Abstract
During the French Enlightenment, cerebralists were a key focus of the period’s distinctly visceralist ideas about the mind–body relation. Hygienic works designed for intellectuals frequently focused on treatments for the “delicate stomachs” of scholars, in a model that flourished well into the following century. In the field of mental medicine, hypochondria—understood as both a digestive and a psychic disorder—was redefined as a condition distinct from melancholy and hysteria, and as particularly predominant among male intellectuals. Major literary writers were also keenly interested in the visceral aspects of intellectual endeavor. The chapter provides an overview of those developments, focusing on the place of visceralism in the special “poetic organization” that was attributed to gens de lettres.
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Notes
- 1.
Diderot, Éléments de physiologie, 334. All translations from the French are my own, unless otherwise noted.
- 2.
Voltaire, “Sensation,” 530.
- 3.
The term “metaphysical anatomy” comes from Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 4, 140. Other sensationist anatomies include Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s statue-man fable in Traité des sensations (1754); the chapter “De l’homme” in Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (1749–89); and Charles Bonnet, Essai analytique sur les facultés de l’âme (1760).
- 4.
Voltaire, “Passions,” 377.
- 5.
Daniel Cottom, Cannibals and Philosophers, xii, 7.
- 6.
Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant, 38.
- 7.
Marianne Charrier-Vozel illustrates the popularity of flatulent literature by citing a letter in which Mme d’Epinay described the therapeutic farting she used to relieve her colic: “Sociabilités de la maladie,” 237.
- 8.
On restaurants and food science, see Spang, Invention of the Restaurant, and E. C. Spary, Eating the Enlightenment. On the rise of hygiene, see Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France, 441–473.
- 9.
As Spary emphasizes, literate Europeans “construed their eating habits in terms of regimen” (Eating the Enlightenment, 254).
- 10.
See Fernando Vidal, Les sciences de l’âme; and Gary Hatfield, “Remaking the Science of Mind.”
- 11.
See Bertrand Marquer, “Portrait de l’artiste en dyspeptique.” On monomania and obsession, see, among other studies, Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify, 152–196. Studies of the nineteenth-century writer or artist as a “sick” hero include Alan Pasco, Sick Heroes; and Myriam Roman, “Avatars romanesques du penseur chez Mme de Staël, Balzac et Hugo.”
- 12.
Ramazzini, Treatise of the Diseases of Tradesmen, 246. Other citations to this work appear parenthetically in the text.
- 13.
See George S. Rousseau’s introduction to John Hill, Hypochondriasis: A Practical Treatise, 1766; German E. Berrios, “Hypochondriasis: A History of the Concept,” and “In the Name of Hygieia and Hippocrates: A Quest for the Preservation of Health and Virtue.”
- 14.
See Dinah Ribard, “Pathologies intellectuelles et littérarisation de la médecine.”
- 15.
Lorry, Essai sur l’usage des alimens, vol. 2, 216.
- 16.
“Hypochondriacal (passion or affection): This is the term ordinarily used by physicians to designate a species of malady related to melancholy, since atrabile is also its morbific humor, which infects the entire mass of fluids […] but settles particularly on the organs or viscera of the lower abdomen” (“Hypochondriaque,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 8, 408–409).
- 17.
Tissot, De la santé des gens de lettres, xii. Abbreviated here as SGL.
- 18.
See Antoinette Emch-Dériaz, “The Non-Naturals Made Easy.” See also her discussion of La Santé in Tissot, Physician of the Enlightenment, 72–77.
- 19.
Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 250.
- 20.
The theory of vital regions owed much of its success in the eighteenth century to the prominence of Montpellier vitalism, one of whose trademark ideas was what Elizabeth Williams has called a “triadic conception” of the body (Williams, The Physical and the Moral, 38–39, 43–44, 51, 59). See also Roselyne Rey, Naissance et développement du vitalisme en France, 164–169.
- 21.
Tissot cited Rousseau’s “Préface de Narcisse” to support his contention that library work debilitated the body (SGL, 31) but ultimately took a cautious distance from Rousseau’s polemical condemnation of the arts and sciences. See on that question, Ronan Chalmin and Anne Vila, “Malade de son génie: raconter les pathologies des gens de lettres, de Tissot à Balzac.”
- 22.
Cited in Miriam Nicoli, Les savants et les livres, 145.
- 23.
See Séverine Pilloud, Les mots du corps, 279–281.
- 24.
Voltaire called Tissot a “fabricator of little medical books” in a 1772 letter to the Marquise du Deffand (Œuvres complètes de Voltaire. Correspondance générale, vol. 56, 71).
- 25.
For a fuller discussion of Voltaire’s personal regimen—and visceralism in his satirical writings—see my essay, “The Philosophe’s Stomach.”
- 26.
Mark S. Micale, Hysterical Men, 18–19. See also his overview of the late eighteenth-century shift in medical thinking about nervous disorders (49–116).
- 27.
On Villermay and the gendering of hysteria, see Étienne Trillat, Histoire de l’hystérie, 101–107; Nicole Edelman, Les Métamorphoses de l’hystérie, 16–22; and Sabine Arnaud, On Hysteria, 27–28 and passim.
- 28.
See Elizabeth A. Williams, “Stomach and Psyche.”
- 29.
Villermay, Recherches historiques et médicales sur l’hypocondrie, 373.
- 30.
Pinel, Nosographie philosophique, vol. 2, 8–10; Villermay, Traité des maladies nerveuses ou vapeurs, vol. 1, 223.
- 31.
See, for instance, Villermay, Recherches historiques et médicales sur l’hypocondrie, 60.
- 32.
See, for example, C. A. T. Charpentier, Essai sur la mélancolie, 62–63. As Susan Kassouf points out, late eighteenth-century European doctors also attributed those symptoms and habits to the Jewish male body (“The Shared Pain of the Golden Vein”).
- 33.
Broussais, De l’irritation et de la folie, 645. Jackie Pigeaud refutes the “epigastric metaphor” proposed by some historians of psychiatry by emphasizing that Broussais’s epigastric theory of passions and mental states was literal and materialist (Aux portes de la psychiatrie: Pinel, l’ancien et le moderne, 282).
- 34.
Goldstein, Console and Classify, 93.
- 35.
Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, 138; Cabanis, On the Relations Between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man, vol. 1, 117, translation modified (as are all translations of later citations from this work).
- 36.
Cabanis, Rapports, 226; Relations, vol. 1, 224.
- 37.
Cabanis, Rapports, 229–230; Relations, vol. 1, 227. For a recent discussion of Cabanis’s views on female constitution, see Florence Lotterie, Le Genre des Lumières, Femme et philosophe au XVIIIe siècle, 281–299.
- 38.
Cabanis, Rapports, 242; Relations, vol. 1, 241.
- 39.
Cabanis, Rapports, 248; Relations, vol. 1, 248.
- 40.
Cabanis, Rapports, 313; Relations, vol. 1, 328–329.
- 41.
Cabanis, Rapports, 314–315; Relations, vol. 1, 330.
- 42.
Brunaud, De l’hygiène des gens de lettres, 37. Brunaud’s belief that great minds were housed in big skull echoed other strands of early nineteenth-century scientific discourse; see Michael Hagner “Skulls, Brains and Memorial Culture.”
- 43.
Joseph-Henri Réveillé-Parise, Physiologie et hygiène des hommes livrés aux travaux de l’esprit, vol. 1, 104.
- 44.
In the “Avant-Propos” to La Comédie humaine, Balzac explained that the general goal of the Études philosophiques was to show the “ravages of thought … sentiment by sentiment” (La Comédie humaine, vol. 1, 19). He also drew on Cabanis’s “secretion” model of thinking in Louis Lambert (1832).
- 45.
Balzac, Traité des excitants modernes, 306; abbreviated here as TEM.
- 46.
Bertrand Marquer uses Balzac’s novel Le Cousin Pons to support a suggestive parallel between the physiological concept of the “second stomach” and Balzac’s image of the bourgeoisie as a median entity in the social body (“De l’épigastre au ventre”).
- 47.
Moïse Le Yaouanc provides a brief but incisive overview of how Balzac’s notion of the “nocivité de la pensée” draws on contemporary medical discourse, in Nosographie de l’humanité balzacienne, 47–49.
- 48.
Tissot’s English translator, James Kirkpatrick, politely objected to his condemnation of tea drinking, calling it a product of Tissot’s Swiss patriotism rather than his medical judgment; An Essay on Diseases, 149.
- 49.
Physicians were not, of course, the only sources of Balzac’s reflections on modern gastronomic excesses: his most explicit inspiration was Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s famous gastronomical treatise Physiologie du goût (1st ed., 1826).
- 50.
Réveillé-Parise, Physiologie et hygiène, vol. 1, 48 and vol. 2, 432.
- 51.
Les Martyrs Ignorés, 967–972.
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Vila, A. (2018). Visceralism and the Superior Mind in French Medicine and Literature, 1750–1850. In: Mathias, M., Moore, A.M. (eds) Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01857-3_7
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