Nervous Disease in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain

This study, based on extensive use of eighteenth-century newspapers, hospital registers and case notes, examines the experience of suffering from nervous disease – a supposedly upper-class malady. Beatty concludes that ‘nervousness’ was a legitimate medical diagnosis with a firm basis in eighteenth-century medical theory.

'Beatty presents a wealth of new information and perspectives' Journal of British Studies 'this is an admirable piece of work that sets out the debate on nervousness in a helpful and thorough way... Beatty gives us a balanced view of the real medical context of a topic that has often been examined with very different agendas... [This book] is a good place to start research and teaching on the subject.' British Journal for the History of Science

Heather R. Beatty