Flesh in the Age of Reason by Roy Porter

Author:Roy Porter [Porter, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, 18th Century, Cultural Anthropology, 20th Century, Philosophy, Science History, Britain, Amazon.com, Retail, Cultural History, History
ISBN: 9780393326963
Google: Ru8hc6KS4yEC
Amazon: 0140167358
Barnesnoble: 0140167358
Goodreads: 479533
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 2002-12-31T15:00:00+00:00

Any such imputations of shamming would be scotched, insisted Dr Nicholas Robinson, once it was made clear that such disorders were not ‘imaginary Whims and Fancies, but real Affections of the Mind, arising from the real, mechanical Affections of Matter and Motion’; for ‘neither the Fancy, nor Imagination, nor even Reason itself… can feign… a Disease that has no Foundation in Nature’. After all, he stressed, one could not ‘conceive the Idea of an Indisposition, that has no Existence in the Body’. So if madness were somatic, the explanations offered rang true and they rendered a shocking condition reassuringly commonplace.

As has just been hinted, Sir Isaac Newton’s achievements provided a further model attractive to physiologists and physicians. The fervent Newtonian Nicholas Robinson maintained in his A New System of the Spleen (1729) that it was the nerve fibres which controlled behaviour; a pathological laxity or relaxed state in them was the primary cause of melancholia. ‘Every change of the Mind,’ he thus maintained, ‘therefore, indicates a Change in the Bodily Organs.’ Insanity was assuredly a genuine disorder, he insisted, not a mere matter of ‘imaginary Whims and Fancies’; it arose from ‘the real, mechanical Affections of Matter and Motion’.

These and similar organic interpretations of madness remained highly popular up to mid-century. But thereafter a major theoretical transformation came about. This was in large measure due to the growing acceptance of associationist theories of mind pioneered by Locke and further developed in France by the sensationalism of Condillac.

In his Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke had suggested that madness was due to some fault in the process of the association of ideas. Locke argued that madmen, unlike imbeciles, had not ‘lost the Faculty of Reasoning’. In fact, madmen, ‘having joined together some Ideas very wrongly… mistake them for Truths; and they err as Men do, that argue right from wrong Principles’. One madman, for instance, wrongly fancied himself a king, but he correctly reasoned from that that he should have ‘suitable Attendance, Respect and Obedience’. Another believed that he was made out of glass and drew the correct inference that he should take suitable precautions to prevent his brittle body from breaking. Locke’s doctrine that the madman’s reason was wholly intact had been clearly formulated in the 1677 Journals, where he had remarked that ‘Madnesse seems to be noething but a disorder in the imagination, and not in the discursive faculty’. Locke’s view that insanity was essentially ‘deluded imagination’ was decisively to shape British thinking about madness in the second half of the eighteenth century.

William Cullen (1710–90), the most prominent professor in Edinburgh University’s flourishing medical school, produced a more medical version of this psychological model of madness. Cullen basically ascribed madness to the brain; hallucinations for their part were disorders of the senses, while false appetites stemmed from the organs governing the respective passions. As a mark of the centrality of the nervous system to his theory, intensity of cerebral excitement was identified as the key to both the cause and the cure of madness.

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