Coleridge, Moritz and the ‘psychological’ case history

Abstract

himself and the state of his health against the background of the eighteenth-century medical case history. I argue that in or about 1803 a decisive change occurred in Coleridge’s selffashioning arising largely from his discovery of a new and profoundly creative way of writing about illness. This was the tradition of the socalled ‘psychological’ case history inaugurated in Germany by Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–93). Moritz developed a new rhetoric for the case history based on two distinctive Romantic postulates: first, the idea that a case could be rendered fully only in its ideal form as art or fiction; and second, the notion that the best ‘moral doctor’ (Moritz’s term for a psychologist) would be the one who would recognize in the minutiae of a life a potential to reorganize it according to a new pattern. In an ideal Moritzian case history, consistency would be almost unattainable. This creative-destructive interpretative stance was obviously at odds with the case history in the form in which it had existed from at least the time of the Hippocratic writers which aimed at definitive simple, causal characterization of diseases and their vicissitudes. Coleridge’s experiments with Moritzian ideas and rhetoric can be seen in his ‘psychological’ criticism, notably in his lectures on the character of Hamlet which, I contend, discuss the prince as a Moritzian ‘case’. No one who reads Coleridge’s letters and Notebooks will fail to be struck by the mass of medical detail they contain. Testicles swollen to three times their natural size, inflamed eyes, ‘Scrophulous boils and indurations around the neck’, ‘bowel agonies’, ‘profuse sweats at night confined to the region of my chest’. I call this ‘medical detail’ as distinct from, say, talk about his health, because of the meticulousness with which each symptom is described – reserve has no place in these writings – and because of Coleridge’s readiness to express himself in technical, medical language. This practice endowed Coleridge’s letters and Notebooks with a rhetorical dimension they would not otherwise have had. This was the dimension of the medical case history. Coleridge’s investment in the rhetoric of the medical case history was complex. His most basic commitment to it was perhaps existential. He needed to know that there were people in the world willing to share his distress. Presenting his plight in medical language allowed him to demand their attention insistently yet dispassionately. Strikingly, he writes as if no friend could want to be kept in ignorance of his pains. Indeed, for a period of about two years beginning in early 1801, he would treat interest in them as a test of friendship. Thus in a letter to William Godwin of September 1801 he writes: ‘I have, I confess, felt little inclination to write to you, who have Neil Vickers