By Liz Deangelo (Vanderbilt University)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the notion of sensibility became a social phenomenon that permeated the art and literate of the time.  Sensibility was a term used to describe an acute feeling of emotion or a quickness of perception.  Although it became a term to describe social refinement and good breeding, the idea of sensibility originally developed from medical conceptions about delicate or sensitive nerves.

A fine sensibility or fragility of the nervous system could cause malaises of both the mind and the body.  During the eighteenth-century in Britain, various disorders of the nervous system were combined through the umbrella term of nervous disease.  Nervous disease encompassed a broad range of distempers, including melancholy, hysteria and anxiety. Furthermore, these nervous disorders mostly beset the British elite, according to the Scottish physician George Cheyne.

In his medical treatise The English Malady: or a Treatise on the Spleen and Vapours,  George Cheyne boldly claimed that nearly one third of the English upper-class suffered from a type of nervous disorder, which he called the “English Malady.”  Cheyne avowed that the climate, rich food and luxury of eighteenth-century Britain contributed to the malady plaguing many of the well-to-do.  In particular, women suffered from a type of melancholic hysteria due to the weakness of their nerves.  Fainting or swooning indicated the frailty of the female nervous system and became a fashionable way for women to behave.  Furthermore, it became fashionable to diagnosis women with a nervous disorder.  As one physician from the city of Bath, England once exclaimed to a patient, “Madam, you are nervous.”  The nervous diagnosis brought together the physical, psychological and fashionable aspects of upper class in eighteenth-century Britain and demonstrates the fluid boundary between medicine and society during that time.

Sources:

Cheyne, George. The English Malady. London, M.DCC.XXXIII. [1733]. Eighteenth Century

Collections Online. Gale. Vanderbilt University. 4 Oct. 2011
<http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/ecco/advancedSearch.do>.

Houston, R. A. “Madness and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century.” Social History 27.3

(2002): 309-26. JSTOR. Oxford Journals. Web. 4 Oct. 2011. <http://www.jstor.org/stable//508347>.

Jackson, Stanley W. Melancholia and Depression: from Hippocratic Times to Modern Times.

New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. Print

Jordanova, L. J. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the

Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989. Print

Schmidt, Jeremy. Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and

Madness in Early Modern England. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007. Print.

Van Sant, Ann J. Eighteenth Century Sensibility and the Novel: the Senses in Social Context.

Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1993. Print

By Regan Allen (Vanderbilt University)

In its later stages, the body of a medieval leper bore the appalling signs of decay and putrefaction: a misshapen face, numb and deteriorating limbs, festering sores on the skin, rancid breath and a raspy, fading voice. Believed to be highly contagious, this distressing image was the source of vast panic in medieval Europe. The progressing fear of leprosy in part justifies the existence of surprisingly extreme proposed treatments and cures during that time.

Medieval physicians explained leprosy’s unsightly symptoms by humoralism, a well-established medical model that divided bodily composition into four fluids, or humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Many asserted that an excess of black bile contaminating the blood resulted in the leprous condition. This conjecture resulted in a variety of treatments that aimed to purify the blood and the body as a way to realign the humors.

For example, an alchemist would give a leprous individual a concoction containing gold, a metal that symbolized richness and purity. Lepers willingly drank the solution expecting that the gold would cleanse and restore humoral equality, correcting the infirmity.

Lepers were also submitted to the evacuation of excess humoral fluid through regular bloodletting. Typically, a surgeon would cut a vein near the location of the accumulated corrupt blood. A regulated amount of fluid collected in a pan as it seeped out of a blood vessel, ideally eradicating large quantities of concentrated impurities.

The medieval practice of spilling pure blood through sacrifice constitutes another, more fantastical proposed treatment. Soaking in a bath medicated with the blood of an infant or a virgin was considered a possible cure. A leper who sat in this blood bath expected to undergo what would now be considered like a transfusion: the corrupt blood moves out of the body while the untainted blood moves in to replace it.

In today’s Western culture, leprosy exists more commonly as a literary metaphor than as an actual threat to general welfare. However, the same cannot be said for the Medieval Ages, in which leprosy’s extensive presence cultivated the development of treatments as extreme as the society’s overwhelming fear of the disease.

Brenner, Elma. “Recent Perspectives on Leprosy in Medieval Western Europe1.” History Compass 8.5 (2010): 388-406. Print.

Brody, Saul Nathaniel. The Disease of the Soul; Leprosy in Medieval Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974. Print.

Demaitre, Luke E. Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: a Malady of the Whole Body. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007. Print.

Zimmerman, Susan. “Leprosy in the Medieval Imaginary.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38.3 (2008): 559-87. Print.

By Margaret Hernon (Vanderbilt University)

Literary critics have been trying to diagnose the feverish Marianne Dashwood, heroine of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibilty, for decades.  Marianne becomes dangerously ill after being spurned by her lover and taking a long, melancholic walk in the rain, and her illness forms the climax of the novel itself.  Though many critics read this moment as a way to demonstrate the power of Marianne’s emotional turmoil, far older currents of medical thought are also at play, currents which may help to explain the prevalence of ill and invalid women in nineteenth-century works of literature.

When analyzing Marianne Dashwood – the overly-emotional embodiment of “sensibility” within Austen’s text – it is important to remember that, in the eighteenth-century, “sensibility” was far closer in meaning to “sensitivity” than “sensible.”  Many critics such as Barbara K. Seeber read Marianne’s fever as a way to symbolically depict her transition from foolish, excessive sensibility into sense (225-226).  After the fever, Marianne does vow to change her ways: “My illness has made me think…I saw in my own behavior…nothing but a series of imprudence towards myself, and want of kindness to others” (Austen 244).

Austen, however, is writing from a centuries-old cultural paradigm in which women were held to be irrational and infirm due to their wombs.  A 1670 text, for example, elaborates on the sufferings of women in “Hysterik Fits”: “Their Dreams are frightful, their Eyes are fixt and staring…they cough without intermission, spit in vast quantities for weeks” (Anon. 36).  Though it may seem counter-intuitive for doctors in the age of Enlightenment to still hold the womb responsible for such vagaries, this was clearly not the case.  As the eighteenth-century French physician Louyer-Villermay demonstrates, hysteria was “an ill of which the womb is the seat and which is entirely distinct from all the disorders that can exist in the genital organs of men” (Williams 252).

Marianne Dashwood, then, is not suffering solely in response to her thwarted love affair.  She – as well as numerous other literary lady invalids – is ill simply because she is a woman and must be ill.

Works Cited:

Anonymous. An account of the causes of some particular rebellious distempers. London: 1670

Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.

Seeber, Barbara. “I See Everything as You Desire Me to Do: The Scolding and Schooling of

Marianne Dashwood.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 17 (2004): 87-110

Williams, Elizabeth A. “Hysteria and the Court Physician in Enlightenment France.”

Eighteenth-Century Studies. 35 (2002): 247-255.

Image: Sketch of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra, 1810.  Wikimedia Commons