"All the World Is Gone to the Assembly": Elizabeth Carter's Headaches, Nerves, and (In)Sociability

Elizabeth Carter suffered from severe headaches all her life. Her letters are peppered with references to fits of "head-ach" so bad they made her bold enough to demand her own room wherever she visited, and to cherish a preference for solitude contrary to the ideal of Bluestocking sociability. Following her friends and physicians, she bowed to fashionable diagnoses in considering these headaches the result of a nervous constitution, and she was prescribed the usual remedies, including sociable trips to fashionable watering places. While positioning her sufferings within the frame of fashionable diseases, Carter tried to dissociate herself from fashionable sensibility, and struggled to gain acceptance for her pain as part of her body's "mechanism" by using a more old-fashioned, religious interpretative frame. This case study of Carter's headaches thus charts Carter's own understanding of her constitution, her body, and her pain within—and without—the framework of eighteenth-century fashionable diseases.