George Cheyne:the English malady (1733) - George Cheyne

In 18th-century Britain, the medical profession began to pay attention to the minor psychiatric disturbances of educated and polite society. Rather as neurosis became fashionable in fin-de-siecle Vienna, "nerves" became a highly eligible illness in early Georgian London and Bath. What Freud was for Vienna, George Cheyne was for 18th-century fashionable ailments. He above all was responsible for developing and popularizing the notion that abnormalities of mood and thought were due - not as traditionally thought to diabolical forces or the "humours" - but to physiological defects of the nervous system. To explain how the nervous system collapsed, Cheyne spelt out a critique of modern, high pressure urban society which in many ways prefigured Rousseau and also Freud's "Civilisation and its Discontents".;Although an important figure, Cheyne has been little studied. No scholarly reprint exists of his major thematic work, "The English Malady". This edition, prefaced by a substantial introduction by Roy Porter, aims to contextualize the work in respect of 18th-century medicine, culture and society.