her text that she had turned to prostitution to earn money in an attempt to buy her freedom (Sharpe, 1996, p. 49). Her text is haunted by what it does not disclose and is structured by what Jenny Sharpe has noted is ‘the paradoxical position of the slave woman … who existed outside the structures of domesticity but was expected to uphold its ideals’ as she attempted to speak truth to power (p. 32). The conventions governing Prince’s speech act make certain elements of her narrative unutterable if Prince is to maintain the support of Pringle and his Anti-Slavery Society backers, and thus readers of her text are forced to examine the fissures, unrepeated repetitions, and absences that provide a glimpse into what the text cannot speak but which is written in its pages nonetheless. 3. The legal charge of seditious libel has its roots in the eighteenth century and the development of the public sphere. In the context of a free press, it became important for the state to have recourse to the means with which to govern what could be considered treasonous printed speech. The charge of private libel, on the other hand, affords the individual a right to protection from defamation similar to that of the national interest. Private libel, moreover, reinforces norms of proper public speech and lays out corrective measures to be taken against those individuals who transgress these national ideals governing speech. The courts are just one venue in which Prince must negotiate how she speaks and what the effects of speech are, however. She must also negotiate the effects of the social-discursive network of abolitionism and medicalized discourse, as well as the institution of slavery, as she attempts to give an account of herself that is more than simply an account of mediation by these inescapable discourses governing proper speech. 4. The name of Mary Prince is itself a complicated matter. Pringle states in a footnote, ‘in printing this narrative we have retained Mary’s paternal name of Prince’, and notes that her name while owned by Wood may have been



Chapter 5: Performance Anxiety: Illness and The History of Mary Prince

5.

6.

7.

8.

‘Mary, Princess of Wales’, a marker ‘of the habitual contempt with which [slaveholders] regard the negro race’ (1997, p. 84). Significantly, Pringle’s act of naming fails to acknowledge, and in fact voids, her relationship to her husband Daniel James. Further complicating this act of naming his employee, one which powerfully replicates the structures of slavery, are Mary’s other names. Wood refers to Prince as Molly (p. 96), a phrase which has workingclass and sexualized overtones as a housekeeper who ‘was obliged to prostitute herself to her owner’ (Rauwerda, 2001, p. 402). As A. M. Rauwerda notes, Prince’s ‘name is politicized’ as a battleground between Pringle and Wood who both stake claims to the right to determine who she is (p. 402). The question of her name also expresses, in a compact form, a national ‘anxiety about the ultimately unknowable racial other’ in the face of efforts to better define Englishness in the Romantic period (Todorova, 2001, p. 292). It is important to note that the idea that enslaved Africans would be free on English soil which is associated with the Mansfield ruling is as much an interpretation of the Somerset case by abolitionists as it is common law. Blackstone’s interpretation of this ruling in his Commentaries strode a middle course by suggesting that while a slave might be free in England, his or her master still had a right to expect service (Temple, 2003, pp. 187–9). Kiple cites the example of Barbados which imported 387,000 slaves between 1626 and 1807, ‘yet in 1834 there were only 82,000 on the Island to receive liberation’ (1984, p. 106). Measuring only births and deaths, the black population of Barbados was decreasing at ‘fully 4 percent annually’ in the early eighteenth century. As economic competition from within the empire and by rival nations increased over the course of the eighteenth century, it became more economically necessary to value the life of a slave and ‘a policy of “amelioration” was adopted’ (p. 106). How effective or feasible such amelioration was for the institution of slavery is highly suspect, however, as Prince’s account suggests and as the example of Jamaica attests, where this characteristic net loss of population continued into the 1840s. Planters may simply have been unable to adapt their techniques and methods of caring for slaves to maintain populations without the Atlantic slave trade. Grainger moved to St Kitts in 1759, where he managed the plantation of his wife’s uncle. He died in 1766 and, in addition to posthumous literary publications, his slave medical manual was published in a second edition edited by William Wright in 1802. Doing the laundry was a chore which had become strongly identified with working-class labor and would have been readily understood as an undesirable task. As Kathryn Temple notes, ‘washing was a pervasive problem’ and the English devoted ‘any number of popular songs and rhymes to the fact that they hated doing the laundry’ (2003, p. 190). Prince’s toil is figured metonymically by the washtub, a figure for wage-labor which connects her enslavement to the Reform movement and forms of cross-race solidarity she experiences when the English washerwomen offered to assist her ‘when they saw that I was so ill’ (Prince, 1997, p. 87). Whether this made servitude look like a kind of domestic slavery, or enslavement a cause which could be allied with Reform, this identification with the working classes articulates a deep anxiety in Britain surrounding threats to bourgeois dominance and power by those whose labor supported the middle classes.




Notes to Chapter 5

9. As if to once again supplement a lack in the text, Pringle closes his appendix to the text with the heroic declaration ‘THAT NO SLAVE CAN EXIST WITHIN THE SHORES OF GREAT BRITAIN’ (Prince, 1997, p. 125). 10. This scene of care, it should be noted, reinscribes a conventional notion of benevolent white femininity associated with the anti-slavery movement. This scene shows not only how Prince’s narrative is shaped by her readers’ mores and expectations, but also how it productively contributes to such regulatory ideals even and especially as it negotiates the emergence of Mary Prince as an effect of those ideals. 11. In Moira Ferguson’s most recently revised edition of The History of Mary Prince (1997) she includes modern newspaper accounts of a controversy over official memory of slavery in Bermuda, taken from the Bermuda Gazette in 1994. Taking nothing away from the contribution these papers make to understanding the permanence of certain strains of racism, these appendices also point to a continuing critical impulse to ‘finish’ a text that so compellingly rallies against becoming itself. 12. And to what extent are these eye problems another way of conceiving of the difficulty Prince had making her infirmities visible under slavery? 13. I am following Sedgwick’s suggestion that the Austinian performative ‘must be understood continuously in relation to the exemplary instance of slavery’ which, along with the hetero-normative institution of marriage, are the examples of forms of speech that create that which they describe (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 90).



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Allard, James Robert (2004) ‘John Thelwall and the Politics of Medicine’, European Romantic Review, 15, 1, 73–88. —— (2007) Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body (Burlington: Ashgate). Armstrong, Nancy (1987) Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford University Press). Barrell, John (1991) The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press). Baumgartner, Barbara (2001) ‘The Body as Evidence: Resistance, Collaboration, and Appropriation in The History of Mary Prince’, Callaloo, 24, 1, 253–75. Beddoes, Thomas (1795) ‘Observations on the Character and Writings of John Brown MD’, in The Elements of Medicine of John Brown MD (London: J. Johnson). —— (1799) Notice of Some Observations Made at the Medical Pneumatic Institution (London: Biggs and Cottie). —— (1802) Hygëia: or Essays Moral and Medical, on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of our Middling and Affluent Classes (Bristol: J. Mills). Bennett, Betty T., ed. (1995) Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Bewell, Alan (1989) Wordsworth and the Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press). —— (1999a) Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press). —— (ed.) (1999b) Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, vol. 7 (London: Pickering and Chatto). Blackmore, Sir Richard (1725) A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours: or, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Affections (London: J. Pemberton). Boccaccio, Giovanni (1972) The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (New York: Penguin). Brown, Charles Brockden (1962) Arthur Mervyn or Memoirs of the Year 1793, ed. Warner Berthoff (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston). Brown, John (1795) Elements of Medicine of John Brown MD, trans. Thomas Beddoes (London: J. Johnson). Brown, Laura (1993) The Ends of Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Bruhm, Steven (1993) ‘Aesthetics and Anesthetics at the Revolution’, Studies in Romanticism, 32, 399–424. Buchan, William (1985) Domestic Medicine (New York: Garland Publishing). Burke, Edmund (1776) Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: J. Dodsley). —— (1986) Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Toronto: Penguin). Burrall, Barbara and Arthur Huntley (2002) ‘The Thomas Beddoes Reviews’, Dermatology Online Journal, 8, 1. Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge). 191



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aesthetics as a discourse of the body 58, 71, 74, 79–82 and hypochondria 58, 66, 67, 79–82 and murder 136 and nationalism 68 see also under Coleridge Allard, James Robert 34, 86 Allston, Washington 75–80 anxiety 32, 40, 49, 58, 76, 79–80, 130, 132, 177 middle classes 33, 35, 40–1 nation 107, 115–16, 124–5, 183, 189 and new illnesses 79, 115–16 Armstrong, Nancy 33 Barrell, John 124–6, 143, 185–6 Baumgartner, Barbara 188 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell 9, 28–56, 65, 116, 123–4, 140, 170–1, 178–80 works: Hygeia 28, 29, 35–8, 44, 46–54; Notice of Some Observations 30, 31; ‘Observations on the Character and Writings of John Brown, MD’ 32, 40 and medical manuals 29, 34, 43–5, 49 and scientific medicine 30 Bennett, Betty T. 99 Bewell, Alan 7, 39, 62, 90, 101, 113, 116, 141–3, 157–8, 184 Blackmore, Sir Richard 96–7, 110 Blackwood’s Magazine 125, 134, 136, 139, 152 Boccaccio, Giovanni 104, 184 bodies and abjection 11, 50, 53, 112, 125, 183 and absence 83, 134

attending to 120–1, 130–1, 134–5, 137 and corporeality 12, 15, 54, 85–6, 114–15, 163, 165–6 as knowable 53, 60, 64–5, 67, 70, 74, 81, 128, 143–5 and rhetoric 65, 68, 71, 74, 78–80, 82, 86–9, 91, 97, 114, 117–18 Bristol 30–1, 40, 61–3, 67–8, 73–6, 79, 106, 123 Bristol Journal see Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal Brown, Charles Brockden 23, 25, 64, 86–7, 103–5, 107–14, 116, 184 Brown, John 9–10, 22, 25, 32, 40, 42, 54 Brown, Laura 183 Bruhm, Steven 70 Buchan, William 34–5, 65–6 Burke, Edmund 34, 36, 70, 88, 183 Butler, Judith 11, 41, 53–4, 115, 166–7 Butler, Marilyn 31 Carey, Mathew 105–6 Carlson, Elof Axel 173 Carmichael, A. C. 158 Cheyne, George 17–19, 88, 91–7, 113, 183 cholera 8, 62, 90 Christophersen, Bill 107, 111 Clark, David L. 80–1, 111, 135–6, 139, 186 Clej, Alina 186 Colburn, Glen 13 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 57–85, 117, 130, 141, 148, 162–3, 176, 179–82, 186 works: Biographia Literaria 66–7, 74, 78, 81, 85; The Friend 181; ‘Lecture on the Slave Trade’ 61–2; ‘On the Present War’ 61; Principles of Genial Criticism 25, 58, 68,

199



Index

Index

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor – continued 71–2, 74–6, 81–2, 181; The Watchman 85 and aesthetics 58, 66–8, 71–2, 74, 79–82 and Beddoes 59, 65, 116 and disorders 57–8, 62, 65, 79, 82 and medical manuals 65–6 Collins, David 157 Costello, Julie 43 Crook, Nora 91 Darwin, Erasmus 22, 59, 70, 173–4 Davy, Humphry 61 De Almeida, Hermione 10, 32, 45, 173, 183 Dekker, George 73 De Man, Paul 40 De Quincey, Thomas 120–48, 161–2, 185–7 works: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 120–2, 124–7, 129–34, 141–8; ‘Dialogues of the Three Templars’ 125; ‘The Last Days of Immanuel Kant’ 134–6, 138; The Logic of Political Economy 125–8; ‘On Murder’ 134, 136–9 and gender 131, 161 and orientalism 124–5, 130, 137, 143 and political economy 122, 125–8, 133 and slavery 127–8, 133 Derrida, Jacques 51, 55, 79, 162 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 15 Eagleton, Terry 58, 180 Edgeworth, Maria 192–3 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 30–1 English Malady 16, 91–6, 114, 116, 144 epilepsy 46 Falk, Bernard 178 Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal Fisch, Audrey 183 Ford, Jennifer 57

67

Foucault, Michel 3, 7, 21–2, 46, 50–1, 115, 176, 178, 180 Gigante, Denise 182 Godwin, William 88, 105 Goellnicht, Donald C. 63, 95, 183 Grainger, James 157, 189 Green, J. H. 82–4 Guiton, Derek 91 Hamacher, Werner 83, 182 Haycock, David 57, 63–4, 83 health and class 28–9, 35–41, 44, 54, 126–7 and geography 86, 116 as an ideal 28, 36, 53–4, 56, 86, 88–9, 92, 100, 128, 144, 158 as an object of knowledge 28–9, 31, 39–40, 42, 46, 53–4, 60, 71, 74–5, 80–4, 87, 122, 130–1, 133–4, 141, 143, 145, 166 pleas for 154, 163 rhetorical vs real 60, 65, 71, 79–80, 87, 113, 117–18, 146, 150 of seamen/servicemen 61–2, 85 of slaves 127–8, 150, 156–8, 163, 165, 168 and subjection 164, 166, 168 as a temporary state 63 Holmes, Richard 57, 76 Hume, David 70 Hutcheon, Linda 38 Hutcheon, Michael 38 hypochondria and anxiety 33, 58, 79, 130, 132, 140, 177 and distraction 2, 52 epidemic of 24–5, 29, 49, 91, 150, 158 and epistemology 22, 65, 82, 118, 136, 146, 171 and ethics (Prince) 146, 160, 163, 167–8 as a fashionable disorder 7, 17–19, 91, 176 and fiction 87, 109, 117, 133, 166, 176, 184



200

and gender 13, 19–21, 37, 131, 161, 183 as an interruption in norms 13–14, 54 and irrationality 3, 14, 21, 53, 64, 80, 132 and longing 53, 96, 132 as a pathology 51, 53, 60, 63, 66, 79, 81, 95, 102, 122, 131, 134, 140, 158, 171, 174 and performativity 82, 110, 149, 162–3, 168 and reading 129–30, 144, 175–7 and self-fashioning 14, 58–60, 63, 120–1, 129–30, 140, 149, 151, 160 suggested treatments 4, 66 as a symptom of illness 95, 97, 111 and temporality 97, 100, 116, 147 and volition 4, 21–2, 176 and wealth 8, 62, 92 hysteria 13 distinguishing from hypochondria 19, 21, 37, 161, 178 identity 20, 82, 121, 128, 130, 134, 153, 165 imperialism 61–2, 93–5, 116–17, 123–4, 144, 148–9, 183 Kant, Immanuel 21, 26, 121, 134–41, 178, 186–7 Kaul, Suvir 93 Keach, William 183 Kiple, Kenneth, F. 156, 189 Krell, David Farrell 42, 180 Kristeva, Julia 50, 52, 54, 180 LaCapra, Dominick 48 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 172–3 Lane, Joan 32 Lawrence, Christopher 5, 7, 10, 32 Leask, Nigel 139, 186 Lefebure, Molly 179 Locke, John 121 Logan, Peter Melville 13, 36, 130, 179

McClintock, Anne 185 McWhir, Anne 101, 184 Madden, Richard Robert 158 medical authority 29 medical manuals 29, 33–4, 43–5, 47, 49, 66, 103 medical perception 29, 43, 51–6, 116 medicine and anatomy 50–1, 64, 83 and dissenting religion 31, 33 and labour 36 and politics 9, 11, 31, 34, 40 and profession 29, 32, 40, 44–5, 55–6, 178 and scientific experimentation 30–1, 55 and West Indies 62, 157 see also under norm Meister, Robert 16–17 melancholia 16–17, 20, 22, 59, 91, 96, 178, 183 Mellor, Anne 91, 98 Melville, Peter 39, 81, 113 Miller, D. A. 63–4 mourning 98–9 Nancy, Jean-Luc 118 Napoleonic Wars 68, 89 nation 61, 99 aesthetic taste of 68 health of 36, 43, 85–91, 96, 105, 107, 109, 111–13 nervous system 9, 19, 95 norm 9–11, 60, 71, 150, 152, 158–9, 162, 164–6, 168, 171, 183, 188 of deviance 7 of embodiment 123 of health 164, 183 of medicine 154 political 150 of well-being 11–12, 14, 67, 158, 172, 175 norms see norm opera 38, 39, 142–3, 182 opium 75–6, 120, 125–7, 129, 141, 143–5, 179 opium-eater 120, 122, 124–5, 130, 135, 141, 144–5, 185



Index 201

Index

O’Quinn, Daniel 139, 186–7 orientalism 171 see also under De Quincey Paley, Morton D. 78, 184 Parker, Reeve 72 Parrish, Stephen Maxfield 59 Perfect, William 161 Pfau, Thomas 68 Philadelphia 87, 105–9, 115, 184 Plug, Jan 113 Porter, Dorothy 34, 91 Porter, Roy 31–2, 35, 65, 92–3, 179–80, 185 Priestley, Joseph 33 Prince, Mary 149–69, 188–90 and abolition 151–3, 169 and authorship 152 The History of Mary Prince 149–69, 190 and illness 150, 154–5, 158, 162–5, 168 Rajan, Tilottama 38, 72, 176, 179–81 Rauwerda, A. M. 189 Redfield, Marc 68, 70, 181 Reid, John 7, 9, 46, 97, 111, 179, 184 Ronell, Avital 70, 118, 185 Rousseau, George Sebastian 57, 63–4, 83, 178 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 20–1, 39, 183 Rowlandson, Thomas 1–5, 7–9, 16, 178 Rush, Benjamin 108–10, 184 Rzepka, Charles J. 138, 144, 186–7 Samuels, Shirley 108 Schaffer, Simon 33 Schneider, Matthew 186 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 162, 175–6, 190 sensibility 5, 14, 20, 60, 64, 99–100, 111, 130–2, 173, 183 sexual 141, 188 sexualized 153, 189 Sharpe, Jenny 188 Shell, Susan Meld 21, 52, 135, 178

Shelley, Mary works: Frankenstein 116; The Last Man 85–119, 140, 184–5 and empire 88–9, 93–4, 116, 118 and last man theme 98, 102, 117, 184 and time 116–17 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 98–9, 183 Siskin, Clifford 121 slavery 149, 153, 156–8, 160–1, 163–8, 188–90 see also under De Quincey Smith, Adam 5, 121–5 Smith, Ginnie 34, 179 Southey, Robert 30, 64, 89–90 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 39 Stansfield, Dorothy A. 31, 33, 35, 40, 179 Sussman, Charlotte 101–2 Temple, Kathryn 153, 189 Todorova, Kremena 189 Traister, Bryce 183 Trotter, Thomas 36, 179 Vickers, Neil 6, 10, 42, 59, 72, 179, 182 Vila, Anne C. 183 Wallen, Martin 12, 29, 59, 171, 180–1, 183 Wasianski, Ehregott Andreas Christoph 134–6, 138–9, 187 Wesley, John 34, 181 West Indies 18, 61–2, 85, 107, 156–60, 164 Whytt, Robert 19–20, 95 Wilson, Andrew 18–19 Wilson, Eric 59–60 Wollstonecraft, Mary 36, 89, 105, 183 Woodmansee, Martha 69, 74 Wright, Julia 90, 105, 183 yellow fever 85, 87, 105, 107–8, 184 Youngquist, Paul 12, 29, 56, 123, 179, 185–6



202

The Age of Hypochondria: Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Romantic Misfits (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Romantic Cosmopolitanism (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Byron's Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

Literary History Writing, 1770-1820 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

The Feminization of Fame 1750-1830 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770-1830 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700-1900 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Britain's Bloodless Revolutions: 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776-1832 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery,1760-1807 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789-1832 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Land, Nation and Culture, 1740-1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Literary Minstrelsy, 1770-1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Literature, Commerceand Luxury (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Literary Minstrelsy, 1770-1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

Cultures of print: essays in the history of the book

Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (No. 66))

Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture

Romanticism and the Visual (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

The Age of Hypochondria: Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Romantic Misfits (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Romantic Cosmopolitanism (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Byron's Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

Literary History Writing, 1770-1820 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

The Feminization of Fame 1750-1830 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770-1830 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700-1900 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Britain's Bloodless Revolutions: 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776-1832 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery,1760-1807 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789-1832 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Land, Nation and Culture, 1740-1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Literary Minstrelsy, 1770-1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Literature, Commerceand Luxury (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Literary Minstrelsy, 1770-1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

Cultures of print: essays in the history of the book

Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (No. 66))

Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture

Romanticism and the Visual (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

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