Nervous Conditions: Science and the Body Politic in Early Industrial Britain

Notes

Notes For abbreviations used to cite manuscript collections, see the beginning of the bibliography. Chapter 1.The Nervous Man of Science 1. For example, see Mathias, The First Industrial Revolution. 2. Showalter, The Female Malady. For an intelligent, though rather mean-spirited, critique of Showalter’s theory that the Victorians feminized madness, see Busfield, “The Female Malady?” Showalter has since considered male nervousness in Hystories. 3. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment, 290–91. 4. Thurston, History of the Growth of the Steam-Engine, chap. 3. 5. “Herschel, William,” in Gillispie, Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 6. H. Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, 284. 7. Somerville, Personal Recollections, 183–85. 8. Babbage biography, 2, Buxton Papers, Museum for the History of Science, Oxford , cited in Hyman, Charles Babbage, 50. 9. Campbell and Garnett, Life of James Clerk Maxwell, 51, 84, 152–53, 163. 10. Spencer, Autobiography, 474–75, 495. 11. For example, see John Herschel to Michael Faraday, 12 March 1857, JH–RSL 23.102; David Brewster to John Herschel, 26 September 1867, JH–RSL 4.270. 12. For an excellent, related exploration of some of the points made in this chapter, see Winter, Mesmerized. 13. Poovey, Making a Social Body; Drayton, Nature’s Government; Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination; Colley, Britons; Vrettos, Somatic Fictions. 14. Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness. I thank Jim Capshew for this reference and several helpful discussions of pathography. 15. Cheyne, English Malady; Guerrini, “Case History”; Logan, Nerves and Narratives. 16. Logan, Nerves and Narratives, 2–3. 17. Cannon, Science in Culture, chaps.1, 9; Heyck, “From Men of Letters to Intellectuals.” 18. Cheyne, The English Malady. 19. A. Combe, Observations on Mental Derangement, 186. 20. Batten, Resolute and Undertaking Characters, 169–70; Otto Struve to George Airy, 14 March 1865, and Airy to Struve, 27 March 1865, RGO–CUL 6/381.699–700. 199 21. Claparède, La psychologie animale de Charles Bonnet, 21. 22. Arago and Henry entries in Gillispie, Dictionary of Scientific Biography; on Arago’s blindness, see [Brewster], “François Arago,” 475–77. 23. Purkinje and Fechner entries in Gillispie, Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 24. Arago, “Bailly,” 1:236. 25. Helmholtz to William Thomson, 14 December 1862, WTK–CUL H70. 26. M. W. Jackson, “Artisanal Knowledge,” 551. 27. Tresch, “Mechanical Romanticism.” 28. Brigham, Remarks on the Influence of Mental Cultivation, 76–78, 119. 29. Gabbey, “Newton and Natural Philosophy.” I have modified Gabbey’s definition to accord with Andrew Cunningham’s important points in “How the Principia Got Its Name.” For particularities of the Scottish community, see Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs. 30. Bashford, Purity and Pollution; Kapur, Injured Brains of Medical Minds; Guerrini, “Case History”; Duffin, “Sick Doctors”; Altman, Who Goes First?. 31. J. Browne, “I Could Have Retched All Night”; Colp, To Be an Invalid; Secord, Artisan Naturalists. For analysis of a poetic case, see Cody, “Watchers upon the East.” 32. Alborn, “‘End of Natural Philosophy’ Revisited.” 33. Wise with Smith, “Work and Waste”; Cahan, From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences . For parallels between these changes in natural philosophy and changes in how vision was understood, see Crary, Techniques of the Observer. 34. As mathematician and logician Augustus de Morgan put it to Astronomer Royal George Airy, “It is not nature which you investigate—but matter” (De Morgan to Airy, 15 December 1855, RGO–CUL 6/376.185–86). 35. Priestley, History and Present State of Discoveries. 36. Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts, 1–28, 216; Geison, “Social and Institutional Factors.” 37. Turner, “Paradigms and Productivity.” Also see his In the Eye’s Mind. 38. Jardine, “Inner History.” 39. Note, though, how Brewster’s daughter described the 1843 Great Schism in the Scottish Presbyterian Church, in which the Brewsters landed on the evangelical side: “Mind triumphed over matter, soul over flesh, conscience over mammon, and the gazing thousands of the city were moved into tearful admiration” (Gordon, Home Life of Sir David Brewster, 170–77). 40. Roger Smith first made these connections between natural philosophy and the understanding of the mind in his excellent paper, “Background of Physiological Psychology.” 41. Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind; T. Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind. For these philosophers’ profound influence on British physics, see Olson, Scottish Philosophy and British Physics. 42. Hartley, Observations on Man. I will use “mental-moral philosophy” to refer to the interrelated studies in this period of moral philosophy, philosophy of...