The Fashioning of Fashionable Diseases in the Eighteenth Century

This essay considers why the eighteenth century has particular significance for anyone concerned with the cultural forces necessary to render a disease fashionable. A brief overview of a pervasive cult of sensibility addresses the role of popular medical writing, imaginative literature, and spas in circulating a romanticized model of nervous disorders as signs of intellectual and moral superiority. Attention is drawn to the ambiguity in the term "fashionable" implying "popular," but also something that might be contrived; to what extent were Georgian fashionable diseases merely cultural constructs? Here the medicalization of masturbation suggests a limit-case. The discussion concludes with an individual case history as reported to the leading academic physician William Cullen.