Nervous Disease in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain:
The Reality of a Fashionable Disorder
Heather R Beatty
Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine
978 1 84893 308 8: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 84893 309 5
This study, based on extensive use of eighteenth-century newspapers, hospital registers and case notes, examines the experience of suffering from nervous disease – a supposedly upper-class malady. Beatty concludes that, far from the stereotyped portrayal of nervous patients in contemporary fiction, ‘nervousness’ was a legitimate medical diagnosis with a firm basis in eighteenth-century medical theory.
Sample pages
Readership
History of Medicine and Eighteenth-Century Studies
Contents
Introduction: Explaining a Fashionable Disorder
1 Defining Nervous Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain
2 Quacks, Social Climbers, Social Critics and Gentlemen Physicians: The Nerve Doctors of Late Eighteenth-Century Britain
3 'Fester'd with Nonsense': Nervous Patients in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain
4 The Pursuit of Health: The Treatment of Nervous Disease
5 A Disease of the Body and of the Times
Epilogue
Appendix
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