George Cheyne. The english malady (1733) Delmar, NY: Scholars Facsimile Reprints, 1976. $50.00 (hard) (Reviewed by George S. Rousseau)
- Book ID
- 101358133
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1993
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 174 KB
- Volume
- 29
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
George Cheyne. The English Malady (1733) Delmar, NY: Scholars Facsimile Reprints, 1976. $50.00 (hard) (Reviewed by George S. Rousseau)
George Cheyne (1671-1743) would be heroic on three counts were he alive today: for his weight loss, medical views, and the quality of personal attention given to patients.
A fourth counthaving survived the ignominy of the ruling medical and intellectual junta of his day, and the unusual route he took to emerge as the leading English medical practitioner of his time-might also endear him to our contemporary cultural values at a time when our medical profession is being scrutinized. In the late twentieth century we idolize underdogs who survive and triumph; so too did upper-crust Georgians.
"Disgrace" hardly describes Cheyne's story: a tale of personal transformation, professional adaptation, and physical survival, as he swelled to more than four-hundred pounds and then dwindled to a little more than one hundred, as he recounts in "The Author's Case," a first-person autobiographical narrative appended to his best-selling book, The English Malady (1733), the work reprinted in this edition.
Oddly, Cheyne has never found a full-length biographer. Much has been written about him in our century, some of it by the learned editor of this "Tavistock Classic in the History of Psychiatry," but the difficulty Cheyne presents to his would-be biographer is the multi-faceted dimension of his life and work. He lived in an era when science, medicine, and religion had not yet become the specialties they are in our time, spending his early years as a mathematician, accepted and then rejected by the Newtonians after committing transgressions they deplored. Cheyne afterwards practiced a combination of medicine, mysticism, religion, bookselling, and plied a number of other trades, including the dissemination of apocalyptic literature and acting as a consultant to aristocrats for the building of religious libraries and monuments.
Cheyne's successful biographer must be able to deal with all these facets, which makes it perfidious to cubbyhole or label him: with the history of science (Newtonianism, iatromathematics, geometry); medicine (iatrochemistry, medical theory and practice); psychology (his relation to the currents of empirical psychology of his day); psychiatry (especially theories of mind and body); sociology (disease within culture and civilization); religion (his considerable role in the cults of mysticism and millenarianism of his time); economics (his lucrative medical practice in Bath and elsewhere); Cheyne in Grub Street (his import and distribution of religious books throughout the British Isles); all these in addition to his theories of the body (especially the nerves) and his own domestic and political life, which remains unknown as the result of scant evidence. No diaries or memoirs survive, and only a handful of letters to Samuel Richardson the novelist, and Selina, the wealthy Countess of Huntington, his medico-spiritual patient, have been found, none of which assist the biographer to annotate the patterns that fueled the psychological pulse, so to speak, of this figure. This is a tall order. At best the first fulllength study of Cheyne will necessarily be an intellectual biography portraying the age as well as the man.
The English Malady, as Roy Porter demonstrates in his excellent introduction, was Cheyne's bestseller. Cheyne had published other books before The English Malady appeared in 1733-books on health, gout, diet, longevism, medical theory and practice-but this book made his name a household word. The English Malady explains the body in healthy and pathological states and defines illness in relation to society. To develop his