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Article: Narrating hysteria: Caleb Williams and the cultural history of nerves
- Article from:
- Novel
- Article date:
- January 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Novel, Inc. Winter 1996. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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England experienced an epidemic of nerves in 1800. As one physician noted, "nervous diseases make up two-thirds of the whole with which civilized society is infested" (Trotter, View viii).2 He could make such a claim because "nerves" was a broad, undifferentiated disease that took on the appearance of other diseases. Every complaint was potentially nervous in origin, and so nerves became the leading category of illness in the late-Georgian period. The explanation for this epidemic was social. Since the physician George Cheyne, in The English Malady (1733), had tied the stereotypical gloom of the English aristocracy to England's "wealth and abundance," rather than to an intrinsic defect in ...
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