Carlyle’s Nervous Dyspepsia: Nervousness, Indigestion and the Experience of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

In 1895 Thomas Clifford Allbutt, the Regius Professor of Physic of Cambridge, inveighed against the widespread truism that the increase of ‘nervous diseases’ owed much to the decadent lifestyle of modernity. Allbutt argued that people said that nervous diseases were rife due to “living at high pressure, to the whirls of the railway, the pelting of telegrams, the strife of business” (‘Nervous’ 214), but he was not convinced by lay-people’s naïve sociological diagnosis of the malady and denounced it as an error (215). That Allbutt, himself a strong supporter of neurasthenic diagnosis in Britain, had to deny the Beardian assertion that neurasthenia was the product of modern civilization (214) indicates how deeply the medico-cultural belief concerning nervous malady and modernity was entrenched in people’s minds at that time. In fact, well before the arrival of the Beardian notion of neurasthenia in Britain, the British were believed to have experienced a train of nervous sufferings as the first citizens who had encountered the emergence of a commercial and industrial society. The British tended to see the Beardian malady, neurasthenia, as old wine in a new bottle (Sengoopta 98). From the eighteenth-century English Malady expounded by George Cheyne in 1733, who first linked nervousness and civilization, to Thomas Trotter’s notion of the nervous temperament at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the link between nervous maladies and modern experience had been clearly established in British civilized life (Porter, ‘Nervousness’ passim).