Authors: Andrew Solomon
311
The passage of Voltaire quoted here is from
Candide,
page 140.
311
Horace Walpole’s charming prescription is in Roy Porter’s
Mind-Forg’d Manacles,
page 241. The question of geography and depression first arose in this period. William Rowley wrote that “England, according to its size and number of inhabitants, produces and contains more insane than any other country in Europe, and suicide is more common. The agitations of passions, the liberty of thinking and acting with less restraint than in other nations, force a great quantity of blood to the head, and produce greater varieties of madness in this country, than is observed in others. Religious and civil toleration are productive of political and religious madness; but where no such toleration exists, no such insanity appears.” William Rowley’s remarks are in Max Byrd’s
Visits to Bedlam,
page 129.
312
The line from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is number
36, to be found on page 38 of
The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray.
The lines from “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” are on pages 9–10 of the same volume.
312
Coleridge’s remarks are to be found in
The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Earl Leslie Griggs, editor, vol. 1, letter 68, page 123.
312
Kant’s aphorisms are from his
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime,
pages 56 and 63.
312
On mental health in the American colonies, see Mary Ann Jimenez’s
Changing Faces of Madness.
312
One example of the U.S. trend toward religious explanations of depression is William Thompson, a minister in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, who became so depressed that he had to give up his work and became “the lively portraiture of Death / A walking tomb, a living sepulcher / In which black melancholy did inter.” The devil it was who “vexed his mind with diabolical assaults and horrid, hellish darts.” The poem on William Thompson, written by his “family and friends,” may be found in
Ibid.,
13.
313
Cotton Mather on the depression of his wife is in
Ibid.,
13–15.
313
The quotations from
The Angel of Bethesda
are on pages 130–33.
313
Henry Rose’s remarks are in his
An Inaugural Dissertation on the Effects of the Passions upon the Body,
page 12. Other prominent Americans publishing treatises on the subject of depression include Nicholas Robinson, William Cullen, and Edward Cutbush. Nicholas Robinson was much read in the colonies, and his mechanical explanations of melancholy dominated thought there throughout the mid–eighteenth century. For more on Nicholas Robinson in the colonies, see Mary Ann Jimenez’s
Changing Faces of Madness,
pages 18–20. William Cullen, publishing in Philadelphia in 1790, a humanist freed from some of religion’s constraints, found that a “drier and firmer texture in the medullary substance of the brain” from a “certain want of fluid in that substance” causes melancholy. These words may be found in Cullen’s
The First Lines of the Practice of Physic,
vol. 3, page 217. Edward Cutbush, in the colonies, speaks of melancholy as an “atonic madness” in which “the mind is generally fixed to one subject; many are cogitative, silent, morose, and fixed like statues; others wander from their habitation in search of solitary places, they neglect cleanliness, their bodies are generally cold, with a change of color and dry skin; all the different secretions are much diminished, the pulse slow and languid.” He saw the brain as constantly in motion (much like the heart or lungs) and thought that all madness came from “an excess or defect of motion, in one or more parts of the brain.” He then wondered whether such defects of motion come from the blood and the nervous fluid, as Boerhaave said, from chemical matters, as Willis suggested, or “an electric or electroid fluid” that could cause “the periodical attacks of insanity” in the event of “an accumulation of this electricity in the brain.” Cutbush said that overexcitement of the brain could ruin it: “The first impression causes so great a commotion in the brain, that it will exclude, or draw into a vast vortex, every other motion, and insanity with her humerous train of attendants will usurp her way over sovereign reason.” Edward Cutbush’s views are in his
An Inaugural Dissertation on Insanity,
pages 18, 24, 32–33.
313
On “evangelical anorexia nervosa,” see Julius Rubin’s
Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America,
pages 82–124 and 156–76. The phrase “starving perfectionists” is on page 158.
314
These words from Kant on the sublime are in
The Philosophy of Kant,
page 4.
314
The famous line is from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s
Faust,
part I, scene 6, page 42.
314
Wordsworth’s lines are from the poem “Resolution and Independence,” in the volume
The Prelude: Selected Poems and Sonnets,
page 138.
314
Keats on easeful death is line 52 of “Ode to a Nightingale,” in
The Poems,
page 202. The quotation from “Ode on Melancholy” is lines 21–25, in the same collection, page 214.
314
The quotations from Shelley are from his poem “Mutability,” lines 1–4 and 19–21, in
The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley,
page 679.
315
Giacomo Leopardi’s lines are from “To Himself,” in his
Poems,
page 115.
315
“Vanity of vanities” is Ecclesiastes 12:8.
315
The lines from
The Sorrows of Young Werther
are to be found on pages 95 and 120.
315
Baudelaire’s lines are from
The Flowers of Evil,
pages 92–93.
316
Bernard of Morlaix, a monk of the order of Cluny, wrote his most well-known poem,
De Contemptu Mundi,
in the twelfth century. It is one of the most lasting apocalyptic meditations.
316
The quotation from Hegel comes from his
Lectures on the Philosophy of History,
as quoted in Wolf Lepenies’s
Melancholy and Society,
page 75.
316
Of course everything Kierkegaard wrote seems to be about depression at one level or another, but these passages come, respectively, from a quoted segment in Georg Lukács’s
Soul and Form,
page 33, and from Kierkegaard’s
The Sickness Unto Death,
page 50.
316
Schopenhauer’s comments on melancholia are primarily in his essays rather than in his longer books. I would call attention particularly to his essays “On the Sufferings of the World,” “On the Vanity of Existence,” and “On Suicide.” The quotations here are both from “On the Sufferings of the World,” within the collection
Complete Essays of Schopenhauer,
pages 3–4.
317
Nietzsche’s comments on health and illness are in
The Will to Power,
page 29.
317
The passages from Philippe Pinel may be found in his
A Treatise on Insanity,
pages 107, 132, and 53–54, respectively.
317
The quotation from Samuel Tuke is from Andrew Scull’s
Social Order/Mental Disorder,
page 75.
318
The master of another asylum to whom I allude here is quoted in
Ibid.,
77.
318
The statistics on the insane may be found in Marlene Arieno’s
Victorian Lunatics,
page 11. The history of the Lunatics Acts is in the same book, pages 15–17.
318
The population of Bedlam in 1850 is in
Ibid.,
17.
319
Thomas Beddoes’s rather insightful quotation is in Stanley Jackson’s
Melancholia and Depression,
page 186.
319
Benjamin Rush’s ideas and words are in his
Medical Inquiries and Observations,
pages 61–62, 78, and 104–8.
319
J. E. D. Esquirol was among those who stuck quite closely to Pinel. He championed humane asylums in the very early nineteenth century, adding that patients should be treated with a “dry and temperate climate, a clear sky, a pleasant temperature, an agreeable situation, varied scenery,” as well as exercise, travel, and laxatives. For the causes of melancholy, he gives a mind-boggling list that includes domestic troubles, masturbation, wounded self-love, falls upon the head, hereditary predisposition, and libertinism, among others. For the symptoms, he said that “this is not a complaint that agitates, complains, shouts, weeps; it is one that silences, that has no tears, that is immobile.” Esquirol’s quotations come from his
Mental Maladies,
page 226, and from Barbara Tolley’s unpublished dissertation “The Languages of Melancholy in
Le Philosophe Anglais,
” page 11. While some concentrated on the
humanity of treatment, others focused on the nature of the illness itself. James Cowles Prichard echoed Nietzsche in defining an illness much closer to sanity, setting up what would become the modern understanding of depression. “It is perhaps impossible,” he wrote, “to determine the line which marks a transition from predisposition to disease; but there is a degree of this affection which certainly constitutes disease of mind, and that disease exists without any illusion impressed upon the understanding of reason. The faculty of reason is not manifestly impaired, but a constant feeling of gloom and sadness clouds all the prospects of life. This tendency to morbid sorrow and melancholy, as it does not destroy the understanding, is often subject to control when it first arises, and probably receives a peculiar character from the previous mental state of the individual.” The passages here, quoted from James Cowles Prichard, are to be found in his
Treatise,
page 18.
319
Griesinger’s ideas may be found in a variety of primary and secondary sources. His
Mental Pathology and Therapeutics
provides an excellent survey of his ideas. Stanley Jackson’s
Melancholia and Depression
contains an enlightening summary of Griesinger’s ideas.
320
Foucault’s ideas are expounded in his famous
Madness and Civilization,
a book whose eloquent speciousness did significant damage to the cause of the mentally ill in the late twentieth century.
321
Most of Charles Dickens’s work cries out for social reform. See, for example,
Nicholas Nickleby.
321
For Victor Hugo on social injustice and alienation, see his
Les Misérables.
321
Oscar Wilde gives voice to the spirit of alienation of his age in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” from
Complete Poetry,
pages 152–72.
321
Joris-Karl Huysmans seems to indicate something of the alienated quality of late decadence in his famous
À Rebours
or
Against Nature.
321
The first quotation from
Sartor Resartus
is on page 164; the second is taken directly from William James’s essay “Is Life Worth Living?” in
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy,
page 42.
321
The views of William James on melancholia crop up throughout his writing. The passages quoted here come from his essay “Is Life Worth Living?” in
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy,
pages 43, 39, and 49, respectively. See also, of course,
The Varieties of Religious Experience.
321
The lines from Matthew Arnold are from “Dover Beach,” in
The Poems of Matthew Arnold,
pages 239–43.
322
Maudsley’s quotations are taken from his
The Pathology of the Mind,
pages 164–68. John Charles Bucknill and Daniel H. Tuke took up Maudsley’s theme in the United States—“a disorder of the intellect not being,” they observed, “an essential part of the disorder.” They went on to speak of the external treatments for melancholy, many of them age-old, as having a direct effect on the brain. “In all organs of the body, except the brain, great advances have been made into the knowledge of their physiological laws. But it is quite otherwise with the noble organ which lords it over the rest of the body. The physiological principle upon which we have to build a system of cerebral pathology is, that mental health is dependent upon the due nutrition, stimulation, and repose of the brain; that is, upon the conditions of the exhaustion and reparation of its nerve-substance being maintained in a healthy and regular state.” And they enthusiastically suggest that opium may be effective in relaxing the brain. The passages from John Charles Bucknill and Daniel H. Tuke may be found in their
A Manual of Psychological Medicine,
pages 152
and 341–42. Richard von Krafft-Ebing also identified this mild illness. “When the innumerable slight causes that do not reach the hospital for the insane are taken into consideration, the prognosis of melancholia is favorable. Numerous cases of this kind pass on to recovery without the occurrence of delusions or errors of the senses.” Richard von Krafft-Ebing is quoted from his
Text-Book of Insanity,
page 309.