The eleven essays collected in The English Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions adopt perspectives from a variety of disciplines—history, sociology, music, theater, and literary studies—in order to examine manifestations of and writing about hysteria in Europe during the long eighteenth century. The collection demonstrates not only that hysteria was an important cultural metaphor for the Enlightenment—a fact sometimes obscured by scholarly emphasis on the study of hysteria as a nineteenth and early twentieth-century phenomenon—but also that the period’s writers sometimes considered hysteria a blessing as well as a curse. Implicit in the various arguments of this collection is the suggestion that hysteria might be considered an expression of early modern ambivalence about the emergence of modernity.

‘Nerves’ became a highly eligible illness in early Georgian London and Bath. What Freud was for Vienna at the end of the nineteenth-century, George Cheyne was for eighteenth-century fashionable ailments. The English Malady was one of the best known and most influential books of the Georgian age, dealing with what we would now call psychiatric disorders. Such disorders, he contended, should be regarded as diseases of ‘civilization’ and the product of the pressures and affluence of modern life. By making ‘neurosis’ acceptable, even fashionable, Cheyne’s book assumed considerably wider significance during the Enlightenment. Prefaced by a scholarly introduction by Roy Porter, this reprint edition, originally published in 1991 as part of the Tavistock Classics in the History of Psychiatry series, places Cheyne and his work in the development of British psychiatry.

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