How Everyone Became Depressed Read Online Free PDF Page B

help thinking there is a fund of credulity in mankind … and the money formerly given to monks for the health of the soul is now thrown to doctors for the health of the body, and generally with as little real prospect of success.” 2 In a similar tone, Louis Sé bastien Mercier, a late-eighteenth-century French litt érateur, mocked the “vapours” of the society women: “Our doctors, accustomed to taking the pulse of our pretty ladies, now see only the vapours and nervous illnesses … A pretty woman with the vapours does nothing other than drag herself from her bath to her toilette, and from her toilette to her couch.” 3 Vapours released their grip only slowly. In 1821, French psychiatrist Étienne-Jean Georget deplored that medical writers were still using the term “vapeurs,” rather than the modern expressions hysteria and hypochondria that Georget favored. 4
    But then vapours went out of style. The great term for neurological and psychiatric illness of a nonpsychotic nature that dominated public and medical profession alike from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth century was “nervous illness,” implicitly assuming that mental symptoms were reducible to the nerves of brain and body as explicitly neurological symptoms.
    The term “nervous diseases” reaches way back in medicine, without any particular author taking priority for first describing them. In 1602 Felix Platter, the official physician of the city of Basel, described a patient who had a lip pain so intense that it felt as though a “red-hot iron” was burning him. Platter noted “that such conditions come from the nerves, and that some nervous disorders [Nervenleiden] are capable of inflicting chronic distress without there being otherwise the slightest hint of disease, is amply illustrated in my practice.” 5
    But it was unquestionably Oxford physician Thomas Willis who in his 1667 work Pathologiae Cerebri, translated into English in 1684 as An Essay of the Pathology of the Brain and Nervous Stock, introduced the concept of the nerves to academic medicine in a rigorous scientific way as a cause of disease: through autopsies. On the causes of epilepsy, he wrote, “As to the places affected, for the seat of the irritative matter, although this brings hurt in any part of the nervous system, yet for the most part, it is wont to become most infestous [troublesome], when it is fixed near the beginnings or the ends of the nervous system, or about the middle processes of the nerves … ” How wrong other observers had been! “I know that very many ascribe these convulsive passions … to the vapours rising from the spleen: but it seems much more reasonable to deduce them from the convulsive matters laid up within the brain, and rushing upon the beginning of the nerves.” Thus, the “passions commonly called hysterical” originated in the head, not the uterus. 6
    Willis’s easy use of the adjective “nervous” gave rise to the term “nervous disease.” As early as 1739 we find London society doctor George Cheyne trying to convince the novelist Samuel Richardson that his various nervous flutterings were not evidence of a grave disease. This is before Richardson lapsed into frank melancholia. Cheyne: “Your noise in your ears is a common symptom of nervous Hyp and of no possible consequence.” (“Hyp” was another term for nervous ailments.) Later that year: “All your complaints are vapourish and nervous, of no manner of danger, but extremely frightful and lowering.” Richardson’s friend Mrs. Leake had sent to Cheyne a portion of a letter by Richardson that reflected, Cheyne told Richardson later, “the pain, anxiety, and discouragement your symptoms give you.” But take heart: Such symptoms, “I must sacredly assure you, are merely nervous and hysterical.” Later in 1742 Richardson’s “dejection and lowness” had reached such a state that Cheyne cautioned him, “Nothing hurts weak nerves so much as melancholy stories and