From Paralysis to Fatigue by Edward Shorter

Author:Edward Shorter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 1992-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Nerve Doctors for Nervous Diseases

It is doubtful that the “pace of life” ever really changes. Individuals have always believed they lived in a “speeded-up” or “nervous” society, no less in late-eighteenth-century Europe or early-nineteenth-century America than today. In 1787 the German philanthropist Joachim Heinrich Campe spoke of “our nerve-sick epoch.”50 Historian James Cassedy writes of the United States in the 1830s and 1840s:

Urban editors and physicians pointed to the detrimental effects on the nervous system of the increasing propensity for “fast walking, fast driving, fast eating and drinking, fast bargains, fast business … fast everything but fasi-ing!” In New York, the preacher Henry Ward Beecher found that the “bustle of the street, the ceaseless thunder of the vehicles, the rush to-and-fro of multitudes of people” was more than many of his congregation could bear.51

Europeans at the end of the nineteenth century similarly perceived themselves as living hectic lives plagued by nervous illness. In an 1899 guidebook of private clinics directed toward both physicians and rich laity, Paul Berger explained:

In this era of the machine … over-irritation and shock of the nerves themselves, above all the nerves of the brain, the central organ of the nervous system, have occurred on a scale that previous generations have never known nor suspected. We live in an era of nervous diseases [Nervenkrankheiten], which are increasing progressively on a terrifying scale.52

Contemporaries defined these nervous diseases as “modern diseases.”53 Just as people had once believed that the time of the French Revolution had been an “age of heart disease,” fin-de-siècle observers thought themselves living in an “age of nervous disease.” Viennese novelist Robert Musil described the Vienna of the belle époque as “an age of nerves.”54 In 1894 Leopold Löwenfeld, a nerve doctor in Munich, complained:

The ceaseless hurry and disruption of business life, the feverish pace one has to adopt to get anywhere, the clamor of the wagons in the business-streets, the endless variety that strikes the eye everywhere, all the entertainments that exhaust body and soul and continue until late at night: all these circumstances entrain indisputably an excessive use of nervous energy and do not permit the proper restoration of the exhausted system.55

In France, Jules Chéron, an advocate of conservative treatment in gynecology, deplored the tendency of “modern life … to resemble more and more la vie américaine, which is par excellence a life of overwork, a depressing life. The struggle for existence has never been so bitter, people have never been so crippled in their will, physically and morally more weakened, more exhausted by effort.” Chéron thought the struggle was also responsible for low blood pressure.56

Such a nervous epoch would require “nerve doctors.” The concept of nervous disease—and its attribution to organic changes in the brain and nerves—was already established at the beginning of the nineteenth century. What was new in the last third of the nineteenth century was the emergence of a set of specific “nervous” diagnoses and a corps of physicians to make them and manage their treatment—the nerve doctors or Nervenärzte.

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