An account of an unaccountable distemper: The experience of pain in early eighteenth-century England and France

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Volumn 41, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 459-480

  Smith, Lisa Wynne ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950465731     PISSN: 00132586     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.0.0015     Document Type: Article

References (147)

1. For example, Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993)
2. Moira Garens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporality (London: Routledge, 1996)
3. Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Buckingham: Open Univ. Press, 1989)
4. Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore, Un Corps, Un Destin: La Femme dans la Médecine de la Rennaisance (Paris: H. Champion Éditeur, 1993)
5. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990)
6. Michael Stolberg, "A Woman Down to Her Bones: The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries," Isis 94 (2003): 274-99
7. Thomas Laqueur, "Sex in the Flesh," Isis 94 (2003): 300-6
8. Londa Schiebinger, "Skelettestreit," Isis 94 (2003): 307-13
9. Roy Porter, "Barely Touching: A Social Perspective on Mind and Body," in The Language of Psyche, ed. G. S. Rousseau (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), 80
10. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), 17-18
11. Caroline Bynum, "Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist's Perspective," Critical Inquiry 22, no. 1 (1995): 1-33
12. Kathleen Canning, "The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History," Gender & History 11 (1999): 499-513
13. Lisa Forman Cody, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005)
14. Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex': Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989)
15. Anne Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998)
16. Laqueur, Making Sex
17. Laqueur, "Sex in the Flesh."
18. Laura Gowing has examined legal records, while Wendy Churchill has explored medical practice. Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 7
19. Churchill, "The Medical Practice of the Sexed Body: Women, Men, and Disease in Britain, circa 1600-1740," Social History of Medicine 18 (2005): 3-22
20. Karen Harvey, "The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Representations of the Body in Eighteenth-Century England," Gender and History 14 (2002): 202-23
21. Karen Harvey, "The Century of Sex? Gender, Bodies, and Sexuality in the Long Eighteenth Century," The Historical Journal 45 (2002): 914
22. Barbara Duden, Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991 )
23. See also Ulinka Rublack, "Fluxes: the Early Modern Body and the Emotions," History Workshop Journal 53 (2002): 1-16
24. Malcolm Nicolson, "The Metastatic Theory of Pathogenesis and the Professional Interests of the Eighteenth-Century Physician," Medical History, 32 (1988): 277-300
25. Alisha Rankin, "Duchess, Heal Thyself: Elisabeth of Rochlitz and the Patient's Perspective in Early Modern Germany," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82 (2008): 109-144
26. Men were also thought to lactate and menstruate (Duden, Woman Beneath, 112-19)
27. See also Gianna Pomata and John Beusterien on male menstruation and Cathy McClive on the timing of flows. Pomata, "Menstruating Men: Similarity and Differences of the Sexes in Early Modern Medicine," in Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, ed. Valeria Finnuci and Kevin Brownlee (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2001 )
28. Beusterien, "Jewish Male Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century Spain," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 73 (1999): 447-56
29. and McClive, "Bleeding Flowers and Waning Moons: A History of Menstruation in France, c. 1495-1761" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, 2004)
30. See, for example, Martin, Woman in the Body
31. Patricia Crawford and Sara Mendelson, Women in Early Modern England 1550-1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 18-30
32. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Emharassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993)
33. Linda Pollock, "Childbearing and Female Bonding in Early Modern England," Social History 22 (1997): 306
34. See also Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2003)
35. Michael Roper, "Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History," History Workshop Journal 59 (2005): 57-72
36. For similar criticisms, see Fay Bound, "Writing the Self?: Love and Letter in England, c. 1660-c. 1760," Literature and History 11 (2002): 1-19
37. Joanna Bourke, "Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History," History Workshop Journal 55 (2003): 111-33
38. Séverine Pilloud and Micheline Louis-Courvoisier, "The Intimate Experience of the Body in the Eighteenth Century: Between Inferiority and Exteriority," Medical History 47 (2003): 451-72
39. Joanna Bourke makes a similar argument for modern history. See Linda Pollock, "Anger and the Negotiation of Relationships in Early Modern England," The Historical Journal 47 (2004): 567-90
40. Lucy Bending, The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 89-90
41. Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004)
42. Bourke, "Fear and Anxiety."
43. However, neither study focuses on bodily experience in the patients' present: Antonie Luyendijk-Elshout focuses on the medical treatments for fear; David Gentilcore extensively considers illness narratives, but they are remembrances of past long-term ailments that were cured miraculously. Pilloud and Louis-Courvoisier briefly touch on the mind/body connection, but do not explore it in any depth. See Luyendijk-Elshout, "Of Masks and Mills: The Enlightened Doctor and His Frightened Patient," in Rousseau, Languages of Psyche
44. Gentilcore, "The Fear of Disease and the Disease of Fear," in Fear in Early Modern Society, ed. William Naphy and Penny Roberts (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1997)
45. and Pilloud and Louis-Courvoisier, "Intimate Experience," 471-72
46. Sharon Howard, "Imagining the Pain and Peril of Seventeenth-Century Childbirth," Social History of Medicine 16 (2003): 367-82
47. Lucinda McCray Beier, Sufferers & Healers: The Experience of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987)
48. Raymond A. Ansel-ment, "'The Wantt of Health': An Early Eighteenth-Century Self-Portrait of Sickness," Literature and Medicine 15 (1996): 225-43
49. Elizabeth Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996)
50. Patricia Crawford, "The Construction and Experience of Maternity in Seventeenth-Century England," in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren, ed. Valerie Fildes (London: Routledge, 1990)
51. Rebecca Earle, ed., Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600-1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999)
52. Étienne-François Geoffroy, MSS 5241-5245, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Médecine (Paris) (hereafter BIUM); Sir Hans Sloane, MSS 4034, 4036-4069, 4075-4079, British Library (London) (hereafter BL). Consultation by letter with Sloane cost a guinea, while at least one patient paid Geoffroy twelve livres, about half Sloane's fee. Physicians in both countries charged their patients on a sliding scale according to their finances. See Sir Gavin de Beer, Sir Hans Sloane and the British Museum (London: Published for the Trustees of the Museum by Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), 53; BIUM MS 5241, ff. 45-46, Marquis de Brichauteau to Geoffroy, 10 June 1729
53. Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 324, 541, 545
54. François Loux and Philippe Richard found many proverbs suggesting that illness was a luxury reserved for the wealthy, but Patrick Kiley suggests that French aristocrats considered expressions of pain as unrefined. François Loux and Philippe Richard, Sagesses du Corps: la Santé et la Maladie dans les Proverbes Français (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1978), 151-52
55. Patrick D. Kiley, "Making Sense of Pain: Reading the Sensible Body of Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century France" (Ph.D. thesis, Purdue University, 2000)
56. Matthew Ramsey and Colin Jones have argued that English medicine was not entirely liberal and free market, while French medicine was not necessarily tightly controlled by monopolies or the state. Matthew Ramsey, "Le Médecin, le Peuple, l'État: La Question du Monopole Professionnel," in La Médecine des Lumières: Tout Autour de Tissot, ed. Vincent Barras and Micheline Louis-Courvoisier (Geneva: Georg Éditeur, 2001), 27-40
57. Colin Jones, "The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisements, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution," American Historical Review 101 (1996): 13-40
58. Ramsey, "Le Médecin." Georges S. Rousseau suggests that hysteria was understood differently in European countries by the end of the eighteenth century: "'A Strange Pathology': Hysteria in the Early Modern World," in Hysteria Beyond Freud, ed. Sander Gilman et al. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 91-186
59. Pilloud and Louis-Courvoisier, "Intimate Experience."
60. Western pain descriptions today overlap significantly. The McGill-Melzack Pain Questionnaire, developed in Canada, evaluates pain through vocabulary that appears to hold up cross-culturally, as a Dutch study demonstrates. See Robbert-Jan Verkes, Willem Van der Kloot and John Van der Merj, "The Perceived Structure of 176 Pain Descriptive Words," Pain 38 (1989): 219-29
61. Medical studies suggest that men and women physically process pain and pain relief differently, reducing pain to a matter of physical systems rather than social and cultural differences. Cf. Jane Bradbury, "Why Do Men and Women Feel and React to Pain Differently?" The Lancet 361, no. 9374 (June 14, 2003): 2052-53
62. Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing & the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 49-51
63. Harold Schweizer, "To Give Suffering a Language," Literature and Medicine 14 (1995): 210-21
64. Marni Jackson, Pain: The Science and Culture of Why We Hurt (London: Bloomsbury, 2003)
65. David Morn's, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991)
66. . Ernelle Fife, "Agendas, Gender, and Audience: The Discourse of Eighteenth-Century Illness Narratives" (Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia State University, 1995)
67. Morris, Cidture of Pain
68. Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter, In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience 1650-1850 (London: Fourth Estate, 1988)
69. Schweizer, "To Give Suffering a Language"
70. Sarah Skwire, "Women, Writers and Sufferers: Anne Conway and An Collins," Literature and Medicine 18 (1999), 1-23
71. Porter and Porter, In Sickness and in Health, ch. 6
72. Howard Brody, Stories of Sickness (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), 6, 15
73. Kleinman, Illness Narratives, 49-50
74. On consultation letters, see Laurence Brockliss, "Consultation by Letter in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris: The Medical Practice of Étienne-François Geoffroy," in French Medical Culture in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Ann La Berge and Mordechai Feingold (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 79-117
75. Brockliss, "Quatre Médecins Francophones et la République des Lettres du XVlIle Siècle: Boissier de Sauvages, Villars, Calvet et Tissot," in Barras and Louis-Courvoisier, Lumières, 151-69
76. Micheline Louis-Courvoisier, "Le Malade et Son Médecin: le Cadre de la Relation Thérapeutique dans la Deuxième Moitié du XVIIIe Siècle," Canadian Bulletin for the History of Medicine 18 (2001): 277-96
77. Micheline Louis-Courvoisier and Séverine Pilloud, "Consulting by Letter in the Eighteenth Century: Mediating the Patient's View?" in Cultural Approaches to the History of Medicine: Mediating Medicine in Early Modern and Modern Europe, ed. Willem de Blécourt and Cornelie Usborne (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 71-88
78. Guenter Risse, "'Doctor William Cullen, Physician, Edinburgh': A Consultation Practice in the Eighteenth Century," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48 (1974), 338-51
79. Frédéric Sardet, "Consulter Tissot: Hypothèse de Lecture," in Barras and Louis-Courvoisier, Lumières, 55-66
80. Roy Porter, "The Rise of Physical Examination," in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. William Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993)
81. Stanley Reiser, Medicine and the Reign of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), 1-22
82. Touch, however, may have happened more often than we assume, as Cathy McClive recently argued in "Looking and Touching in French Legal Medicine, 1500-1800" (paper presented at the American Association for the History of Medicine Conference, Montreal, 3 May 2007)
83. Paster, Humoring the Body. Language became medicalized in the mid-eighteenth century: see Fissell, Patients, Power and the Poor, ch. 8
84. Nicolas Jewson, "The Disappearance of the Sick Man from Medical Cosmology," Sociology 10 (1976): 225-44
85. Howard Brody, '"My Story is Broken; Can You Help Me Fix It?' Medical Ethics and the Joint Construction of Narrative," Literature and Medicine 13 (1994): 79-92
86. Blockages can also be seen in iatromechanism, and blood quality in iatrochemistry. See Roselyne Rey, The History of Pain, trans. Louise Wallace, J. A. Cadden, and S. W Cadden (Paris: La Découverte, 1993), 103
87. Pilloud and Louis-Courvoisier, "Intimate Experience," 460-63
88. On French and other European trends, see Luyendijk-Elshout, "Of Masks and Mills," 205-12
89. Roselyne Rey, "Vitalism, Disease and Society," in Medicine in the Enlightenment, ed. Roy Porter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 274-88
90. Elizabeth A. Williams, A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)
91. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology
92. Sloane was trained by the iatromechanist Thomas Sydenham, while Geoffroy was an iatrochem-ist. Most of Geoffroy's replies exist; although very few of Sloane's do, patients' letters sometimes refer to his previous treatment. On shared medical language, see Nicolas Jewson, "Medical Knowledge and the Patronage System in Eighteenth-Century England," Sociology 9 (1974), 369-85
93. Wayne Wild has also noted the continuance of old-fashioned treatments in medical practice by physicians who espoused new ideas: Medicine-hy-Post: The Changing Voice of Illness in Eighteenth-Century British Consultation Letters and Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006)
94. Using different collections of consultation letters, Wild argues that a rhetoric of sensibility and subjectivity entered English consultation letters from the 1730s. For eighteenth-century France, Kiley argues that modern patients have a more extensive vocabulary, as well as more suffering. (Wild, Medicine-hy-Post, 61-100
95. Kiley, "Making Sense," 24-25, 68-72.)
96. Rankin, "Duchess", 129-33
97. This linguistic overlap has been largely lost in modern England. See Horacio Fabrega and Stephen Tyma, "Culture, Language and the Shaping of Illness," Journal of Psychosomatic Research 20 (1976): 335
98. Dorothée Sturkenboom "Historicizing the Gender of Emotions: Changing Perceptions in Dutch Enlightenment Thought," Journal of Social History 34 (2000): 55-76
99. John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)
100. Rey, Pain, 3
101. Fabrega and Tyma, "Shaping of Illness," 335
102. Several modern studies have pointed out how chronic pain affects every part of a person's life: Morris, Culture of Pain, Jackson, Pain
103. C. Richard Chapman and Jonathan Gavrin, "Suffering: The Contribution of Persistent Pain," The Lancet 353, no. 9171 (June 26, 1999): 2233-38
104. Elizabeth A. Williams, "Hysteria and the Court Physician in Enlightenment France," Eighteenth-Century Studies 35 (2002): 247-55
105. Bending, Bodily Pain, 104-7
106. Jewson, "Medical Knowledge"
107. Roy Porter, "The Body and the Mind, the Doctor and the Patient: Negotiating Hysteria," Gilman et al., Hysteria Beyond Freud, 225-66
108. See Elaine Scarry, Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985)
109. Pain may be more difficult for modern patients to express. Gilles Trimaille, for example, has discussed the confiscation of the measurement and determination of pain by modern medical and legal experts: "L'Expertise Médico-Légale: Confiscation et Traduction de la Douleur," in La Douleur et le Droit, éd. Bernard Durand, Jean Poirier, and Jean-Pierre Royer (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997)
110. Eighteenth-century physician George Cheyne, who also had an extensive consultation-by-letter practice, believed that letters were therapeutic (Wild, Medicine-by-Post, 113)
111. See also Louise DeSalvo, Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Stories Transforms Our Lives (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000)
112. Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Paul Brodwin, Byron Good et al., Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992)
113. Scarry, Body in Pain
114. Jackson, Pain; Kleinman, Illness Narratives
115. Morris, Culture of Pain
116. Michael Roper, "Splitting in Unsent Letters: Writing as a Social Practice and Psychological Activity," Social History 26 (2001): 318-39
117. Rousseau, "'A Strange Pathology,'" 94-95
118. Pilloud and Louis-Courvoisier suggest that bodies and their passions needed to be open to the outside world ("Intimate Experience," 472). See also Rublack, "Fluxes"
119. George S. Rousseau, "Ingenious Pain: Fiction, History, Biography, and the Miraculous Eighteenth Century," Eighteenth-Century Life 25, no. 2 (2001): 47-62
120. Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001)
121. Bending argues that the assumption that pain lacks language overlooks sufferers' experiences (Bodily Pain, 110-14)
122. Porter, "'Expressing yourself Ill': The Language of Sickness in Georgian England," in Language, Self, and Society: A Social History of Language, ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 276-78
123. Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 178-99
124. Roy Porter, "Western Medicine and Pain: Historical Perspectives," in Religion, Health and Suffering, ed. John R. Hinnells and Roy Porter (London: Kegan Paul International, 1999), 107
125. Gillian Bennett examines popular descriptions of internal sensations as invading animals, while Gentilcore looks at disease as possession by an external entity. Bennett, "Bosom Serpents and Alimentary Amphibians: A Language for Sickness," in Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe, ed. Marjike Gijswijt-Hofstra, Hilary Marland, and Hans de Wardt (London: Routledge, 1997)
126. see also Gentilcore, "Fear."
127. Silverman, Tortured Subjects
128. Véronique Demars, "La Douleur, Sérum de Vérité: l'Utilisation du Serment dans les Douleurs de l'Accouchement pour la Preuve de la Paternité Naturelle dans l'Ancien Droit," in Durand et al., La Douleur
129. Serge Dauchy, "Le Jurisconsulte et le Médecin: la Douleur Vue à Travers les Recueils d'Arrêts (XVIe - XVIIIe Siècle), in Durand et al., La Douleur
130. Florence Carré, "Le Criminel Face à La Douleur: La Thèse de Lombrosso," in Durand et al., La Douleur
131. Howard, " Seventeenth-Century Childbirth. "
132. Tissot's collection is similar. Brockliss, "Quatre Médecins," 154
133. Séverine Pilloud, "Mettre les Mauz en Mots, Médiations dans la Consultation Épistolaire au XVIIIe Siècle: Les Malades du Dr Tissot (1728-1797)," Canadian Bulletin for the History of Medicine 16 (1999): 215-45. For a detailed French case in which a man suffering from impotence and obesity sought the help of French physicians and Tissot, see Daniel Teysseire, Obèse et Impuissant: Le Dossier Médical d'Elie-de-Beaumont, 1765-1776 (Grenoble: Jérome Millon, 1995)
134. Fife has used the terms "linear" and "circular" ("Agendas, Gender, and Audience," 63-70)
135. see also Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Fine, and Anat Rachel Shimoni, "Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts," Text: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 23 (2003): 321-46
136. Minna Palander-Collin, "Male and Female Styles in Seventeenth-Century Correspondence." Language Variation and Change 11 (1999): 123-41
137. Janet Holmes, Women, Men and Politeness (London: Longman, 1995), 2
138. Rousseau recounts the dismissal of Dr. John Radcliffe by Queen Anne after he diagnosed her with vapors, when she wanted a disease that could be readily treated. See also Elaine Showalter, "Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender," in Gilman et al., Hysteria Beyond Freud, 286-335
139. Lynn Botelho, "'When the healer becomes the patient': old age and illness in the life of Elizabeth Freke, 1641-1714," lecture, Johns Hopkins University, 21 April 2006
140. See Brody, "My Story is Broken."
141. Brody, Stories of Sickness, 6
142. On gout, see Thomas Benedek, "Gout in Women: A Historical Perspective," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 71 (1997): 1-22
143. Roy Porter, "Gout: Framing and Fantasizing Disease," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 68 (1994): 1-28
144. For only a few examples on hysteria and hypochondria, see George S. Rousseau, "Towards a Semiotics of the Nerve: The Social History of Language in a New Key," in Burke and Porter, Language, Self, and Society
145. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability
146. and Williams, "Hysteria and the Court."
147. Diagnoses and treatments had to make sense to patients; see Steven Shapin, "Trusting George Cheyne: Scientific Expertise, Common Sense, and Moral Authority in Early Eighteenth-Century Dietetic Medicine," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77 (2003): 263-97