Abstract
Reviewed by: P. M. Jones, University of Birmingham, UK
The notion that intellectuals are more susceptible than most members of society to mental disorders (manias, melancholy, hypochondria, hysteria, ‘the vapours’, etc.) is deeply embedded in European history. According to this short book, the connection between the two was made explicit in the eighteenth century and it can be detected in a range of Enlightenment discourses. In fact, a whole new medical category dubbed ‘maladies des gens de lettres’ was invented in order to accommodate the syndrome. Doctors debated, discussed and theorized the link and their diagnoses converged around the proposition that such ailments and illnesses were physical diseases with causes that could usually be found in the stomach. The philosophy of vitalism propagated by Montpellier’s Faculty of Medicine from the 1750s onwards was clearly influential in this regard inasmuch as the doctrine prioritized explanations of bodily functions rooted in three vital regions: the brain, the abdomen and the skin. The tendency towards melancholy, hypochondria or hysteria among students and scholars was unquestionably a physical condition, therefore, and one that presented when the labours of the writing cabinet were pushed to extremes.
The author assembles an impressive array of sources which bring the suffering scholar syndrome to life, so to speak. Indeed, she claims that by the later eighteenth century the condition was so well known that it had entered vernacular language. This is questionable, the more so as the sources cited are nearly all philosophe-inspired texts and medical treatises that few would have read – even among the educated. The basic thesis having been established, an intricate analysis of each of these texts follows. This makes for a dense and hard to access book, particularly for researchers or historians lacking familiarity with the medical literature of the Enlightenment.
Still, Suffering Scholars offers a neat counterpoint to the perfectibilist rhetoric of the age. In the judgement of physicians, if no one else, the century’s striving for human progress clearly had a negative side to it: an inordinate pursuit of knowledge practised in social isolation, they reported, could be seriously damaging to physical and mental health. By the 1790s, though, this moral panic linked to sustained intellectual effort was beginning to subside. The educated laity together with the so-called ‘gens de lettres’ had more concrete matters on their minds such as the impact of revolution in France and the brusque remodelling of Europe by the armies and officials of Napoleon Bonaparte. Even if intellectuals continued to weigh heavily in the cultural sphere, doctors began to lose interest in them as a specific patient category who could be characterized by a propensity to specific ailments.
Hysteria was hived off and reconnected to the female, whereas hypochondria moved in the other direction to become identified as a disorder of the male for the most part. The perceived coherence of the disease syndrome of the scholar was lost as a result. Some physicians switched their attentions to other human categories: alcoholics, opium eaters, sexual deviants. In fact, with interest in social hygiene and public health on the rise in the early decades of the nineteenth century, doctors focused their energies instead on the medical ramifications of poverty, industrial pollution, insalubrious working conditions and endemic unemployment.