Hypochondriasis

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. 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. Their concern is apparent in both the poetry and prose of two centuries.