Nervous Disease in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain:

The Reality of a Fashionable Disorder

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Heather R Beatty

Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine

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

• Introduction
• Index

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

Related titles

• Depression and Melancholy, 1660–1800
• Desperate Housewives, Neuroses and the Domestic Environment, 1945–1970
• Literature and Science, 1660–1834

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