Introduction: Fashioning the Unfashionable

Abstract

This volume is one of the publications arising out of the Leverhulme Trust research project ‘Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, 1660–1832’, which was conducted between 2013 and 2016 by members of the English division at the University of Northumbria and of the History Department at the University of Newcastle. The purpose of the project was to investigate how certain diseases, some of them extremely unpleasant, or even destructive to life, became fashionable during certain periods, as ideas about culture and the valuation of specific modes of living, suffering and dying change. In the period of the project, for example, mental conditions such as melancholy continued, at least in certain circles, to enjoy a high degree of fashionability, as they had since the early seventeenth century, partly because of their association with intelligence and creativity, and subsequently with nerves and sensibility.