Abstract
I am better, than I was. My Spirits are low: and I suffer too often sinkings & misgivings, alienations from the Spirit of Hope, strange withdrawings out of the Life that manifest itself by existence — morbid yearnings condemn’d by me, almost despis’d, and yet perhaps at times almost cherish’d, to concenter my Being into Stoniness, or to be diffused as among the winds, and lose all individual existence. But all this I well know is a symptom of bodily disease, and no part of sentiment or intellect / closely connected with the excessively irritable State of my Stomach and the Viscera, & beyond doubt greatly exasperated by the abruptness & suddenness of my late Transitions from one state to another.
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Notes
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (hereafter STC) to Sir George Beaumont, 6 April 1804, in The Collected Letters of Sarnuel Taylor Coleridge (hereafter CL), ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1956–1971) 2: 1122. We have written with one secondary work constantly before us: Jennifer Ford’s Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), which George Rousseau reviewed when it first appeared; see Medical History (January 2000): 139–41 and which he esteems with this caveat developed below: Ford relies rather too much on Swedenborg and the sense of Coleridge’s approbation of some of that mystic’s explanation of the physiology of dreams and nightmares. We think instead that Coleridge tried hard, over many years, and in prolific annotations that would amount to a book on Swedenborg in itself to concur with the Swedish mystic but — in the end — could not. Close textual analysis of the evidence suggests that Coleridge was typically ironic or sardonic or dismissive but, in the end, unable to find himself in agreement with Swedenborg’s theosophical solutions. George Rousseau is also grateful to Dr Matthew Gibson, astute student of the visionary tradition from Coleridge down through Yeats, with whom he was privileged to discuss the former throughout the year 2001.
John Hill, Hypochondriasis. A Practical Treatise on the Nature and Cure of that Disorder; Commonly Called the Hyp or Hypo (London, 1766) 3. By ‘real’ Hill meant that it had an organic origin, the ‘obstruction of the spleen by thickened and distempered blood’ (ibid.). Our study has been assisted by a recently published collection of essays written by leading contemporary psychologists, Hypochondriasis: Modern Perspective on an Ancient Malady (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Edited by scientists Dr Vladan Starcevic and Dr Don R. Lipsitt, it aims ‘to produce a text on this ancient disorder that will provide “state of the art” knowledge on hypochondriasis for years to come’; see Vladan Starcevic and Don R. Lipsitt, ‘Introduction’, in Starcevic and Lipsitt (eds), Hypochondriasis, xiii. Especially useful here is German E. Berios, ‘Hypochondriasis: History of the Concept’, 3–20. Also valuable are: Susan Baur, Hypochondria: Woeful Imaginings (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); G. A. Ladee, Hypochondriacal Syndromes (Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier, 1966); Gernöt Böhme, ‘Hypochondria as an illness caused by civilisation in the eighteenth-century’, talk delivered at the Conference on Nature and the Body convened by Gianna Pommata in Bologna, Italy, Summer 1997; Alan Ingram, Boswell’s Gloom (London: Macmillan, 1984); R. D. Gillespie, ‘Hypochondria: Its Definition, Nosology and Psychopathology’, Guy’s Hospital Report 78 (1928) 408–60. For historicized pre-twentieth-century conceptualizations of hypochondriasis, see Esther Fischer-Homberger, ‘Hypochondriasis of the Eighteenth Century — Neurosis of the Present Century’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 46 (1972) 391–401. We agree with the assessment of hypochondria in the role of genius made by Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter, In Sickness and in Health: the British Experience, 1650–1850 (London: Fourth Estate, 1988) 203–10, and Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900 (London: Reaktion Books, 2001) 154–64. For a modern statement about the role of the condition in our world see Adam Sage, ‘Hypochondria threatens France’s economic health’, Times, 24 June 1997.
George Cheyne, The English Malady: Or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds, As Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers, &c. (London, 1733) i—ii. Other major works on the subject from this period include Richard Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours: Or, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Affections (London, 1725), Nicholas Robinson, A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and Hypochondriack Melancholy: Wherein all the Decays of the Nerves, and Lowness of the Spirits, are Mechanically Accounted For (London, 1729), and Robert Whytt, Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of those Disorders which have been Commonly Called Nervous, Hypochondriac, or Hysteric; to which are Prefixed some Remarks on the Sympathy of the Nerves (Edinburgh, 1765).
Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament; Being a Practical Enquiry into the Increasing Prevalence, Prevention, and Treatment of Those Diseases Commonly Called Nervous, Bilious, Stomach, and Liver Complaints; Indigestion; Low Spirits; Gout, &c. (2nd edition, London, 1807) viii.
James Gillman, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: William Pickering, 1838) 33.
Peter C. English, Rheumatic Fever in America and Britain: A Biological, Epidemiological, and Medical History (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 1999) xvii.
Joseph Cottle, Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1847) 351.
Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament, 137. Coleridge eventually admitted this fact to himself, reflecting in 1814 that he had ‘for many years … been attempting to beat off pain, by a constant recurrence to the vice that reproduces it’. STC to Josiah Wade, 26 June 1814, CL 3: 511.
John Reid, Essays on Hypochondriasis, and Other Nervous Affections (3rd edition, London, 1823) 178–9.
Issy Pilowsky, ‘Hypochondriasis, Abnormal Illness Behavior, and Social Context’, in Starcevic and Lipsitt (eds), Hypochondriasis, 249–62, 254.
Robert James, Medicinal Dictionary (London, 1743–5), article on ‘Hypochondriacus Morbis’, quoted in G. S. Rousseau’s introduction to John Hill’s Hypochondriasis: a Practical Treatise (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1969).
James Johnson, An Essay on Morbid Sensibility of the Stomach and Bowels, As the Proximate Cause, or Characteristic Condition of Indigestion, Nervous Irritability, Mental Despondency, Hypochondriasis, &c. &c. (London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1827) 60.
Thomas Trotter, Observations on the Scurvy; with a Review of the Opinions Lately Advanced on that Disease, and a New Theory Defended, (2nd edn, London, 1792) 44.
Hector Gavin, On Feigned and Factitious [sic] Diseases, Chiefly of Soldiers and Seamen, On the Means Used to Simulate or Produce Them, and on the Best Modes of Discovering Impostors: Being the Prize Essay in the Class of Military Surgery, in the University of Edinburgh, Session, 1835–6, with Additions (London: John Churchill, 1843) 176.
Dorothy Wordsworth to Catherine Clarkson, 16 June 1811, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 1806–1811, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd edn, revised M. Moorman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) 495.
Arthur J. Barsky, ‘Somatosensory Amplification and Hypochondriasis’, in Starcevic and Lipsitt (eds), Hypochondriasis, 223–48, 223.
Roy Porter, Bodies Politic (London: Reaktion Books, 2001) 162, a cmcial statement about the role of the gut in the development of theories of genius.
Susan Sontag, ‘Loving Dostoyevsky’, The New Yorker 2001: 98–105.
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© 2003 George Rousseau, Miranda Gill, David B. Haycock and Malte Herwig
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Rousseau, G.S., Haycock, D.B. (2003). Framing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Gut: Genius, Digestion, Hypochondria. In: Rousseau, G.S., Gill, M., Haycock, D., Herwig, M. (eds) Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524323_11
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