Pain in The 18th C

Smith / An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper
459
An Account of an Unaccountable
Distemper: The Experience of Pain in
Early Eighteenth-Century England
and France
Lisa Wynne Smith
The abundance of artistic renderings of pain during the eighteenth century

suggests it was a subject of great interest. In The Gout (1799), for example, James
Gillray (17571815) represented gout as an evil, sharp, and fiery devil biting into
the sufferers foot. Charles le Brun (161990) captured the differences between the
facial expressions of emotion, including acute and simple bodily pain. These images evoke powerfully the early eighteenth-century inseparability between physical
and emotional suffering. Gillrays gout was the crippling fiend that could not be
ignored, while Le Bruns faces starkly revealed the connection of emotional and
physical pain. Representational art, however, was not the only means for depicting
pain; eighteenth-century sufferers could be eloquent in their written descriptions of
their afflictions, as revealed by letters written by patients to their physicians. Such
medical consultation letters are a rich source for the history of the body. Using
collections of French and English consultation letters dating from 1700 to 1740, I
will consider two questions: what the overlap between mind and body meant for
sufferers, and what it implied about the theory, practice, and experience of early
eighteenth-century medicine.
Over the last twenty years, feminist theory and the history of the body have
indicated the importance of examining how bodies are experienced and gendered.1
Debate also has flourished about whether or not early modern bodies were seen in
terms of one sex or two.2 Notably, however, there has been little consideration of
the body as a tangible element with real experiences; this article moves beyond a
discussion of the sexed body to consider the experience of pain.3 The pervasiveness
Lisa Smith is an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan. In addition to completing a monograph on early modern womens health care in England and France, she is currently
researching eighteenth-century mens health care and care-giving roles.
Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 41, no. 4 (2008) Pp. 45980.
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Eighteenth-Century Studies
41 / 4
of humoral theory fundamentally shaped the perception of bodily experiences. As

revealed by pain vocabulary, men and women understood the workings of their
humoral bodies similarly; emotions were indivisible from corporeal sensations,
with patients fear framing their physical experiences. An in-depth comparison
of multiple letters written by two English chronic sufferers, Lady Sondes and Mr.
Pulleyn, demonstrates the ongoing process of writing about pain, as they composed
their narratives before they had fully interpreted their bodily experiences. Without
knowing what disease they had or what it meant within the context of their lives,
these two patients underwent parallel experiences in trying to live with their suffering. Letters describing pain not only give insight into corporality, but reveal
emotional preoccupations during illness, especially in the absence of diagnosis.
Pain Narratives
The work of Thomas Laqueur and Barbara Duden has fundamentally
shaped the study of early modern body history. Laqueurs assertion that a one-sex
body existed in premodern Europe, with the sexes only becoming distinctly separate by the nineteenth century, has been widely debated.4 According to the one-sex
model, sex and gender were determined along a continuum of possibilities, with
women considered as inverted, inferior males.5 Other historians have looked for
the perception of sexual difference in a wide variety of discourses.6 Yet, despite
historians debates over the one-sex model, it seems increasingly clear that representations of one- and two-sex bodies coexisted peacefully, if confusingly (for modern
historians), in early modern Europe.7 As Karen Harvey has contended, historians
should instead consider specific cases of bodily difference or similarity in practice,
especially the meaning that the one- or two-sex body had for individuals.8 A few
have attempted to examine such bodily experience. Barbara Duden, for example,
looked at historical changes in bodily perceptions, considering eighteenth-century
womens experiences of inner flows. Pains and humors moved from one part of
the body to another and could be pathological or healthy, but any stagnation was
inevitably unhealthy, if not deadly.9 Duden examined specifically female experiences
in her analysis, but she did not argue that flows were unique to women,10 contrary
to some historians assumptions about womens bodies.11 Linda Pollock has suggested that, in order to understand womens relation to the world, it would be most
fruitful to study the history of the female body.12 This is an important point that
needs expansion: bodies were also significant to the experiences of men. Moving
beyond representations of sexed and reproductive bodies to analyze the lived
body will result in a more extensive body history.
There are two reasons for the relative lack of discussion about bodily
experience: historians tendency to dismiss subjectivity, and the lack of sources.
Michael Roper has considered the importance of studying the subconscious in history in order to understand individuals motivations; by marginalizing subjective
experience in their analysis, historians overlook the importance of material and
everyday life.13 Although Roper looks at emotions, his comments apply equally to
body history. Historians are wary about the extent to which the written word can
possibly express the interior world; documents are constructed with multiple layers
of meanings and rely on socially acceptable ways of expressing oneself.14
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It is indeed a difficult task to look at what discourse reveals about real

experience. For example, in their analysis of patients letters addressed to Swiss
physician S. A. Tissot, Sverine Pilloud and Micheline Louis-Courvoisier never
entirely reconcile the relationship between sufferers representations and true perceptions of experiences in their illness descriptions.15 Linda Pollock, however, has
questioned historians over-cautiousness in assuming that we cannot access peoples
internal lives and emotions, even if embedded in social and cultural constructs. She
contends that cultural scripts were necessary to communication, since any person
articulating an emotion had to do so in a way that would be understood by both
writer and recipient; the representation of an emotion thus expressed a reality.
Just as the scripts existed within a particular milieu, so too did the ways in which
people experienced their emotionsand this is what historians should be studying.16 Antonie Luyendijk-Elshout and David Gentilcore have considered fear as a
common symptom or cause of disease with specific physiological characteristics,
suggesting the potential usefulness of looking at the subjective experience of illness,
particularly in accessing the relationship between mind and body.17 These studies
also suggest ways in which sufferers narrative constructions, whether about emotions or the body, reflected their lived reality; the narratives of fear, for example,
indicated to a physician the patients uncertainty and physical symptoms of disease,
providing enough information to treat the patient accordingly.
Beyond skepticism about using such sources, the study of bodily experience has been hampered by the lack of them. Bodily experiences described in early
modern diaries, autobiographies, or literary works had already been through several
interpretationsaccording to gender roles, religious beliefs, family expectations, or
community valuesbefore the writers recorded the events.18 While these sources
provide insight into the self, the body, and attitudes toward illness and healing,
they do not allow analysis of patients physicality while they were still trying to
understand their suffering within the context of their lives. Therefore, given the
nature of available sources and historians reluctance to engage with subjectivities,
it has been difficult to examine bodily experience.
Medical consultation letters, in contrast, offer access to the intimate
details of patients ongoing illnesses: symptoms, fears and anxieties, and physical
sensations. Addressed to a physician, someone more neutral about the illness than
friends and family, these letters were written while sufferers searched for diagnosis,
treatment, and meaning. The letters in the two collections discussed were written
to early eighteenth-century physicians tienne-Franois Geoffroy (Paris) and Sir
Hans Sloane (London) by wealthy patients, and sometimes their family members
or their regular doctors, who wanted the medical advice of famous practitioners.19
These collections are usefully compared. First, despite the obvious elite bias, they
provide excellent insight into the experiences of patients within similar social
groups, the middling and upper sorts.20 Second, England and France had similar
medical worlds. Medical historians have found extensive similarities in medical
corporations, consumerism, practice, and theory across early modern Europe,
particularly between England and France.21 Significantly, the medical cultures of
both France and England drew upon the same Greco-Roman tradition. Medical
books for popular and professional audiences were commonly translated between
the two languages, people travelled back and forth between the countries, and
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several English physicians trained in France. As Matthew Ramsey has suggested,

there were wider divergences in medical thought within countries than between
them.22 Finally, the vocabulary of pain in both languages is remarkably similar,
drawing on humoral theory.23 The parallel pain descriptions raise the question of
what roles gender, national culture, shared medical culture, and social status played
in shaping bodily experience.24
It is useful to consider consultation letters in relation to illness narratives.
Studies of chronic illness today have discussed the need for patients to understand
their suffering within the context of their lives and to create illness narrativesoften
more than oneto explain it.25 Historians have also used this methodology to study
diaries, autobiographies, or literary accounts.26 Illness narratives accounted for the
cause of the diseasecatching cold, eating and drinking to excess, or omitting to
treat a simple ailmentand were shaped within the context of the patients lives.
Many sufferers formulated their narratives of becoming ill, being sick, and getting
better in terms of Gods correction of their moral and spiritual failings, but as many
possible stories existed as there were patients.27 Narratives provided patients with
the opportunity to identify the meaning of their experiences. Eighteenth-century
accounts in diaries and autobiographies were constructedlike modern illness
narrativesin hindsight, with patients interpreting initial events according to their
changing needs.28
However, consultation letters cannot be interpreted in exactly the same way
as more personal sources.29 Eighteenth-century physicians had neither the technology to look at the interior of living patients bodies nor much interest in hands-on
examinations, ensuring the centrality of patients stories.30 Descriptions had to be
as full as possible, especially in letters, so they could be as meaningful to the doctor
as to the patient. The cultural script of embodiment (humoral theory) was most
accessible to patients and best articulated their perceptions of real experiences.31
Physicians then interpreted symptoms within a medical narrative of diagnosis,
prognosis, and recovery.32 However, the term illness narrative does not strictly
apply to many consultation letters, which might be better named pain narratives.
Patients tended not to write about immediate problems, but about long-standing
ailments.33 Some illness interpretation occurred in the letters, such as identifying a
cause or providing a medical history, but many letters lacked a storyline of treatments, direct cause, meaning, and progression from past to present. Instead, they
began in the moment of pain, lacking an interpretation that functioned for both
physician and patient.
Experiencing the Humoral Body
In consultation letters, both English and French sufferers described pain
with the same vocabulary, suggesting a shared experience primarily based on
humoral theory. Pilloud and Louis-Courvoisier have identified in Tissots patient
letters the occasional use of other models of the body, such as iatromechanism
and nerves, although humoral ideas predominated. Humoral theory was flexible;
by the eighteenth century, it went beyond balancing the four humors to consider,
for example, blood quality and movement of internal fluids.34 Amid debates about
iatrochemistry, iatromechanism, and vitalism, patients prioritized the humoral
body.35 Sloane and Geoffroy even treated their patients within a humoral frame-
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work, perhaps to make their advice more comprehensible.36 This sharply contrasts
historians debates over one-sex or two-sex bodies, highlighting the importance of
the humoral body on a daily basis. Moreover, despite Wayne Wilds assertion that
the rise of new science rhetoric resulted in pre-1730 consultation letters containing little patient subjectivity, the language of pain in the Sloane and Geoffroy
letters was extraordinarily descriptive and personal.37 Humoralism fundamentally
shaped sufferers experience of their bodies, as revealed by descriptions of internal
sensations and body/mind overlap.
English and French patients perceived the body in terms of motion: fluxions,
rising and falling vapors, and stoppages. Although Alisha Rankin has suggested
that bodily flows were distinct from humors, the humoral body was by its nature
expected to be constantly in a state of flux. Both Rankin and Duden, moreover, have
analyzed womens descriptions of flows, but consultation letters indicate similar
bodily experiences for both sexes.38 For example, Mrs. Rider complained of a
fluctuation of wind in her bowels, one of the most common sorts of fluxes.39 The
movement of a flux might be dangerous, depending on where it went, as Henry
Downing experienced in 1726. He was subject to frequent catarrhe & defluxions of Rheum, such as sometimes in the night falling on my windpipe awake me
& make me apprehend a danger of being suffocated.40 There could be multiple
fluxes simultaneously, as with one French man who had a copious and frequent
stomach flux, as well as fluctions on the teeth and eyes for over thirty years.41
Vapors were a related internal movement; in 1724, Canon Aubriots rising vapors
woke him up several times a night.42 Both implied a distinctly unpleasant physical
sensationnot just a theoretical movement within the body, but something widely
understood. Conversely, internal stoppages, or obstructions, could be perturbing.43
For example, a French monk wrote in 1727 that he felt a blockage in the stomach,
which he blamed for his hypochondria.44 Patients were aware of constant movement within the body, which they expressed in terms of wind fluctuations, rising
vapors, falling defluxions, and blocked stomachs. This reflected a model of the
body in which humors constantly moved, regardless of gender.
Suffering had a flexible vocabulary, concurrently describing physical and
emotional pains in ways that underscored the anxiety surrounding illness. This
emphasizes the extent to which body and mind were inseparable in the early eighteenth century;45 pain involved ones whole being, both body and soul.46 Patients
and their doctors often referred to emotional states as symptoms of disease. The
English term uneasy, and the French incommoder (which in its adjectival
form means unwell and in its verb form, to bother), and oppression occur
frequently. In modern English, uneasy has a distinctly mental connotation, but
occurs ambiguously in early modern English, often with a physical emphasis. For
example, Mary Butler, the Duchess of Ormonde, wrote about all the sorts of uneasyness that ever I had with vapors, including twitching when she fell asleep, with
sudden awakening.47 More unclear is Anne Hamiltons use of uneasy. In 1710,
she complained that most uneasy to me is the hot flashing, a discomfort during
the day that became violent at night.48 Similarly, Sarah Longs use of the word in
173839 is complicated. Her uneasinesses referred to convulsive twitching in
her head and sore eyes. She wrote that uneasinesss generally happen when I am
most inclined to sleep, & feel as if my scule were bent in, & my Eyes Draging out
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my Head; so that I am obligd to struggle a long time, before I can Recover my

Self again.49 Here, uneasiness initially appeared physical, but later Sarah Long
referred to the great struggle to get back to normal; such a struggle over convulsive
twitching must have been as much mental as physical. Similar ambiguities emerge
with the use of incommode. A frequent use of incommode emerged in the
example of Mr. Seret, who consulted Geoffroy (1729) about mes incommodits,
headaches.50 However, sometimes, as with an anonymous French woman, incommode was ambiguous. Her constant stomach pain was very bothersome
(fort incomode).51 It is unclear, however, whether it was bothersome physically
or emotionally, since the woman then described in detail the stomach pains that
worried her and how they never entirely left.
Oppression was commonly used in both England and France. Sometimes
oppression was purely physical, without any emotional undercurrents. One French
woman referred to its physical nature in 1714: I find myself troubled by this oppression of which I spoke. I am hardly oppressed when I am calm. It only occurs
when I am active or I climb the stairs.52 Thus, oppression could describe internal
obstructions. However, Ann Warners letter about her daughter (1724) contains
examples of the dual use of oppress. While her daughters spirits are so oprest
yt she some times can hardly speak, she was also vastly oprest by wind.53 Dr.
Jeffries discussed Mrs. Riders physical and emotional oppression: she complains of
a great oppression; sinking of spirits; [illeg.] apprehension of something she knows
not what; a fluctuation of wind in her Bowells.54 Jeffriess account emphasizes
that both doctor and patient perceived the ambiguity of Mrs. Riders oppression.
Importantly, even the emotional use of oppression evoked physical discomfort.
Expressions used for physical pain can provide meaningful metaphors for ones
emotional state,55 but the ways in which words like oppression or incommode
were used by early modern sufferers indicate more than a metaphor. The overlapping emotional and physical meanings of these words reveal the close relationship
between physical and emotional suffering.56
In turn, words with more obvious emotional connotationsfrights,
apprehensions, and heartsicknessdescribed pain. Often, these were purely
emotional response to ones illness or treatment. John Grandorge reported in
1725 that Thomas Tufton, the Earl of Thanet, apprehends yt any forcing things
[remedies] will not do well, nor to continue these bathings.57 John Hales (1706)
attempted a prescribed poultice, but when his skin became inflamed, he stopped the
poultice, fearing twas dangerous.58 But fright could be physical. Among her many
physical problems, Lady Sondes was equally concerned about that ugly feeling
in a fright, I did not know for what.59 A French word related to apprehension
is inquitude (worry). In 1728, Gouet de Luygnee wrote for her father, who
complained of insomnia, a fluction of the head, colic, and a worrying/nagging
pain in the legs (inquietudes dans les jambes). In the same letter, however, she
expressed her own worries about my fathers health (inquietudes sur la sante
de mon pere).60 Inquitude, then, could be as much physical as emotional.
Similarly, Sarah Long felt an obstruction in the vessels of her head, which apprehension reaches to my temples, and as I think likewise to my heart.61 She did
not just fear the obstruction, but, as her use of apprehension as another noun
for pain indicates, her apprehension had become physical.
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Maux de coeur (heartsickness, heart pains, or, today, nausea) also had
dual meanings. A French man who suffered from vertigo or vapors had a long list
of symptoms: dizziness, sweating, headaches, loss of appetite, spots on his face,
melancholy, and un mal de coeur fort. 62 In this context, it is not clear whether the
sickness was predominantly physical or emotional. By contrast, a French Dames
symptoms were primarily physical: light hysteric vapors, stomach problems, lassitude in the limbs, and maux de coeur.63 This double usage emerges in George
Hepburns letter to Sloane:
His [Mr. Walpoles] countenance, a listless heavy disposition and a very
great dejection of spirit, sufficiently denoted that both the solids and fluids were in great disorder. And, that ye Peculiar sensation of a sinking at
the heart (as it is calld) which is no doubt a Relascation about the upper
orifice of the stomach.64
Here medical diagnosis combines with the patients perceptions, which appear
plainlysinking at the heart. While it was a physical problem, the term also
indicated an emotion when alongside symptoms like heavy disposition and
dejection of spirit. Physical processes could reflect emotions, one reason why
physicians advised keeping ones spirits up during illness. However, the use of
emotional words in place of pain nouns suggests that the experience of pain was
as much emotional as corporeal.
Extended pain descriptions evoked patients general moods. As Lucy Bending has noted, the metaphors and analogies used throughout an account, rather
than specific words, most effectively transmit the overall idea of ones sufferings.65
For example, in a letter to Sloane (1708), Elizabeth Howland used hot and dry
words ten times, describing her hart burning of great violence, a great heat
and smarting in her mouth, and a flushing heat over her body. This, she believed,
was because of a great sharpness and heat in [her] bloud that needed blood-letting; she had already taken milk and barley water to cool and sweeten her blood.66
Her physical experience was intense internal heat, which she treated with cooling
means. In contrast, a thirty-six-year-old French nun suffered cold symptoms. During her period, she had violent oppressions accompanied occasionally by fever.
For a day before, she sometimes also had a small stomach pain and coldness on
top of her head. Her breathing was difficult, a prodigious wheezing in the chest
with acrid and salty phlegm. The letter gives the sense of a pervasive heaviness that
kept increasing suddenly. Oppression appeared nine times, described variously as
violent, more violent than ever, and more intense.67 She also used cold,
wet terms for the illness, indicating its nature and her physical temperament
to her physician. Geoffroy diagnosed her as having a tendency to head colds and
pleurisycold and wet humoral disorders.68
Patients who consulted Sloane and Geoffroy were fluent in the language
of pain; humoral theory offered a vocabulary and a store of metaphors that simultaneously expressed physical and emotional symptoms. Humoralism may have
also provided physicians with diagnostic possibilities, indicating important details:
location, movement, pattern, intensity, emotional response, hotness or coldness,
moistness or dryness, and sharpness or heaviness.69 Although historians have tended
to see the doctorpatient encounter and the production of medical knowledge in
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terms of patient demand, they have overlooked the potential usefulness of humoral
theory in diagnosis.70 Physicians such as Sloane and Geoffroy may have continued
to use humoralism in practice, despite their adherence to other theories, not only
because it allowed doctors and patients to speak the same language, but because
it was effectiveand the newer theories lacked practical applications.
Making Sense of Pain
Despite the overall efficacy of humoral language, patients did not always
feel that they successfully articulated their suffering. Elizabeth Howlands narrative
captured the heat of her pain, but not its essence: I so little know how to tell you
what I aile that I cant thinke you can make any thing of what I have writ.71 Nor
could an anonymous French woman fully communicate about her kidney pain.
This she discussed last, as it was impossible to express (quil nest pas possible
dexprimer).72 Modern studies of pain have argued that there is a point at which
it becomes indescribable, but perhaps the act of writing about pain, as much as
what they actually verbalized, was what helped sufferers.73 Consultation letters
also reveal the process of patients trying to understand their suffering.
These letters were functional communication between doctor and patient.
A patient had to recount everything, since the doctor could not ask further questions before responding. However, the process of letter writing itself might have
been therapeutic, helping the patient to impose order and meaning on the chaos
of sufferingor, as Elaine Scarry has termed it, to remake a world shattered by
pain.74 Work on Protestantism in Germany, Quakerism in England, and judicial
torture in France has shown the need in early modern Europe for confession in
order to set the world to rights. Telling the right story could balance the bodies
and minds of sufferers, healing both the individual and society.75 Modern studies
of pain claim that it isolates sufferers, as others never fully comprehend their experience, but eighteenth-century patients ability to describe pain may have elicited
understanding. 76 Barbara Stafford has examined late eighteenth-century cartoon
images of pain in terms of Enlightenment ideas about sensitivity and the force of
the imagination. She argues that caricatures of pain were intended to make viewers
feel the pain through their imagination.77
Letters could have played a similar role. In addition to gaining sympathy
from friends and family, patients may have wanted to persuade the doctor of the
truth of their suffering. With doctors, however, it was not just a matter of gaining
commiseration; the more detailed the narrative, the more reliable it appeared. There
was a tension between physicians need for patients stories, issues that could affect
the construction of patients stories, and physicians knowledge that patients could
exaggerate or be unreliable. While physicians could observe their patients physically
during ordinary consultations,78 epistolary consultations relied solely on the story;
there was a fine balance between recounting a good story that led to diagnosis and
one that was too good. As Roy Porter has noted, the patient had to be careful, since
a too-fluent talent in describing pain might be perceived as rhetoric or histrionics.79
Consultation letters, however, suggest that patients were often struggling to identify
their suffering rather than writing letters of great rhetoric.
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Many patients feared that undiagnosed pains threatened their lives.80 Internal movements were not always described in exclusively humoral terms, but were
sometimes depicted as an independent force. For some, the movement of internal
pain implied an integral assault on the sufferer by a living entity that had invaded
the body.81 Mlle de Refuge had beating [batement] in the left ear and sometimes
in the head (1729), while Mrs. Irwin wrote (1724) that when she laid her hand
on her stomach, it beats as if something were alive.82 The violence and regularity
of moving pain permeated the letter of the anonymous French woman. Fluttering and beating in her stomach came upon her frequently, almost constantly,
waking her in the middle of the night. These were violent pains she reiterated five
times in the letter.83 The frequently used imagery of torture highlights a sense of
physical and emotional invasion. Torture was thought to work because of the close
relationship between body and soul; the truth of the soul could thus be forced out
through physical pain.84 Among many other problems, such as itchiness, vomiting,
night suffocations, insomnia, and trembling limbs, M de Guijon was particularly
tormented by gout.85 A languishing French man was unable to eat or sleep in
1723 because of his bloody coughing and the prickings and violent rendings
in his chest.86 Such descriptions implied an attack against body and mind, suggesting the extent to which patients dreaded the effects of an undefined pain upon
their entire lives.
Even defined illness could cause fear, if patients believed that it was untreatable. A series of letters to Geoffroy presented sixty-year-old Mme de la Buretieres
illness. She had first consulted Geoffroy in September 1724 and was still undergoing treatment in May 1725.87 The physical symptoms and her treatment were
discussed primarily by her local physician: vapors, swollen and red eyes, trembling
in the head and hands, and lack of appetite. The physician assured Geoffroy that
the patient followed her prescribed regimen, which he summarized.88 The physical
symptoms, however, played relatively little role in the patients letters. Out of four
letters to Geoffroy, she detailed only once her symptoms and thrice her response to
the prescribed remedies.89 Rather, she emphasized her fears about her illness. For
her, the dominant problems were the continual worry, sadness, and trembling.90
By May, she had a frightening repugnance to taking milk, which was supposed
to be the most effective remedy, and wondered if her catarrh was incurable (peut
estre ce catarre en moy est incurable).91 She told Geoffroy that he alone could
give her consolation and hope for treatment, despairing when he did not respond
quickly.92 The physical nature of illness was less important to Mme de la Buretiere
than the possibility that she could not be cured.
The particularly comprehensive cases of Lady Sondes and Mr. Pulleyn
provide a useful comparison of two eighteenth-century patients attempts to understand their suffering. Unfortunately, when looking for extensive cases containing
multiple letters, a cultural comparison becomes more complicated. Although the
letters contain excellent examples of pain descriptions for both countries, there
are fewer cases for France than for England of individuals experiences over time.
English patients were more likely to write their own letters to an important physician, whereas French patients frequently had their letters written by another medical
man or a friend of high social standing. For example, M de Guijon did not write
about his gout, while his brother, Dr. Jullien, and Geoffroy did.93 Also, patients
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rarely approached Geoffroy more than once,94 but several of Sloanes patients
wrote multiple times. Soeur Pecquet de Ste Victoire, who suffered from vomiting
and stomachaches over six months (1730), is an important exception. However,
possibly because her illness was obvious, her letters do not suggest difficulties with
its interpretation; she only consulted Geoffroy about her course of treatment.95
By contrast, the letters of Lady Sondes and Mr. Pulleyn reveal their attempts to
live with their suffering and to describe it. For them, the continual pain provoked
anxiety about its role in their lives until it was interpreted medically.
Catherine Watson, widow of Edward, Viscount Sondes, wrote to Sloane
several times between 1722 and 1734.96 Her illness (unspecified), she complained,
had aged her: I am near forty years old & may by my Afflictions, & ill health be
as old, & decayed, as if I was fifty or sixty.97 She wrote:
the pain you have often heard me complain of, in my left side was very
bad & I shivered inwardly for two or three nights, but grew better again.
I had a little cold, but that mended too. Only, especially in the morning,
I felt a pain & fullness in the back part of my head. After I got up, it
would go off. But my hands & legs used to feel mighty full & I have had
a soreness in my flesh. About this day seven-night, I thought my mouth
looked to be twitched when I spoke, & my underlip feels stiff & looks
drawn, & when I speak it some times feels that it does not move readily.
My lord says he should not have perceived it if I had not told him, so its
not much, I suppose. I was let Blood as I had been for such a complaint
two years ago, which ordered me, & I sent to Mr. Grahams for some
powders. I thought they cured me that you gave me, but still I am ill &
my legs twitch, so much as is very troublesome to me. And I am so weary
that they are ready to sink under me, & I am so troubled with feeling, in
a great fright, as one cant imagine &, especially, in bed. My heart too
beats extremely & I dont sleep so well as I used. I have frightful dreams
& look very pale, & yellow. . . .98
Lady Sondess complaints varied, as she tried to understand an illness that did not
improve:
I am afraid to take Steel as its apt to fill me with strange fancies, & it always did so, & I too often have a fever after it. And your Electuary with
long taking wont agree with me as it fills me with wind, with which I am
in my Bowells, Stomach, & up to my Chin those Nerves much tormented
in a morning. In the Afternoon, I have Twitchings in my legs, & some
nights when I go to bed, for I can never lay down at first before that Rising in my Nerves comes up the Back part of my head, & gives me a pain
there for some little time. Then it expands it self about my head & then I
am in fear that it should deprive me of my memory, or senceswhich tis
a mercy I retain with such an illness. I do my business as I used to when
I am not laid up, but so low spirited that I was just speechless today, &
have often been quite so. I take an Electuary of Dr Colbys . . . [obliterated line] . . . My bowells, & those sort of fitts were very good, but still
my nerves & head he has not so much regard too, or I fancy not. Indeed,
I have not told him so much of my fears, as I have you, nor would not
to anybody else because I as yet have not these misfortunes, only when I
am so low spirited in a morning. I am then stupid, & forgetful of what is
sometimes said, except it is business; but that, reading & writing, I thank
469
God, I am able to do. I have still often a coldness in my head & if I go

out catch sad colds, . . . for this old Castle, is all up, & down steps, & I
have not strength to go up & down stairs. It gives me almost fits. . . .99
Lady Sondes repeatedly attempted to convey particular symptoms. On another occasion, for example, she described the twitching in her legs as Knawing,
while she had such a sort of Pain in her back and weaknesse in her hips.100
Most disturbingly, she was in constant pain, to the point of distraction, particularly
when it came to concentrating on work. Her vocabulary suggests an illness surrounded by confusion, anxiety, and sadness: strange fancies, stupidity, forgetfulness,
low spirits, bad dreams, troubles, frights. She particularly feared that pain would
eventually cause memory loss. She also portrayed a body that had turned on itself,
with twitching legs that might sink under her, stiff lips that would not move readily,
and nerves that expanded. Even the treatment caused her suffering. She disliked
the medicines, which engendered an ugly feeling in a fright, I did not know for
what, as well as general tingleing and drawing in her lip.101
When the worst of her symptoms passed, Lady Sondes declared, with the
first letters, I write, one of thanks should be to you, for the great kindness & care,
you have showed, for me, in my illness. Although she lacked that equalness, of
temper, & spirits, I used so happily to enjoy, she was finally able to get on with
life. She reported that when I am about Busiynesse, [I] find my self best & can
do itt and had started to take the Air regularly.102 Importantly, she also found
Dr. Colbys interpretations of her illness acceptable. Early on, he diagnosed her as
perfectly Hysterical,103 but Lady Sondes later repeated to Sloaneapparently in
agreementColbys opinions about her poor circulation causing her disorder.104
Mr. Pulleyn also had trouble making sense of his distemper. By the time
he asked for Sloanes help, his illness had lasted for several years. He had sought
medical attention previously, but received unsatisfactory explanations. His letter
to Sloane reveals his anxieties:
I am attempting to give an account of an unaccountable distemper with
which I have been miserably tormented for some years. I must call it a
pain, yet cannot describe it so, for its neither like the Gout nor Toothach, nor such accute distempers, but a certain sort of shivering in my
blood & Limbs (as my Thighs & Hipps) & so in my Body. And at last
it lodges itself about my breast & stomach, & there afflicts me with a
dreadful Melancholy & such a Pain as I have described, & while it is
on me it almost distracts me, but I cannot tell how further than I have,
but I gladly would be dead during the time its upon me. Any change of
weather from fair to rain or the like almost makes me desperate, but how
it goes off & comes on me I cannot tell but that it does so. But when &
during the time for the better, I think myself perfectly well & in a manner
forget my Misery. But when it returns it pays me with a sorrowful Memorandum (I pray God help you that have reason to describe it more fully).
When I am at the best my Water is yellowish, but when the fit is coming
on its as Pale as Rock Water, & thus it will alter in almost a minutes
time. And when for the better I part with a pretty quantity of wind
which I am almost sure is the origin of my distemper, which (as I am told)
is the Hypochondria. But whether right or no I know not, & if I did I am
no wiser how to keep myself, for I have not yet met with anybody that
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41 / 4
could tell me the nature of it, or that they even knew anybody that was
cured of it. But that understanding Physician that does, & can relieve me,
shall be liberally rewarded.105
Similar to Lady Sondes, pain was the recurring pattern in Mr. Pulleyns life. Over
several years, the pain occurred regularlywhen the weather changed. But his pain
was like a returning invader, a strange shivering that lodge[d] itself inside and
afflict[ed] him. When well, he could forget the suffering, but the onset of pain
caused misery, torment, distraction, desperation, and melancholy. Even worse,
nobody had helped by naming or treating the disease. The foundation of his first
letter is one of frustration: how does one give an account of an unaccountable
distemper? A subsequent letter, however, suggests that Mr. Pulleyn had happy results from his consultation with Sloane.106 By then Sloane had treated Mr. Pulleyns
disease for at least eight months, during which time Pulleyn followed Sloanes
prescriptions, apparently faithfully. Although Pulleyn received a great deal of
advice from others, he promised Sloane that he would not do any thing without
your approbation, consigning my self wholly to your directions.
The process of understanding pain emerges in these letters. Lady Sondes
and Pulleyn constructed the plot lines of their narratives in a circular fashion,
suggesting the difficulty of living with, and writing about, undefined pain. This
circular form of discourse, used by many consultation letter writers, focuses on
the subjective and private and lacks a clear beginning, middle, or end. This style
has been contrasted with an allegedly more masculine form of linear discourse
that focuses on facts and has a clear narrative progression.107 However, such an
interpretation overlooks the uncertainty and incomprehension surrounding many
patients experience of illness, regardless of their gender. Sufferers with undiagnosed illness lacked a clear role, neither that of their normal lives nor of a patient
undergoing treatment. They did not know the extent of their illness, caught in a
perpetual cycle of pain; circular discourse reflected more accurately the ongoing
nature of their suffering.
In Lady Sondess first letter, she described her ailment, gave some details of
treatment, and further discussed her complaints. In the second letter, she explained
the negative effects of her medicines, which merged into a discussion of her various
complaints and her attempts to carry on as usual. Next, she wrote about her relationship with Dr. Colby and finally considered her complaints again. Compared to Lady
Sondess truly circular narratives that ended where they began, Mr. Pulleyns initial
narrative appears superficially linear: beginning, middle, and end. He described his
pain and melancholy, analyzed his urinary habits, provided his previous diagnosis,
and concluded with a plea for help. However, his description of the pain itself was
circular, reiterating how bad it was and how much he suffered.
As the circular nature of the narratives emphasized, the relentlessness of
pain wore both patients down emotionally. Lady Sondes was weary; Mr. Pulleyn
sometimes wished to be dead. To some extent, a circular narrative represents the
failure of ones language to express pain completely. While Lady Sondes described
her feeling of fright as something one cant emagin, the usual pain terms failed
Mr. Pulleyn altogether; he felt he must call what he suffered a pain yet cannot discribe it soe, pitying anyone who could better describe it. Lady Sondes
471
too sometimes fell back on the simple use of the word pain (or alternatively,
versions of fear) as all-encompassingsuch a sort of pain that could not be
described more. To explain their pain, the patients referred to its various physical
and emotional forms. Although Lady Sondes and Mr. Pulleyn believed that words
failed them, their circular narratives clearly represented their pain: inescapable
and, sometimes, indescribable.
The ongoing nature of pain for both patients continued, in part, because
the meanings of their illnesses were unclear. Without an adequate explanation for
their suffering, both kept rewriting their narratives. Most importantly, previous
physicians had not successfully interpreted the sufferers bodily pains; when patients
disagreed with a diagnosis, they were unlikely to trust a physicians proposed treatment. Diagnosing diseases as hysteria or hypochondria was particularly troublesome. Such diseases were difficult to treat and would constrain the patients life for
a long time, but they could also imply moral judgmentthese were the diseases of
the sedentary, the effeminate, and the weak.108
Lady Sondes was an active woman who prized her ability to think clearly,
go about her business, take exercise, and walk around her own home. One of her
worries, she stressed, was that her illness was making her old before her timefifty
was generally considered the start of old age, but still a time of relative activity
and vigor. But for the unwell, it could also be the start of ones progress into an
increasingly weak and passive role.109 Hysteria could thus be a double-pronged
diagnosis for Lady Sondes; a disease of the overly delicate, it might even result
in a prematurely enfeebled old age. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she rejected Colbys
initial diagnosis, advice, and treatments, finding them to be disagreeable and even
frightening. She also refused to share her fears with Colby, only feeling able to trust
Sloane. Clearly, communication had broken down between Colby and his patient,
resulting in an inability to construct a joint narrative that explained her illness and
to start appropriate treatment.110 Only when he diagnosed her as having a blood
disorder, a controllable problem that did not require a major life change, did she
make peace with her illness. In the meantime, Lady Sondess letters to Sloane allowed
her to begin to recreate her body and illness. It was not an immediate process, as
shown by her thirteen letters in which the same themes and descriptions reoccur.111
Lady Sondes repeatedly wrote her illness to help Sloane, Colby, and herself find a
meaning for her pain.
For Mr. Pulleyn, previous attempts to explain his suffering were unsuccessful. Although he had been diagnosed as having hypochondria, no one could
explain the nature of his illness; he was frustrated with its elusiveness and the
failure of doctors to help him. Just knowing the nature of his illness would allow
Mr. Pulleyn to master his own disorder, or how to keep my selfe, as he put it.112
As it was, the best framework that he had was that his pains worsened when the
weather changed, but how it goes off & comes on me I cannot tell. Equally
worrying, no one he consulted had known a patient who had been cured of the
disorder. Desperately, Mr. Pulleyn promised that any understanding physician
who helped him would be liberally rewarded. Until then, the story of his illness
was incomplete; an unsatisfactory diagnosis rendered him unable to make sense
of and live with his pain.
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41 / 4
Sloanes diagnosis of Mr. Pulleyns complaint as gout, not hypochondria,

gave him hope. Gout, unlike the mysterious hypochondria, could be treated and
even prevented by following a strict diet. Moreover, despite gout and hypochondria
being associated with people of wealth and leisure, hypochondria may have been
a more troubling disease to men of the middling sorts, suggesting uncontrolled
emotions and effeminacy. Gout also had a negative connotation being connected
to gluttony in eighteenth-century medicine, but it was potentially more masculine
in nature, equally associated with high-living and high-spirited men. Significantly,
gout was a disease over which the patient could establish a measure of control
through self-governance.113 Although the tone of Mr. Pulleyns first letter implies
a difficult patient, once he had found an understanding physician in Sloane, he
became cooperative.114 Sloanes diagnosis helped Mr. Pulleyn to develop a better
narrative for his disease, turning the complaint into something with which the
patient could live.
Like Lady Sondes and Mr. Pulleyn, early eighteenth-century patients needed
more than just diagnosis and prescription: frameworks for understanding their illnesses, preferably fitting with their self-perception. In part, articulating their illnesses
enabled sufferers to make sense of their pain as they explained when and how pain
happened and what forms it took. However, consultation letters also formed a joint
narrative between doctor and patient; Sloane and the patients previous physicians
tried to provide Lady Sondes and Mr. Pulleyn with the right medical interpretation for the illness, a diagnosis and treatment that would be accepted and would
allow the sufferers to integrate their experiences into their lives as a whole. Until
a functional narrative was constructed, fears of what the pain might yet signify
shaped Lady Sondess and Mr. Pulleyns experience of illness.
Conclusion
The letters of early eighteenth-century sufferers are a rich source of information about embodiment, particularly the close relationship between emotional
and physical suffering. As Lady Sondess and Mr. Pulleyns narratives of chronic
pain reveal, the experience of pain was intricately connected to its meaning; when
an illness lacked other interpretation, fear and anxietyalready an important element of pain descriptionsbecame its primary context. Patients worried about
what the pains signalled: what would be the extent and duration of their illness and
its consequences for their lives? They recounted every possible detail, sometimes
repetitiously, so that a pattern to the pain might emerge for the physician. The
process of letter writing may even have been useful as patients worked through
their experiences, trying to attain a diagnosis. For sufferers, diagnosis provided
the first step to living more comfortably with pain rather than being dominated
by it. Only with satisfactory diagnoses could they make sense of their suffering,
resuming more normal lives.
Patients language in the consultation letters reflects both the cultural description of pain and its lived experience, which cannot be separated. Significantly,
the comparison of English and French letters suggests an underlying shared medical culture that transcended national borders. Humoral theory, more than other
medical theories or cultural differences, provided the vocabulary of pain in early
eighteenth-century England and France. Physicians and patients alike communicated
473
through humoralism, which was flexible enough to allow the coexistence of other
medical ideas and expressive enough to describe simultaneously emotional and
physical symptoms. Humoralism also suggests an alternative way for historians to
study the body, moving to a consideration of the lived body. In particular, just
as pain descriptions in England and France were similar, men and women experienced the humoral body alike; they had similar physical sensations, described in
terms of internal fluxes and stoppages, and overlaps between body and mind. For
sufferers, pain was as much an emotional experience as a physical one; the body
in pain, moreover, was essentially a humoral oneat least until diagnosis. When
patients suffered, particularly from an undiagnosed illness, the gendered body
was peripheral to their experience. Indeed, even when diagnosed with gendered
diseases, like hysteria or hypochondria, the sufferers might consider it irrelevant;
both Lady Sondes and Mr. Pulleyn rejected the initial diagnoses, which did not
mesh with their own self-images.
By shifting their focus away from sexed bodies, historians can consider
more deeply the specific functions of gender in embodiment, as well as the role of
gender in medical treatment. Continued study of the history of bodily experience
can offer us many other insights into the creation of self-identity, such as when
and how gender was important, the influence of social status, and ones sense of
place within the world and community. Certainly, given our modern obsession
with health, intelligence, and behavior being inscribed genetically, it may even be
imperative to look at experiences of people in the past to recall that we are not
simply the sum of our parts, but are also shaped by culture and society. Eighteenthcentury sufferers have much to offer us, with their evocative descriptions of pain
and illness that were shaped by humoral theory. Just as the viewer sees the bare
foot upon the cushion in Gillrays caricature or the naked expressions of Le Bruns
faces, the reader of pain narratives catches an intimate glimpse of sufferers most
vulnerable moments: afraid, anxious, and alone.
Notes
I am extremely grateful to Catherine Crawford, Rachel Rich, Cathy McClive, Warren Johnston, Julia
Simon, and the anonymous referees for their insightful comments on the many drafts of this article.
Funding for my research towards this article was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada.
1. For example, Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York:
Routledge, 1993); Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporality (London: Routledge,
1996); Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Buckingham:
Open Univ. Press, 1989); Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore, Un Corps, Un Destin: La Femme dans la Mdecine
de la Rennaisance (Paris: H. Champion diteur, 1993).
2. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1990); Michael Stolberg, A Woman Down to Her Bones: The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, Isis 94 (2003): 27499; Thomas Laqueur, Sex
in the Flesh, Isis 94 (2003): 3006; Londa Schiebinger, Skelettestreit, Isis 94 (2003): 30713.
3. Roy Porter, Barely Touching: A Social Perspective on Mind and Body, in The Language of
Psyche, ed. G. S. Rousseau (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), 80; Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and
the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994),
1718; Caroline Bynum, Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalists Perspective, Critical
Inquiry 22, no. 1 (1995): 133; Kathleen Canning, The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of
the Body in Gender History, Gender & History 11 (1999): 499513.
474
41 / 4
4. Lisa Forman Cody, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century
Britons (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005); Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in
the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989); Anne Vila, Enlightenment and
Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998).
5. Laqueur, Making Sex; Laqueur, Sex in the Flesh.
6. Laura Gowing has examined legal records, while Wendy Churchill has explored medical practice.
Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996), 7; Churchill, The Medical Practice of the Sexed Body: Women, Men, and Disease in
Britain, circa 16001740, Social History of Medicine 18 (2005): 322.
7. Karen Harvey, The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Representations
of the Body in Eighteenth-Century England, Gender and History 14 (2002): 20223.
8. Karen Harvey, The Century of Sex? Gender, Bodies, and Sexuality in the Long Eighteenth
Century, The Historical Journal 45 (2002): 914.
9. Barbara Duden, Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctors Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany,
trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991). See also Ulinka Rublack, Fluxes: the
Early Modern Body and the Emotions, History Workshop Journal 53 (2002): 116; Malcolm Nicolson, The Metastatic Theory of Pathogenesis and the Professional Interests of the Eighteenth-Century
Physician, Medical History, 32 (1988): 277300; Alisha Rankin, Duchess, Heal Thyself: Elisabeth of
Rochlitz and the Patients Perspective in Early Modern Germany, Bulletin of the History of Medicine
82 (2008): 109-144.
10. Men were also thought to lactate and menstruate (Duden, Woman Beneath, 11219). See also
Gianna Pomata and John Beusterien on male menstruation and Cathy McClive on the timing of flows.
Pomata, Menstruating Men: Similarity and Differences of the Sexes in Early Modern Medicine, in
Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity to early
modern Europe, ed. Valeria Finnuci and Kevin Brownlee (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2001); Beusterien,
Jewish Male Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century Spain, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 73
(1999): 44756; and McClive, Bleeding Flowers and Waning Moons: A History of Menstruation in
France, c. 14951761 (Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, 2004).
11. See, for example, Martin, Woman in the Body; Patricia Crawford and Sara Mendelson, Women
in Early Modern England 15501720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 1830; Gail Kern Paster, The
Body Embarassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1993).
12. Linda Pollock, Childbearing and Female Bonding in Early Modern England, Social History
22 (1997): 306. See also Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in SeventeenthCentury England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2003).
13. Michael Roper, Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History, History
Workshop Journal 59 (2005): 5772.
14. For similar criticisms, see Fay Bound, Writing the Self?: Love and Letter in England, c. 1660c.
1760, Literature and History 11 (2002): 119; Joanna Bourke, Fear and Anxiety: Writing about
Emotion in Modern History, History Workshop Journal 55 (2003): 11133.
15. Sverine Pilloud and Micheline Louis-Courvoisier, The Intimate Experience of the Body in the
Eighteenth Century: Between Interiority and Exteriority, Medical History 47 (2003): 45172.
16. Joanna Bourke makes a similar argument for modern history. See Linda Pollock, Anger and the
Negotiation of Relationships in Early Modern England, The Historical Journal 47 (2004): 56790;
Lucy Bending, The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2000), 8990; Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean
Stage (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004); Bourke, Fear and Anxiety.
17. However, neither study focuses on bodily experience in the patients present: Antonie LuyendijkElshout focuses on the medical treatments for fear; David Gentilcore extensively considers illness narratives, but they are remembrances of past long-term ailments that were cured miraculously. Pilloud
475
and Louis-Courvoisier briefly touch on the mind/body connection, but do not explore it in any depth.
See Luyendijk-Elshout, Of Masks and Mills: The Enlightened Doctor and His Frightened Patient, in
Rousseau, Languages of Psyche; Gentilcore, The Fear of Disease and the Disease of Fear, in Fear in
Early Modern Society, ed. William Naphy and Penny Roberts (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press,
1997); and Pilloud and Louis-Courvoisier, Intimate Experience, 47172.
18. Sharon Howard, Imagining the Pain and Peril of Seventeenth-Century Childbirth, Social History of Medicine 16 (2003): 36782; Lucinda McCray Beier, Sufferers & Healers: The Experience of
Illness in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987); Raymond A. Anselment, The Wantt of Health: An Early Eighteenth-Century Self-Portrait of Sickness, Literature and
Medicine 15 (1996): 22543; Elizabeth Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth
Century (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996); Patricia Crawford, The Construction and Experience
of Maternity in Seventeenth-Century England, in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren, ed. Valerie Fildes (London: Routledge, 1990); Rebecca Earle,
ed., Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 16001945 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).
19. tienne-Franois Geoffroy, MSS 52415245, Bibliothque Interuniversitaire de Mdecine (Paris)
(hereafter BIUM); Sir Hans Sloane, MSS 4034, 40364069, 40754079, British Library (London)
(hereafter BL). Consultation by letter with Sloane cost a guinea, while at least one patient paid Geoffroy
twelve livres, about half Sloanes fee. Physicians in both countries charged their patients on a sliding
scale according to their finances. See Sir Gavin de Beer, Sir Hans Sloane and the British Museum (London: Published for the Trustees of the Museum by Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), 53; BIUM MS 5241, ff.
4546, Marquis de Brichauteau to Geoffroy, 10 June 1729; Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The
Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 324, 541, 545.
20. Franois Loux and Philippe Richard found many proverbs suggesting that illness was a luxury
reserved for the wealthy, but Patrick Kiley suggests that French aristocrats considered expressions of
pain as unrefined. Franois Loux and Philippe Richard, Sagesses du Corps: la Sant et la Maladie dans
les Proverbes Franais (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1978), 15152; Patrick D. Kiley, Making
Sense of Pain: Reading the Sensible Body of Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century France
(Ph.D. thesis, Purdue University, 2000).
21. Matthew Ramsey and Colin Jones have argued that English medicine was not entirely liberal
and free market, while French medicine was not necessarily tightly controlled by monopolies or the
state. Matthew Ramsey, Le Mdecin, le Peuple, ltat: La Question du Monopole Professionnel, in
La Mdecine des Lumires: Tout Autour de Tissot, ed. Vincent Barras and Micheline Louis-Courvoisier
(Geneva: Georg diteur, 2001), 2740; Colin Jones, The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisements, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution, American Historical
Review 101 (1996): 1340.
22. Ramsey, Le Mdecin. Georges S. Rousseau suggests that hysteria was understood differently
in European countries by the end of the eighteenth century: A Strange Pathology: Hysteria in the
Early Modern World, in Hysteria Beyond Freud, ed. Sander Gilman et al. (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1993), 91186.
23. The language is also similar to that of Johann Storchs and S. A. Tissots patients. See Duden,
Woman Beneath; Pilloud and Louis-Courvoisier, Intimate Experience.
24. Western pain descriptions today overlap significantly. The McGill-Melzack Pain Questionnaire,
developed in Canada, evaluates pain through vocabulary that appears to hold up cross-culturally, as a
Dutch study demonstrates. See Robbert-Jan Verkes, Willem Van der Kloot and John Van der Merj, The
Perceived Structure of 176 Pain Descriptive Words, Pain 38 (1989): 21929. Medical studies suggest
that men and women physically process pain and pain relief differently, reducing pain to a matter of
physical systems rather than social and cultural differences. Cf. Jane Bradbury, Why Do Men and
Women Feel and React to Pain Differently? The Lancet 361, no. 9374 (June 14, 2003): 205253.
25. Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing & the Human Condition (New
York: Basic Books, 1988), 4951; Harold Schweizer, To Give Suffering a Language, Literature and
Medicine 14 (1995): 21021; Marni Jackson, Pain: The Science and Culture of Why We Hurt (London:
Bloomsbury, 2003); David Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991).
26 . Ernelle Fife, Agendas, Gender, and Audience: The Discourse of Eighteenth-Century Illness Narratives (Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia State University, 1995); Morris, Culture of Pain; Roy Porter and
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Dorothy Porter, In Sickness and in Health: the British Experience 16501850 (London: Fourth Estate,
1988); Schweizer, To Give Suffering a Language; Sarah Skwire, Women, Writers and Sufferers: Anne
Conway and An Collins, Literature and Medicine 18 (1999), 123.
27. Porter and Porter, In Sickness and in Health, ch. 6.
28. Howard Brody, Stories of Sickness (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), 6, 15; Kleinman, Illness
Narratives, 4950.
29. On consultation letters, see Laurence Brockliss, Consultation by Letter in Early EighteenthCentury Paris: The Medical Practice of tienne-Franois Geoffroy, in French Medical Culture in the
Nineteenth Century, ed. Ann La Berge and Mordechai Feingold (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 79117;
Brockliss, Quatre Mdecins Francophones et la Rpublique des Lettres du XVIIIe Sicle: Boissier de
Sauvages, Villars, Calvet et Tissot, in Barras and Louis-Courvoisier, Lumires, 15169; Micheline
Louis-Courvoisier, Le Malade et Son Mdecin: le Cadre de la Relation Thrapeutique dans la Deuxime
Moiti du XVIIIe Sicle, Canadian Bulletin for the History of Medicine 18 (2001): 27796; Micheline
Louis-Courvoisier and Sverine Pilloud, Consulting by Letter in the Eighteenth Century: Mediating
the Patients View? in Cultural Approaches to the History of Medicine: Mediating Medicine in Early
Modern and Modern Europe, ed. Willem de Blcourt and Cornelie Usborne (Houndmills: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), 7188; Guenter Risse, Doctor William Cullen, Physician, Edinburgh: A Consultation Practice in the Eighteenth Century, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48 (1974), 33851;
Frdric Sardet, Consulter Tissot: Hypothse de Lecture, in Barras and Louis-Courvoisier, Lumires,
5566.
30. Roy Porter, The Rise of Physical Examination, in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. William
Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993); Stanley Reiser, Medicine and the
Reign of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), 122. Touch, however, may have
happened more often than we assume, as Cathy McClive recently argued in Looking and Touching
in French Legal Medicine, 15001800 (paper presented at the American Association for the History
of Medicine Conference, Montreal, 3 May 2007).
31. Duden and Paster suggest that premodern language correlated with physical and emotional reality:
see Duden, Woman Beneath, 3638, 8790; Paster, Humoring the Body. Language became medicalized
in the mid-eighteenth century: see Fissell, Patients, Power and the Poor, ch. 8; Nicolas Jewson, The
Disappearance of the Sick Man from Medical Cosmology, Sociology 10 (1976): 22544.
32. Howard Brody, My Story is Broken; Can You Help Me Fix It? Medical Ethics and the Joint
Construction of Narrative, Literature and Medicine 13 (1994): 7992.
33. Generally, physicians took a week to reply. Letters to Geoffroy and his replies were usually dated.
Sloanes response time can be estimated based on patients subsequent letters.
34. Blockages can also be seen in iatromechanism, and blood quality in iatrochemistry. See Roselyne
Rey, The History of Pain, trans. Louise Wallace, J. A. Cadden, and S. W. Cadden (Paris: La Dcouverte,
1993), 103; Pilloud and Louis-Courvoisier, Intimate Experience, 46063.
35. On French and other European trends, see Luyendijk-Elshout, Of Masks and Mills, 20512;
Roselyne Rey, Vitalism, Disease and Society, in Medicine in the Enlightenment, ed. Roy Porter
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 27488; Elizabeth A. Williams, A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism
in Enlightenment Montpellier (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology.
36. Sloane was trained by the iatromechanist Thomas Sydenham, while Geoffroy was an iatrochemist. Most of Geoffroys replies exist; although very few of Sloanes do, patients letters sometimes refer
to his previous treatment. On shared medical language, see Nicolas Jewson, Medical Knowledge and
the Patronage System in Eighteenth-Century England, Sociology 9 (1974), 36985. Wayne Wild has
also noted the continuance of old-fashioned treatments in medical practice by physicians who espoused
new ideas: Medicine-by-Post: The Changing Voice of Illness in Eighteenth-Century British Consultation
Letters and Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006).
37. Using different collections of consultation letters, Wild argues that a rhetoric of sensibility and
subjectivity entered English consultation letters from the 1730s. For eighteenth-century France, Kiley
argues that modern patients have a more extensive vocabulary, as well as more suffering. (Wild, Medicine-by-Post, 61100; Kiley, Making Sense, 2425, 6872.)
477
38. Duden, Woman Beneath; Rankin, Duchess, 12933.

39. BL Sl. MS 4075, f. 286, Dr. Chistopher Jeffries to Sloane, n.d.
40. BL Sl. MS 4075, f. 73, Henry Downing to Sloane, 19 July 1726.
41. BIUM MS 5244, f. 85, n.a. to Geoffroy and Hequet, 10 July 1729: fluxions sur les dents et sur
les yeux, flux de ventre frequent et copieux.
42. BIUM MS 5245, f. 5, Aubriot, Chanoine de Boulogne sur Mer, to Sloane, 30 January 1724:
aussitot une vapeur seleve qui mevaille [sic] en surtant, en mecriant. Quand je me porte bien cela
maniere aussi ce qui mempeche de dormir, car cela meveille souvent trois a quatre fois par nuict.
43. BIUM MS 5242, f. 297, n.a., 14 June 1730. The male patient had a fever caused by his grandes
et fortes obstructions.
44. BIUM MS 5242, f. 42, n.a., 8 August 1727: Embarras quil sent a lEstomach.
45. This linguistic overlap has been largely lost in modern England. See Horacio Fabrega and Stephen
Tyma, Culture, Language and the Shaping of Illness, Journal of Psychosomatic Research 20 (1976):
335; Dorothee Sturkenboom Historicizing the Gender of Emotions: Changing Perceptions in Dutch
Enlightenment Thought, Journal of Social History 34 (2000): 5576; John Mullan, Sentiment and
Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
46. Rey, Pain, 3; Duden, Woman Beneath, 87.
47. BL Sl. MS 4076, f. 189, Mary Butler to Sloane, n.d. [d. 1733].
48. BL Sl. MS 4042, f. 174, Anne Hamilton to Sloane, 4 September 1710.
49. BL Sl. MS 4076, f. 36, Sarah Long to Sloane, 8 January 173839.
50. BIUM MS 5245, f. 80, Mr. Seret to Geoffroy, 29 January 1729.
51. BIUM MS 5245, f. 221, n.a. to Mme Fouqau (?), n.d. Je sentis une douleur dans lestomach qui
pour netre pas continuel ne laisse pas que detre fort incomode. See notes 72 and 83.
52. BIUM MS 5241, f. 76, n.a. to Geoffroy, 26 December 1714: je me trouve incomode de cette
oppression dont jay parl je ne suis point dutout oppresse quand je suis tranquil il faut pour lestre que
jagisse ou que je monte une escalier.
53. BL Sl. MS 4077, f. 216, Ann Warner to Sloane, 5 September 1724.
54. BL Sl. MS 4075, f. 286, Dr. Chistopher Jeffries to Sloane, n.d.
55. Fabrega and Tyma, Shaping of Illness, 335.
56. The relationship between body and soul, physical reflex and true suffering, was hotly discussed
by several early modern scholars. Descartes, for example, believed that pain required a judgment by
the soul. See Rey, Pain, 7782. Several modern studies have pointed out how chronic pain affects every
part of a persons life: Morris, Culture of Pain; Jackson, Pain; Kleinman, Illness Narratives; C. Richard
Chapman and Jonathan Gavrin, Suffering: The Contribution of Persistent Pain, The Lancet 353, no.
9171 (June 26, 1999): 223338.
57. BL Sl. MS 4075, f. 187, John Grandorge (Chaplain) to Sloane, 16 April 1725.
58. BL Sl. MS 4075, f. 201, John Hales to Sloane, 14 June 1706.
59. BL Sl. MS 4061, f. 306, C. Watson to Sloane, n.d.
60. BIUM MS 5241, f. 236, Gouet de Luygnee to Geoffroy, 26 May 1728.
61. BL Sl. MS 4076, f. 36, Sarah Long to Sloane, 8 January 173839.
62. BIUM MS 5241, f. 5, n.a., n.d.
63. Hysteria was a disorder of the emotions and body, although G. S. Rousseau (A Strange Pathology) argues that eighteenth-century hysteria was increasingly physical. BIUM MS 5241, f. 145,
n.a., n.d.; Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, ch. 5; Elizabeth A. Williams, Hysteria and the Court
Physician in Enlightenment France, Eighteenth-Century Studies 35 (2002): 24755.
478
41 / 4
64. BL Sl. MS 4075, f. 218, Dr. George Hepburn to Sloane, 5 January 1721. It is not clear whether
the patient is Horatio (1st Baron Walpole of Wolterton) or the Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Walpole (1st Earl
of Orford).
65. Bending, Bodily Pain, 1047.
66. BL Sl. MS 4041, f. 245, Elizabeth Howland to Sloane, 22 November 1708. Although this description was not strictly humoral, it was based on the humoral foundation of hot and cold qualities.
67. BIUM MS 5244, f. 74, n.a, n.d. Apres la saigne du pied ses opressions luy vinrent plus viollentes et plus long tems quelle ne les avoit jamais eu.
68. BIUM MS 5244, ff. 7576, Geoffroy to Unknown, n.d.
69. The McGill-Melzack Pain Questionnaire also attempts to identify these aspects of pain.
70. Jewson, Medical Knowledge; Roy Porter, The Body and the Mind, the Doctor and the Patient:
Negotiating Hysteria, Gilman et al., Hysteria Beyond Freud, 22566.
71. BL Sl. MS 4041, f. 245, Elizabeth Howland to Sloane, 22 November 1708.
72. BIUM MS 5245, f. 221, n.a. to Mme Fouqau (?), n.d. See also notes 51 and 83.
73. See Elaine Scarry, Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1985). Pain may be more difficult for modern patients to express. Gilles Trimaille, for
example, has discussed the confiscation of the measurement and determination of pain by modern
medical and legal experts: LExpertise Mdico-Lgale: Confiscation et Traduction de la Douleur, in
La Douleur et le Droit, ed. Bernard Durand, Jean Poirier, and Jean-Pierre Royer (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997).
74. Eighteenth-century physician George Cheyne, who also had an extensive consultation-by-letter
practice, believed that letters were therapeutic (Wild, Medicine-by-Post, 113). See also Louise DeSalvo,
Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Stories Transforms Our Lives (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000);
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Paul Brodwin, Byron Good et al., Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992); Scarry, Body in Pain; Jackson, Pain;
Kleinman, Illness Narratives; Morris, Culture of Pain; Michael Roper, Splitting in Unsent Letters:
Writing as a Social Practice and Psychological Activity, Social History 26 (2001): 31839; Rousseau,
A Strange Pathology, 9495.
75. Pilloud and Louis-Courvoisier suggest that bodies and their passions needed to be open to the
outside world (Intimate Experience, 472). See also Rublack, Fluxes; George S. Rousseau, Ingenious Pain: Fiction, History, Biography, and the Miraculous Eighteenth Century, Eighteenth-Century
Life 25, no. 2 (2001): 4762; Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early
Modern France (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001).
76. Bending argues that the assumption that pain lacks language overlooks sufferers experiences
(Bodily Pain, 11014). See also Scarry, Body in Pain, 161 f.; Porter, Expressing yourself Ill: The Language of Sickness in Georgian England, in Language, Self, and Society: A Social History of Language,
ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 27678.
77. Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 17899.
78. Rey, Pain, 99101.
79. Roy Porter, Western Medicine and Pain: Historical Perspectives, in Religion, Health and Suffering, ed. John R. Hinnells and Roy Porter (London: Kegan Paul International, 1999), 107.
80. Using religious sources, Gentilcore considers the need for labelling ones affliction in order to
respond to it (Fear, 204).
81. Gillian Bennett examines popular descriptions of internal sensations as invading animals, while
Gentilcore looks at disease as possession by an external entity. Bennett, Bosom Serpents and Alimentary Amphibians: A Language for Sickness, in Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe, ed.
Marjike Gijswijt-Hofstra, Hilary Marland, and Hans de Wardt (London: Routledge, 1997); see also
Gentilcore, Fear.
479
82. BIUM MS 5244, f. 78, Mlle de Refuge to Geoffroy, 22 April 1729; BL Sl. MS 4075, f. 321, M.
Irwin to Sloane, 16 June 1724. Mlle de Refuge referred to batement.
83. BIUM MS 5245, f. 221, n.a. to Mme Fouqau (?), n.d. The anonymous French woman described
her pain as se tourne, se remue and battement. She also suffered from rheumatism and migraines.
See also notes 51 and 72.
84. Silverman, Tortured Subjects; Vronique Demars, La Douleur, Srum de Vrit: lUtilisation du
Serment dans les Douleurs de lAccouchement pour la Preuve de la Paternit Naturelle dans lAncien
Droit, in Durand et al., La Douleur; Serge Dauchy, Le Jurisconsulte et le Mdecin: la Douleur Vue
Travers les Recueils dArrts (XVIe XVIIIe Sicle), in Durand et al., La Douleur; Florence Carr,
Le Criminel Face La Douleur: La Thse de Lombrosso, in Durand et al., La Douleur; Howard,
Seventeenth-Century Childbirth.
85. BIUM MS 5241, f. 99, n.a. to Geoffroy, n.d. The patient was tres tourment particulierement.
86. BIUM MS 5243, f. 103, n.a. to Geoffroy, 19 November 1723. He had picotements and
dechiremens and was languissant.
87. BIUM MS 5242, Geoffroys consultation for Mme de la Buretiere, 19 September 1724, ff. 5355;
Mme de la Buretiere to Geoffroy, 18 May [1725], f. 55.
88. BIUM MS 5242, Anonymous physician to Geoffroy, 3 January 1725, f. 48; Regime a observer,
ff. 4950.
89. On the symptoms, see BIUM MS 5242, Mme de la Buretiere to Geoffroy, n.d., f. 57; on remedies,
see her letters to Geoffroy, 18 May, f. 55; n.d. ff. 56, 58.
90. Mes [sic] inquietude continuelle et tristesse et tremblement. BIUM MS 5242, f. 56. She made
similar complaints in f. 57.
91. Une repugnance effroiable. BIUM MS 5242, 18 May, f. 55.
92. Faitte moy lhonneur de mecrire et de me faire scavoire pour ma consolation a quoy tous ces
[sic] remede peuvent servirs le soulagement que jen doit esperer. BIUM MS 5242, f. 57. She complained
about his slow response in May, f. 55.
93. Based on BIUM MSS 52415245 (411 letters) and BL Sl. MSS 40754079 (828 letters), nearly 57
percent of Sloanes letters and only 39 percent of Geoffroys were written by lay people; of these, about
48 percent of English patients and 41 percent of French patients who wrote letters did so about their
own illness. BIUM MS 5241, f. 99, n.a., n.d.; ff. 100101, Geoffroy to M Louis Tou de Guijon, 23 July
1728; f. 102, Jullien to Abb de Guijon, 31 July 1728; f. 103v, M de Guijon to Abb de Guijon (only
a short cover letter with Julliens letter), n.d.; f. 104, Geoffroy to M de Guijon, 10 August 1728.
94. Tissots collection is similar. Brockliss, Quatre Mdecins, 154; Sverine Pilloud, Mettre les
Mauz en Mots, Mdiations dans la Consultation pistolaire au XVIIIe Sicle: Les Malades du Dr Tissot
(17281797), Canadian Bulletin for the History of Medicine 16 (1999): 21545. For a detailed French
case in which a man suffering from impotence and obesity sought the help of French physicians and
Tissot, see Daniel Teysseire, Obse et Impuissant: Le Dossier Mdical dElie-de-Beaumont, 17651776
(Grenoble: Jrome Millon, 1995).
95. BIUM MS 5241, f. 119, Sr Pecquet de Ste Victoire to Geoffroy, 12 April 1730; f. 121, 7 January
1730; f. 122, 7 May 1730; f. 152, 18 November 1729; f. 124, Geoffroy to Sr Pecquet de Ste Victoire,
17 April 1730; f. 125, 15 May 1730; f. 153, 18 November 1729.
96. Most of the letters are undated, which complicates identifying a chronology. Based on internal
evidence in the letters, the earliest letter is ca. 1722, before her husband died, and the latest is ca. 1732.
She suffered from the same (or related) ailments throughout and died 13 February 1734.
97. BL Sl. MS 4061, f. 289, C. Watson to Sloane, n.d. The letter was post-1729, referring to her
daughter Catherines miscarriage. She married Edward Southwell in August 1729.
98. BL Sl. MS 4061, f. 29192, C. Watson to Sloane, n.d. She refers to her husbands illness, so the
letter predates March 1722.
480
41 / 4
99. BL Sl. MS 4061, f. 298, C. Watson to Sloane, [1732?]. Colby was treating her by 1732.
100. BL Sl. MS 4061, f. 302, C. Watson to Sloane, n.d. The date cannot be identified. Nearby letters
(ff. 287, 306, 289) refer to her daughters dowry, upcoming marriage, and miscarriage, while others
(ff. 295, 300) discuss her husbands illness.
101. BL Sl. MS 4061, f. 306, C. Watson to Sloane, [172829?] This letter mentions her daughters
upcoming marriage.
102. BL Sl. MS 4078, f. 38, C. Watson to Sloane, 20 June [1732?].
103. BL Sl. 4078, f. 1, D. Colby to Sloane, 16 May 1732. He later wrote to Sloane that Lady Sondes
suffered from a violent convulsive disorder, suggesting that she visit either Bath or London for the air:
BL Sl. 4078, f. 3, 1 October 1732.
104. BL Sl. MS 4078, f. 38, C. Watson to Sloane, 20 June [1732?].
105. BL Sl. MS 4076, f. 282, Mr. Pulleyn to Sloane, n.d.
106. BL Sl. MS 4077, f. 332, Mr. Pulleyn to Sloane, 7 August 1734. It is not certain that this is the
same person or incident of disease, although it seems likely. The online manuscript index at the British
Library lists Pulleyn as the letter writer in Sl. MS 4076 and Peter Palleyn as the one in Sl. MS 4077.
(However, the second letters autograph appeared to be Pulleyn to me.) The disease is also probably
the same, since Pulleyn described it in the first letter as being similar to gout, the disease treated in the
second letter.
107. Fife has used the terms linear and circular (Agendas, Gender, and Audience, 6370);
see also Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Fine, and Anat Rachel Shimoni, Gender, Genre,
and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts, Text: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse
23 (2003): 32146; Minna Palander-Collin, Male and Female Styles in Seventeenth-Century Correspondence. Language Variation and Change 11 (1999): 12341; Janet Holmes, Women, Men and
Politeness (London: Longman, 1995), 2.
108. Rousseau recounts the dismissal of Dr. John Radcliffe by Queen Anne after he diagnosed her with
vapors, when she wanted a disease that could be readily treated. See also Elaine Showalter, Hysteria,
Feminism, and Gender, in Gilman et al., Hysteria Beyond Freud, 286335; Rousseau, A Strange
Pathology, 14950.
109. Lynn Botelho, When the healer becomes the patient: old age and illness in the life of Elizabeth
Freke, 16411714, lecture, Johns Hopkins University, 21 April 2006.
110. See Brody, My Story is Broken.
111. See also BL Sl. MS 4052 ff. 27374, 15 February 1732 (fatigue, limits to endurance of pain, and
avoidance of malingering); MS 4061, ff. 287 (suffered colic and weakness), 293 (the effects of the steel
remedy), 304 (still ill despite bleeding and blistering), 306 (medicines agreed with her); MS 4078, ff.
57 (complained that Sloane had not read her last letter properly), 5960 (fatigue, loose bowels, swollen
leg, failure of her remedies and worry over her sick child).
112. Brody, Stories of Sickness, 6.
113. On gout, see Thomas Benedek, Gout in Women: A Historical Perspective, Bulletin of the
History of Medicine 71 (1997): 122; Roy Porter, Gout: Framing and Fantasizing Disease, Bulletin
of the History of Medicine 68 (1994): 128. For only a few examples on hysteria and hypochondria,
see George S. Rousseau, Towards a Semiotics of the Nerve: The Social History of Language in a New
Key, in Burke and Porter, Language, Self, and Society; Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology; Mullan,
Sentiment and Sociability; and Williams, Hysteria and the Court.
114. Diagnoses and treatments had to make sense to patients; see Steven Shapin, Trusting George
Cheyne: Scientific Expertise, Common Sense, and Moral Authority in Early Eighteenth-Century Dietetic
Medicine, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77 (2003): 26397.

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Smith / An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper

The abundance of artistic renderings of pain during the eighteenth century

of humoral theory fundamentally shaped the perception of bodily experiences. As

Smith / An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper

It is indeed a difficult task to look at what discourse reveals about real

several English physicians trained in France. As Matthew Ramsey has suggested,

Smith / An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper

my Head; so that I am obligd to struggle a long time, before I can Recover my

Smith / An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper

Smith / An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper

Smith / An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper

God, I am able to do. I have still often a coldness in my head & if I go

Smith / An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper

Sloanes diagnosis of Mr. Pulleyns complaint as gout, not hypochondria,

Smith / An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper

Smith / An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper

Smith / An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper

38. Duden, Woman Beneath; Rankin, Duchess, 12933.

Smith / An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper

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