James Kennaway

Two Kinds of "Literary Poison": Diseases of the Learned and Overstimulating Novels in Georgian Britain

Abstract:This article will analyze the complex relationship between two separate traditions of anxiety about the medical impact of reading. On the one hand there was the older concept of the diseases of the learned (Gelehrtenkrankheiten), associated with crabbed, often impecunious academics. This is a tradition that went back centuries and drew on the six non-naturals of Galenic medicine. On the other hand there was fear that the sentimental novel-reading habits of the leisured elite were overstimulating their nerves, a model that was based primarily on the newer medicine of stimulation associated with physicians such as Cullen, Whytt, Tissot, and Brown. This article will examine how these two models of pathological reading came together during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and what they show about the role of the imagination, luxury, gender, and sexuality.

Singing the Body Electric: Nervous Music and Sexuality in Fin-de-Siècle Literature

Of all art forms, music has perhaps been the most closely associated with nerves. The very fact that music has only limited powers of representation has meant that descriptions of its effects have often turned less to its “content” and more to its physical impact on the body. And throughout the history of neurology nerves themselves have been compared to the tightened strings of a musical instrument. George Cheyne’s The English Malady from 1733, for instance, used a musical analogy for the whole nervous system, writing of “the Brain, where all the nerves, or instruments of Sensation terminate, like a Musician in a finely fram’d and well-tun’d Organ-Case ... these nerves are like Keys, which, being struck or touch’d, convey the Sound and Harmony to this sentient Principle, or Musician.”1 As we shall see, the relationship between music and nerves went far beyond such metaphors, and by the end of the nineteenth century had become one of the most important ways of talking about music. The idea of musical over-stimulation of the nervous system was the basis of a whole discourse in literature, music criticism and psychiatry that saw music as a potential threat. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that the debate on nervous music was intimately connected to broader cultural anxieties about sexuality, and the way it related to personal autonomy and social order.2 The nineteenth-century “body electric,” to borrow Walt Whitman’s term, was not the automaton of the twentieth-century imagination, but a body of sexualised-electric nerves.3