1st Edition

Nervous Disease in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain The Reality of a Fashionable Disorder

By Heather R Beatty Copyright 2012
    256 Pages
    by Routledge

    250 Pages
    by Routledge

    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 ‘nervousness’ was a legitimate medical diagnosis with a firm basis in eighteenth-century medical theory.

    Introduction: Explaining a Fashionable Disorder; Chapter 1 Defining Nervous Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain; Chapter 2 Quacks, Social Climbers, Social Critics and Gentlemen Physicians: The Nerve Doctors of late Eighteenth-Century Britain; Chapter 3 ‘Fester’d with Nonsense’: Nervous Patients in late Eighteenth-Century Britain; Chapter 4 The Pursuit of Health: The Treatment of Nervous Disease; Chapter 5 A Disease of the Body and of the Times; Chapter 6 Epilogue;

    Biography

    Heather R. Beatty