Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise

John Hill

• Publisher: Youcanprint
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9788831632874
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

INTRODUCTION
SECT. I. - The NATURE of the DISORDER
SECT. II. - Persons Subject to it
SECT. III. - The SYMPTOMS of the DISORDER
SECT. IV. - The DANGER
SECT. V. - The Causes of the HYPOCHONDRIASIS
SECT. VI. - Rules of Life for Hypochondriac Persons
SECT. VII. - The proper DIET
SECT. VIII. - The MEDICINE

INTRODUCTION

“When I first dabbled in this art, the old distemper call’d Melancholy was exchang’d for Vapours, and afterwards for the Hypp, and at last took up the now current appellation of the Spleen, which it still retains, tho’ a learned doctor of the west, in a little tract he hath written, divides the Spleen and Vapours, not only into the Hypp, the Hyppos, and the Hyppocons; but subdivides these divisions into the Markambles, the Moonpalls, the Strong-Fiacs, and the Hockogrokles.”

Nicholas Robinson, A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and Hypochondriack Melancholy (London, 1729)

Treatises on hypochondriasis: the seventeenth-century medical term for a wide range of nervous diseases were old when “Sir” John Hill, the eccentric English scientist, physician, apothecary, and hack writer, published his Hypochondriasis in 1766.[1] For at least a century and a half medical writers as well as lay authors had been writing literature of all types (treatises, pamphlets, poems, sermons, epigrams) on this most fashionable of English maladies under the variant names of “melancholy,” “the spleen,” “black melancholy,” “hysteria,” “nervous debility,” “the hyp.” Despite the plethora of materia scripta on the subject it makes sense to reprint Hill’s Hypochondriasis, because it is indeed a “practical treatise” and because it offers the modern student of neoclassical literature a clear summary of the best thoughts that had been put forth on the subject, as well as an explanation of the causes, symptoms, and cures of this commonplace malady.

No reader of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature needs to be reminded of the interest of writers of the period in the condition “disease” is too confining a term hypochondriasis. [2] Their concern is apparent in both the poetry and prose of two centuries. From Robert Burton’s Brobdingnagian exposition in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) to Tobias Smollett’s depiction of the misanthropic and ailing Matthew Bramble in Humphry Clinker (1771), and, of course, well into the nineteenth century, afflicted heroes and weeping heroines populate the pages of England’s literature. There is scarcely a decade in the period 1600-1800 that does not contribute to the literature of melancholy; so considerable in number are the works that could be placed under this heading that it actually makes sense to speak of the “literature of melancholy.” A kaleidoscopic survey of this literature (exclusive of treatises written on the subject) would include mention of Milton’s “Il Penseroso” and “L’Allegro,” the meditative Puritan and nervous Anglican thinkers of the Restoration (many of whose narrators, such as Richard Baxter, author of the Reliquiae Baxterianae,[3] are afflicted), Swift’s “School of Spleen” in A Tale of a Tub, Pope’s hysterical Belinda in the “Cave of Spleen,” the melancholic “I” of Samuel Richardson’s correspondence, Gray’s leucocholy, the psychosomatically ailing characters of The Vicar of Wakefield and Tristram Shandy, Boswell’s Hypochondriack Papers (1777-1783) contributed to the London Magazine, and such “sensible” and “sensitive” women as Mrs. Bennett and Miss Bates in the novels of Jane Austen. So great in bulk is this literature in the mid eighteenth century, that C. A. Moore has written, “statistically, this deserves to be called the Age of Melancholy.” [4] The vastness of this literature is sufficient to justify the reprinting of an unavailable practical handbook on the subject by a prolific author all too little known. [5]

The medical background of Hill’s pamphlet extends further back than the seventeenth century and Burton’s Anatomy. The ancient Greeks had theorized about hypochondria: hypochondriasis signified a disorder beneath (hypo) the gristle (chondria) and the disease was discussed principally in physiological terms. The belief that hypochondriasis was a somatic condition persisted until the second half of the seventeenth century at which time an innovation was made by Dr. Thomas Sydenham. In addition to showing that hypochondriasis and hysteria (thought previously by Sydenham to afflict women only) were the same disease, Sydenham noted that the external cause of both was a mental disturbance and not a physiological one. He also had a theory that the internal and immediate cause was a disorder of the animal spirits arising from a clot and resulting in pain, spasms, and bodily disorders. By attributing the onset of the malady to mental phenomena and not to obstructions of the spleen or viscera, Sydenham was moving towards a psychosomatic theory of hypochondriasis, one that was to be debated in the next century in England, Holland, and France. [6] Sydenham’s influence on the physicians of the eighteenth century was profound: Cheyne in England, Boerhaave in Holland, La Mettrie in France. Once the theory of the nervous origins of hypochondria gained ground--here I merely note coincidence, not historical cause and effect the disease became increasingly fashionable in England, particularly among the polite, the aristocratic, and the refined. Students of the drama will recall Scrub’s denial in The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707) of the possibility that Archer has the spleen and Mrs. Sullen’s interjection, “I thought that distemper had been only proper to people of quality.”

Toward the middle of the eighteenth century, hypochondria was so prevalent in people’s minds and mouths that it soon assumed the abbreviated name “the hyp.” Entire poems like William Somervile’s The Hyp: a Burlesque Poem in Five Canto’s (1731) and Tim Scrubb’s A Rod for the Hyp-Doctor (1731) were devoted to this strain; others, like Malcom Flemyng’s epic poem, Neuropathia: sive de morbis hypochondriacis et hystericis, libri tres, poema medicum (1740), were more technical and scientific. Professor Donald Davie has written that he has often “heard old fashioned and provincial persons [in England and Scotland] even in [my] own lifetime say, ‘Oh, you give me the hyp,’ where we should say ‘You give me a pain in the neck’” [7]; and I myself have heard the expression, “You give me the pip,” where “pip” may be a corruption of “hyp.” As used in the early eighteenth century, the term “hyp” was perhaps not far from what our century has learned to call Angst. It was also used as a synonym for “lunacy,” as the anonymous author of Anti-Siris (1744), one of the tracts in the tar-water controversy, informs us that “Berkeley tells his Countrymen, they are all mad, or Hypochondriac, which is but a fashionable name for Madness.” Bernard Mandeville, the Dutch physician and author of The Fable of the Bees, seems to have understood perfectly well that hypochondriasis is a condition encompassing any number of diseases and not a specific and readily definable ailment; a condition, moreover, that hovers precariously and bafflingly in limbo between mind and body, and he stressed this as the theme of his Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysteric Passions, Vulgarly Call’d the Hypo in Men and Vapours in Women (1711). The mental causes are noted as well in an anonymous pamphlet in the British Museum, A Treatise on the Dismal Effects of Low-Spiritedness (1750) and are echoed in many similar early and mid-eighteenth century works. Some medical writers of the age, like Nicholas Robinson, had reservations about the external mental bases of the hyp and preferred to discuss the condition in terms of internal physiological causes:

...of that Disorder we call the Vapours, or Hypochondria; for they have no material distinctive Characters, but what arise from the same Disease affecting different Sexes, and the Vapours in Women are term’d the Hypochondria in Men, and they proceed from the Contraction of the Vessels being depress’d a little beneath the Balance of Nature, and the Relaxation of the Nerves at the same Time, which creates that Uneasiness and Melancholy that naturally attends Vapours, and which generally is an Intemperature of the whole Body, proceeding from a Depression of the Solids beneath the Balance of Nature; but the Intemperature of the Parts is that Peculiar Disposition whereby they favour any Disease.[8]

But the majority of medical thinkers had been persuaded that the condition was psychosomatic, and this belief was supported by research on nerves by important physicians in the 1740’s and 1750’s: the Monro brothers in London, Robert Whytt in Edinburgh, Albrecht von Haller in Leipzig. By mid century the condition known as the hyp was believed to be a real, not an imaginary ailment, common, peculiar in its manifestations, and indefinable, almost impossible to cure, producing very real symptoms of physical illness, and said to originate sometimes in depression and idleness. It was summed up by Robert James in his Medicinal Dictionary (London, 1743-45):

If we thoroughly consider its Nature, it will be found to be a spasmodico-flatulent Disorder of the Primae Viae, that is, of the Stomach and Intestines, arising from an Inversion or Perversion of their peristaltic Motion, and, by the mutual consent of the Parts, throwing the whole nervous System into irregular Motions, and disturbing the whole Oeconomy of the Functions.... no part or Function of the Body escapes the Influence of this tedious and long protracted Disease, whose Symptoms are so violent and numerous, that it is no easy Task either to enumerate or account for them.... No disease is more troublesome, either to the Patient or Physician, than hypochondriac Disorders; and it often happens, that, thro’ the Fault of both, the Cure is either unnecessarily protracted, or totally frustrated; for the Patients are so delighted, not only with a Variety of Medicines, but also of Physicians.... On the contrary, few physicians are sufficiently acquainted with the true Genius and Nature of this perplexing Disorder; for which Reason they boldly prescribe almost everything contained in the Shops, not without an irreparable Injury to the Patient (article on “Hypochondriacus Morbis”).

This is a more technical description than Hill gives anywhere in his handbook, but it serves well to summarize the background of the condition about which Sir John wrote.

Hill’s Hypochondriasis adds little that is new to the theory of the disease. It incorporates much of the thinking set forth by the writings mentioned above, particularly those of George Cheyne, whose medical works The English Malady (1733) and The Natural Method of Cureing the Diseases of the Body, and the Disorders of the Mind Depending on the Body (1742) Hill knew. He is also conversant with some Continental writers on the subject, two of whom--Isaac Biberg, author of The Oeconomy of Nature (1751), and René Réaumur who had written a history of insects (1722) [9] he mentions explicitly, and with William Stukeley’s Of the Spleen (1723). Internal evidence indicates that Hill had read or was familiar with the ideas propounded in Richard Blackmore’s Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours (1725) and Nicholas Robinson’s A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and Hypochondriack Melancholy (1729).

Hill’s arrangement of sections is logical: he first defines the condition (I), then proceeds to discuss persons most susceptible to it (II), its major symptoms (III), consequences (IV), causes (V), and cures (VI-VIII). In the first four sections almost every statement is commonplace and requires no commentary (for example, Hill’s opening remark: “To call the Hypochondriasis a fanciful malady, is ignorant and cruel. It is a real, and a sad disease: an obstruction of the spleen by thickened and distempered blood; extending itself often to the liver, and other parts; and unhappily is in England very frequent: physick scarce knows one more fertile in ill; or more difficult of cure.”) His belief that the condition afflicts sedentary persons, particularly students, philosophers, theologians, and that it is not restricted to women alone, as some contemporary thinkers still maintained--is also impossible to trace to a single source, as is his description (p. 12) of the most prevalent physiological symptoms (“lowness of spirits, and inaptitude to motion; a disrelish of amusements, a love of solitude.... Wild thoughts; a sense of fullness”) and causes (the poor and damp English climate and the resultant clotting of blood in the spleen) of the illness.

Sections V-VIII, dealing with causes and cures, are less commonplace and display some of Hill’s eccentricities as a writer and thinker. He uses the section entitled “Cures” as a means to peddle his newly discovered cure-all, water dock, [10] which Smollett satirized through the mouth of Tabitha Bramble in Humphry Clinker (1771). Hill also rebelled against contemporary apothecaries and physicians who prescribed popular medicines, such as Berkeley’s tar-water, Dover’s mercury powders, and James’s fever-powders, as universal panaceas for the cure of the hyp. “No acrid medicine must be directed, for that may act too hastily, dissolve the impacted matter at once, and let it loose, to the destruction of the sufferer; no antimonial, no mercurial, no martial preparation must be taken; in short, no chymistry: nature is the shop that heaven has set before us, and we must seek our medicine there”. However scientifically correct Hill may have been in minimizing the efficacy of current pills and potions advertised as remedies for the hyp, he was unusual for his time in objecting so strongly to them. Less eccentric was his allegiance to the “Ancients” rather than to the “Moderns” so far as chemical treatment (i.e., restoration of the humours by chemical rearrangement) of hypochondriasis is concerned. [11] “The venerable ancients,” Hill writes, “who knew not this new art, will lead us in the search; and (faithful relators as they are of truth) will tell us whence we may deduce our hope; and what we are to fear”.

Still more idiosyncratic, perhaps, is Hill’s contention that the air of dry, high grounds worsens the condition of the patient. Virtually every writer I have read on the subject believed that onset of the hyp was caused by one of the six non-naturals, air, diet, lack of sufficient sleep, too little or too much exercise, defective evacuation, the passions of the mind; and although some medical writers emphasized the last of these, [12] few would have concurred with Hill that the fetid air of London was less harmful than the clearer air at Highgate. All readers of the novel of the period will recall the hypochondriacal Matt Bramble’s tirade against the stench of London air. Beliefs of the variety here mentioned cause me to question Hill’s importance in the history of medicine; there can be no question about his contributions to the advancement of the science of botany through popularization of Linnaeus’ system of bisexual classification, but Hill’s medical importance is summarized best as that of a compiler. His recommendation of the study of botany as a cure for melancholics is sensible but verges on becoming “a digression in praise of the author,” a poetic apologia pro vita sua in Augustan fashion:

For me, I should advise above all other things the study of nature. Let him begin with plants: he will here find a continual pleasure, and continual change; fertile of a thousand useful things; even of the utility we are seeking here. This will induce him to walk; and every hedge and hillock, every foot-path side, and thicket, will afford him some new object. He will be tempted to be continually in the air; and continually to change the nature and quality of the air, by visiting in succession the high lands and the low, the lawn, the heath, the forest. He will never want inducement to be abroad; and the unceasing variety of the subjects of his observation, will prevent his walking hastily: he will pursue his studies in the air; and that contemplative turn of mind, which in his closet threatened his destruction, will thus become the great means of his recovery.

Hill was forever extolling the claims of a life devoted to the study of nature, as we see in a late work, The Virtues of British Herbs (1770). Judicious as is the logic of this recommendation, one cannot help but feel that the emphasis here is less on diversion as a cure and more on the botanic attractions of “every hedge and hillock, every foot-path side, and thicket.”

While Hill’s rules and regulations regarding proper diet (Section VII) are standard, several taken almost verbatim et literatim from Cheyne’s list in The English Malady (1733), his recommendation (Section VIII) of “Spleen-Wort” as the best medicine for the hypochondriac patient is not. Since Hill devotes so much space to the virtues of this herb and concludes his work extolling this plant, a word should be said about it. Throughout his life he was an active botanist. Apothecary, physician, and writer though he was, it was ultimately botany that was his ruling passion, as is made abundantly clear in his correspondence. [13] Wherever he lived-whether in the small house in St. James’s Street or in the larger one on the Bayswater Road-he cultivated an herb garden that flattered his knowledge and ability. Connoisseurs raved about its species and considered it one of the showpieces of London. His arrogant personality alone prevented him from becoming the first Keeper of the Apothecary’s Garden in Chelsea, although he was for a time superintendent to the Dowager Princess of Wales’s gardens at Kensington Palace and at Kew. His interest in cultivation of herbs nevertheless continued; over the years Hill produced more than thirty botanical works, many of them devoted to the medical virtues of rare herbs such as “Spleen-Wort.” Among these are The British Herbal (1756), On the Virtues of Sage in Lengthening Human Life (1763), Centaury, the Great Stomachic (1765), Polypody (1768), A Method of Curing Jaundice (1768), Instances of the Virtue of Petasite Root (1771), and Twenty Five New Plants (1773). [14] It is therefore not surprising that he should believe a specific herb to be the best remedy for a complicated medical condition. Nor is his reference to the Ancients as authority for the herbal pacification of an inflamed spleen surprising in the light of his researches: he was convinced that every illness could be cured by taking an appropriate herb or combination of herbs. Whereas a few nonmedical writers--such as John Wesley in Primitive Physick (1747) had advocated the taking of one or two herbs in moderate dosage as anti-hysterics (the eighteenth-century term for all cures of the hyp), no medical writer of the century ever promoted the use of herbs to the extent that Hill did. In fairness to him, it is important to note ...

Table of contents

• INTRODUCTION