Abstract
In 1775 an English translation of a controversial French medical text was published in London under the title Nymphomania, or a Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus. The original text was written by an obscure French doctor, M. D. T. Bienville, and was first published in Amsterdam in 1771. The English translation was the work of Edward Sloane Wilmot, and it is with this edition and the British context into which it appeared that I will principally be concerned in this essay.
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Notes
M. D. T. Bienville, Nymphomania, or, a Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus, translated by Edward Sloane Wilmot (London: J. Bew, 1775), p. 186.
[Jonas Hanway], Thoughts on the Plan for a Magdalen-House for Repentant Prostitutes (London: J. Waugh, 1758), p. 42.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, introduced and translated by Allan Bloom (1979) (Reprinted, London: Penguin, 1991), p. 369.
Plato, The Republic of Plato, translated by Francis Macdonald Cornford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 60.
David Hume, ‘Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion’, in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, (Indiana: Liberty Classics, 1987), p. 603. Note added to the text of the essay in 1758.
G. S. Rousseau, ‘Nymphomania, Bienville and the Rise of Erotic Sensibility’ in Paul-Gabriel Boucé (ed.), Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), p. 96.
William Cullen, Synopsis Nosologiae Methodicae (Edinburgh: n.p., 1818), n.p., ‘entry 103’.
Carol Groneman, ‘Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality’, in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1994, vol. 19, no. 2, 343.
Groneman, ‘Nymphomania’, 343; G. S. Rousseau, ‘“A Strange Pathology”: Hysteria in the Early Modern World, 1500–1800’, in Sander Gilman et al. (eds), Hysteria Beyond Freud (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993), p. 112.
See G. S. Rousseau, ‘“A Strange Pathology”’, and Helen King, ‘Once Upon a Text: Hysteria from Hippocrates’, in Gilman et al. (eds), Hysteria; also Mark Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Aristotle’s Compleat Master-Piece, 23rd ed. (1749), p. 23. For further discussion of the one-sex model of anatomy see King, ‘Once Upon a Text’, and Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
The Ladies Dispensatory: Or, Every Woman Her Own Physician (London: John Hodges and John James, [1739?]), p. 107.
G. S. Rousseau, ‘“A Strange Pathology’”, p. 148. Although Ilza Veith, in her highly influential study of hysteria, argues that ‘The eventual permanent abandonment of the belief that hysteria had a uterine origin and that it occurred only in females came about quite independently and with no direct reference to the writings of Sydenham.’ Veith, Hysteria: the History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 145.
George Cheyne, The English Malady, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1991), p. xxii.
See Laurie Langbauer’s argument in Langbauer, Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990).
See, for example, William Dodd, A Sermon on St. Matthew, Chap, IX, Ver. 12, 13. Preach’d at the Parish Church of St. Laurence, near Guild-Hall, April the 26th, 1759, before the President, Vice-Presidents, Treasurer and Governors of the Magdalen House for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes (London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, [1759?]).
John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (London: W. Strahan et al., 1774), pp. 10, 23.
Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, Stephen Coote ed., (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 41.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Sciences and Arts’, The First and Second Discourses (ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Roger D. and Judith R. Masters), (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1964), p. 36.
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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Peace, M. (1999). The Economy of Nymphomania: Luxury, Virtue, Sentiment and Desire in Mid-Eighteenth Century Medical Discourse. In: Fudge, E., Gilbert, R., Wiseman, S. (eds) At the Borders of the Human. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27729-2_13
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