Reviewed by: Suffering Scholars: Pathologies of the Intellectual in Enlightenment France by Anne C. Vila Kathleen Kete Anne C. Vila. Suffering Scholars: Pathologies of the Intellectual in Enlightenment France. Intellectual History of the Modern Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. viii + 267 pp. $65.00 (978–0–8122–4992–7). Suffering Scholars is an engaging book about the maladies des gens de lettres that absorbed the attention of leading figures of the Enlightenment, physicians and philosophes alike. Samuel- Auguste Tissot’s De la santé des gens de lettres (1768), which was “filled with frightening tales of people who had destroyed their health because of excessive mental application” (p. 24), defined for a general readership the risks of a studious life and the means by which these could be avoided. Some of Tissot’s prescriptions prevail today, with health services on college campuses [End Page 127] recommending to students that they eat well, get plenty of exercise, avoid allnighters in the “stuffy air of their studies” (p. 38), be sociable, and stay balanced. Tissot’s mantra was temperance: “the key to health and longevity was not to avoid study altogether but, rather, to engage in it moderately” (p. 40.) Moderation was Théodore Tronchin’s refrain also. He urged his patients to walk daily, eat modestly, and go easy on the drugs. The panoply of astringents, laxatives, and opiates (pâtés of red poppy) that filled the medicine chests of the well-to-do could damage one’s health. Voltaire’s “consumption of remedies” (p. 215, n. 43) for instance, frightened Tronchin. He could not approve of his patient’s practice of purging, this despite his own prescription of a “marmalade” (p. 100) of cassia or rhubarb to be taken by the philosophe four times a week. Excessive study often presented itself in digestive ills. The relationship of active mind to indigestion was backed by medical theory. Anne C. Vila explains how vitalism offered a “triadic conception” of the body, positing that the brain, the abdomen, and some other organ (variously identified) controlled one’s health. The work of the mind could weaken that of the viscera, and imbalance one’s system, and vice versa. Voltaire’s practice of purging operated within this model. He kept “his entrails as empty as possible in order to keep his mind clear” (p. 100). Dyspepsia was one of Voltaire’s signature traits, famous through his correspondence and his eccentricities as host at Ferney. Rousseau, on the other hand, was associated with melancholia, another sign of the reciprocity of mind and body. Philippe Pinel cited Rousseau in his Nosographie philosophique (1797) speaking of the harm of immoderate study and “deep meditations” (p. 136). Rousseau was the “‘perfect’ example of the melancholic temperament” (p. 136) as offered up in a turn of the century textbook on physiology. The interest in the health problems of the philosophes is explained only somewhat by contemporary anxiety about the passions. Any of the passions, even those of the mind, were held to be dangerous if not kept in check. What Vila’s account demonstrates so well is how widespread was interest in another problem, that is, the mind/body relation. Sensationalism posited that knowledge came through the senses, but where was sensory information synthesized, and made ready to be acted upon? Was the “mind” (or was it the “soul”?) separate from the brain? Attention was paid to the health of celebrated thinkers because it was presumed easier to see the extent to which “mind” was integrated with the body in persons whose minds were so obviously active. One of the author’s aims is to “re-corporealize the figure of the Enlightenment-era thinker” (p. 16), and I think she succeeds in showing how deep metaphysical questions could be asked of contemporary bodies. Still, one misses a diagnosis of Voltaire’s stomach complaints in a book that wants us to understand the historical body in “biologically grounded” (p. 17) terms. Did he suffer from acid-reflux, or a gluten intolerance? Parasites? It would be interesting to know. And, although Vila is pushing back, she says, against histories that “see sociability as the defining quality of eighteenth-century French...