Cause or Symptom?: Contentions Surrounding Religious Melancholy and Mental Medicine in Late-Georgian Britain

Abstract

Recent scholarship on melancholy, religion, and enthusiasm in early modern England (see Schmidt, Hodgkin, Hawes), by contrast with earlier work (see MacDonald, Heyd, Lipsedge), challenges the extent to which was secularized after the Restoration. Underlying the vitality of the tradition of spiritual physic in Protestant ministrations to the melancholic, for example, Jeremy Schmidt takes firm issue with MacDonald's earlier thesis concerning the impact and extent of the late-seventeenth-century assault on enthusiasm. He argues that the latter not only provides too narrow a definition of secularization, but also that religious consolation remained an important option for melancholic sufferers well into the eighteenth century. Methodists, Quakers, and other evangelicals continue earlier traditions of consolation and spiritual ministration to the melancholic and mentally deranged, the former, for example, being regular visitors to patients at Bethlem/St Luke's, and the latter being heavily involved in lunacy reform. Leaders of lay opinion, too, including James Boswell, persist in emphasizing How blessed is the relief which [the melancholic and hypochondriac] ... may have from the divine comforts of religion (Boswell 45-46). While as spiritual trouble of was [partially] ... displaced by a stress on bodily symptoms and complaints, eighteenth-century writers continue to deploy moral philosophizing to insist that hypochondriac was a disease of the mind (Schmidt 6). Schmidt, also, however, accepts that eighteenth-century texts on are significantly less moralistic and much more medical-- predominantly eschewing and rejecting supernatural explanations for melancholy, and providing more physiologized and naturalistic models (183). Katharine Hodgkin goes even further, suggesting that religious is regarded as little more than a symptom of mental affliction by the end of the century. In what follows, I argue that this is an exaggeration of the consistency and uniformity of the changes that had taken place by 1800, or even by the end of the Georgian era in 1834. Confined primarily to a period before 1700 (in Hodgkin's case) or 1750 (in Schmidt's), neither of these studies attempts to trace social and medical discourse on in any detail for the later Georgian period. In an appropriately millennially dated article, George Rousseau's piece from 2000 controversially and somewhat hyperbolically alleges that depression's history has not been effectively written (especially, in lexicographic and genealogical terms), and that pre-eighteenth-century terminological categories such as melancholy, vapors, hyp, and hysteria remain unstable and ill-defined. Moreover, Rousseau argues that while evidence from the Enlightenment era might imply that older pre-medicalized concepts of were waning, in fact they lingered, especially as religious melancholy (74). Nonetheless, Rousseau appears overly dismissive of a welter of scholarship on melancholy, and despite drawing his net widely, he pays scant attention to religious melancholy. Much earlier, for example, Stanley Jackson's studies of the supplanting of humoral medical explanations for in the early Georgian era, with mechanistic models informed by Newtonian natural philosophy, as well as the psychological content of earlier Burtonian approaches to melancholy, did much to elucidate changing patterns of medical diagnosis and treatment of the disorder (see Jackson, Melancholia and Melancholia). More recently, Paul Laffey has stressed the important distinction being drawn by Georgian clergymen-physicians, such as Edward Synge and in their accounts of religious (see John Wesley, Two Registers: Part 1). On the one hand, they argue that the disorder was moral (related to fears, sins, and passions) and was remedial (via spiritual counsel, counter arguments, and practices such as prayer/vigil); on the other hand, it was physical/constitutional and was to be remedied via medicines and diet and exercise regimens. …