Nervous Disease in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Reality of a Fashionable Disorder / Edition 1

by Heather R Beatty

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138664609
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	01/21/2016
Series:	Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

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;