George Rousseau

Depression's forgotten genealogy: notes towards a history of depression:

The history of depression remains unwritten, yet historians harbour plentiful assumptions about its pre-1800 past. These views are necessarily coloured, even shaped, by modern views of depression formed after its nineteenth-century medicalization. A history of depression from ancient to modern times is an impossible task to complete successfully and would require, as a minimum, the historians utmost vigilance to nuance, difference, and the inclusion of non medical literature, especially poetry, drama and non-didactic prose. Nevertheless, five points about depressions pre-1800 European profile can confidently be made: (1) it developed along lines of female rather than male gender; (2) was transformed in the long eighteenth century when it blended with male madness under the sway of the cults of a pan-European sensibility movement; (3) always embedded a problematic pseudo-depressive state, or feigned version, which acted to permit female escape from dire socio-economic situation; (4) included sustained chronic duration as a requirement in its theory from the Renaissance forward; (5) is richly documented in its pre-1800 versions in imaginative literature, its often overlooked genealogy.

Political gout: dissolute patients, deceitful physicians, and other blue devils

This essay seeks to assess the renegade Thomas Beddoes through the filter of the gout diagnosis in his time. It stretches out to cover his whole life and emphasizes the need for a broad comparative historical and biographical approach. Gout is shown to have functioned then as more than a malady; it was also part of a social code embedding class, rank, affiliation, standing and political position.

The Doctor as Man of Letters: Mid-Georgian Transformations

Sir John Hill developed both his dramaturgy and practice of writing prose satire from his perspective as a student of natural history and the medical sciences. His yoking of medicine and acting was novel in mid-Georgian London but did not seem idiosyncratic to him. His importing from one realm to another was his primary contribution to dramaturgy—specifically, importing scientific theories which the actor, as well as writer, then needed to know. This chapter probes the precise niche of Hill’s contribution to the development of early modern dramaturgy. It does so by exploring Hill’s mind set, especially his role as a medical man active in various ways in the theatre of the mid-eighteenth century; by tracing the historical typology of the doctor as man of letters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; by unravelling how Hill became known among his contemporaries as the ‘rhyming apothecary’ and what significance this classification held for his performative ventures; by viewing his pronouncements on acting, especially as published in The Actor (1750), in relation to his medical theories; by following the doctor–writer type in central London’s coffeehouses; and by exploring how the doctor-as- man-of-letters rose, or did not rise, to the stature of Enlightenment thinker.

The Biographer’s Tale: Second Thoughts About ‘Filter Hill’

George Rousseau’s 2012 biography of Hill—The Notorious Sir John Hill: The Man Destroyed by Ambition in the Age of Celebrity—brought this neglected figure of mid-eighteenth century London to the attention of academic scholars. His biography explained why Hill had been neglected, why he deserved to be revisited and resuscitated, and painstakingly documented over many hundreds of pages Hill’s contributions to eighteenth-century life and thought in diverse fields. Now four years have elapsed. In this second ‘look’ Rousseau revisits the publication of his biography and explains why he might have approached some areas differently, particularly in the configuration of Hill as a ‘filter’ for mid-century London. The chapter begins with theoretical concerns about the varieties of biography and then moves to the perplexities of the form of biography as a container and frame for a subject as‘uncontainable’ as John Hill, all the time working to situate his biographical subject—Hill—within historical contexts of developing fame and celebrity. The chapter then distinguishes between mid-Georgian conceptions of fame and celebrity and traces differences brought into focus since 2012 as the result of work in the new subdisciplines gathered around celebrity studies. Finally, notoriety is discussed as a particular type of celebrity, both within the contexts of the 1750s and as a province of the biographer’s and historian’s field of vision. The essay ends on Rousseau’s summing up of the four-year interim 2012–2016.

Notoriety’s Public Interiors: Mid-Georgians Combining Celebrity and Intimacy, with an Appendix on the Rotunda at Ranelagh

Europe’s largest secular public interior, the Rotunda at Ranelagh, was erected to fulfil a social purpose. The Ranelagh complex—house, pleasure gardens, Chinese pavilion, huge Rotunda—soon became more fashionable than its older rival Vauxhall. Horace Walpole wrote, “It has totally beat Vauxhall… You can’t set your foot without treading on a Prince, or Duke of Cumberland”. However, if celebrity was guaranteed, the intimacy found there was less evident and Walpole remained as silent about it as he had been forthcoming about its celebrity visitors. This chapter theorises this development: first to explain why a need arose for such a large Rotunda; why the public was willing to pay to see celebrities; and how intimacy might flourish in such exposed spaces.

Book Review: Smallpox and the literary imagination 1660–1820

Uniting their forces, it seems, by sheer dint of scholarly writing, literary historians of the last generation have rewritten the cultural profile of numerous diseases: cancer, consumption, gout, heart disease, obesity and others. David Shuttleton, a literary historian interested in the interface of literature and medicine, has rounded out this record with his fine study of smallpoxs profile in the eighteenth century, its most transformative epoch before inoculation and vaccination turned around its fortunes after 1800. Shuttleton revises smallpoxs harsh realities, social effects, and especially its verbalizations and mentalizations by onlookers, close and distant. Smallpoxs narrower medical history is, of course, far from certain. Identified in the ancient world, first described by the Arab physician Rhazes, and distinguished from measles by Fracastoro, its progress from the Middle Ages to 1600 still conceals mysteries. What can safely be affirmed is that by 1700 it was killing many thousands each year: the scourge from which the eighteenth century could never be free. Jenners vaccinations at the end of the century, building on Lady Mary Wortley Montagus earlier inoculations, were the Enlightenments best hope for prevention. But the resistance to inoculation was immense. It was only when empire and imperialism in the Indian subcontinent made plain that smallpox would become a menace as dire as cholera, that the benefits of vaccination were securely applied. “Medical history” is a smaller field than “medical profile”, which extends to a maladys public understanding: here think of mental illness and AIDS. Shuttleton appropriately begins with this larger, bewildering profile in mind and augments our sense of smallpoxs cultural casualties. A scourge that disfigures its victims through visible sores, scars, and red spots erupting hot pus will be moralized despite attempts to neutralize the condition. Yet if disease clusters possess inherent symbolic resonances, as cultural historians have been demonstrating for three decades that they do, smallpoxs salient sign was disfigurement: disfigurement more than death. This perception did not sit easily with a Georgian civilization steeped in the lure of widely disseminated cults of beauty—aesthetic, physical, moral and sublime—and beautys opposites in the realms of the ugly and grotesque. Historians have interpreted much Enlightenment culture through this specific opposition. Yet read the pathetic accounts of those dying of smallpox and the horror of disfigurement terrorizes them far more than death does. If obesity in our time has become the site of fiercely contested debates trading on our obsession with symmetrically trim bodies—so slim that they are often anorexic—smallpox before 1800 took a similar toll on the faces and figures of women and men, rich and poor. Shuttletons accounts are often riveting, demonstrating the part played by imagination in the framing of this condition, especially the literary imagination that conceptualizes malady by first verbalizing it. This is not another pedestrian representation of a disease cluster: Shuttleton also embeds perplexing philosophical dimensions of “representing malady”—its degree of stigma—and takes sides in the ongoing debate about the need for demystification. Students of medical history know how assiduously Susan Sontag campaigned in the 1980s to demystify disease, which (in her view) should be a scientific category rather than moral sign or cultural stigma. Her aim was noble and eloquently argued, but history from time immemorial—continuing into the present—weighs against her position. People have always given meaning to disease; infected individuals cannot refrain from attaching morally loaded significance to their maladies that exceed the limits of the pathological signs and literal physical symptoms. For centuries smallpox was living proof of the moral tendency rather than its exception, just as psychological depression is today.

News and Notes: Autobiography of a Schizophrenic (1951) and the postwar anti-psychiatric movement: 1946?51

Autobiography of a Schizophrenic , published in 1951, is one of the earliest examples of the fictional mental breakdown memoir written in English. Its unknown author should also be considered prophetic of the anti-psychiatry movement that would flourish a decade later in the 1960s. The anonymous author trusts to Christian salvation rather than humanism or nihilism, and thinks faith in God the schizophrenics only secure remedy.

Book Review: City of health, fields of disease: revolutions in the poetry, medicine, and philosophy of romanticism

Romanticism continues to beguile for its ability to deflect scholars aiming to deconstruct its understanding of things medical: poles of health and disease, especially in cases of genius and idiocy, as well as what we moderns loosely term a “culture of health” configured as medicines language, ideology and politics. Now Martin Wallen, an American professor of literature, has made a useful contribution to the ongoing debate by applying his literary learning to the ways in which northern European Romantic medical thought remained in the clutches of Brunonianism, the theory that all human life reduces to states of “excitement”.

Writing the History of the Emotions

A moment’s reflection suggests that writing the history of the emotions poses huge hurdles in ‘framing’. No meeting with the dissertation director or publisher is needed. Shakespeare long ago intuited this quandary, even for far more complicated political categories. At the moment near the end of Coriolanus when his hero recognizes the great moral mess he has created – the ruination of Rome and pathetic failure of his military campaigns – he promises to ‘frame convenient peace’, well aware that everything in his plan will lie in the process rather than the fittingness (hence his ‘convenience’) of any new Rome he might build. So, too, is it in compiling histories of passions and emotions. All lies in setting them up. Essay Review