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2: Celestial Symptoms
- University of Virginia Press
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with a kiss in the summer of , the mother of John S. infected her son with the belief that he would become a “preacher of the everlasting gospel,” and with kiss after kiss she passed the contagion to her other children and daughters-in-law, each of whom fell prey, one upon another, to the common delusion. By the time that William Simonson , a man of “unquestionable integrity,” arrived at the Wilmington, Delaware , home two days later, the divinely inspired John had swayed the entire family to believe that they were “possessed with an evil spirit,” preaching that after their real mother had died a week earlier, Satan had entered her body and spread through her kiss to fill their own. As Simonson struggled to comprehend the scene, the children burst into action, dragging their mother screaming from bed and beating her almost to death, and when thwarted in their aims, they lit the house on fire “to consume the tormenting demon in the image of their mother.” Only the removal of the inspired John restored order to the home, although nothing alleviated the madness of the old woman, and neither doctor nor mesmerist could cure the ragged and raving preacher.1 The concept of mental and moral contagion had a peculiarly tangible feel at the turn of the nineteenth century, and for the attending physician in the case, John Vaughan, the violent and addled ministry of John S. provided solid evidence of the mode of operation of “that physical something , usually stiled sympathy.” Within the maternal kiss and the habitual bonds of mother and child, Vaughan saw a bridge of intimacy over which madness and religious delusion flowed, revealing how sympathy could become “susceptible of morbid influence beyond satisfactory explanation.” Celestial Symptoms • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Celestial Symptoms When David Hume emphasized the transpersonal, vagrant nature of sympathy , the tendency of “all the affections” to “pass from one person to another, and beget correspondential movements in every human creature,” he put his finger on the phenomenon so troubling to Vaughan: through sympathy, affections, all of them, good and ill, were highly contagious.2 As “a connection or relationship between the different parts of a system ,” rather than a fundamental law of “animal economy,” Vaughan argued that sympathy varied with “the states of the system” in which it was expressed, the constitutional tendencies of the individual, their habits, and the vagaries of life history working in concert with sympathies to shape the course of disease, so that madness flowed from a madwoman as surely as love from a mother or inspiration from the divine. “Predispositions of the body, and sympathy of mind,” he wrote, “probably deserve an equal rank in the formation of corporeal and mental diseases. The translation of diseases from the blood-vessels to the brain and nervous system, and the transformation of febrile action to mania, also evince that physical relationship so frequently mentioned by physiologists, as connecting mind and body, and subjecting each to a participation in the morbid affections of the other. Fanaticism appears to be as much a primary mental disorder, as febrile action is a vascular disease.”3 The thread (or threat) of divine inspiration that Vaughan unraveled from the story of John S. suggested that this “physical something” might illuminate the material origins of the most disorderly forms of religious enthusiasm then shaking the revival tents of the western states. In reaping souls by the hundreds, the first great evangelical wave added a new impetus to the project of clarifying the origins of fanaticism and of divining the connection between material reality and religious inspiration. Relentlessly material observers like Felix Robertson, a physician from Tennessee, pathologized revivalistic phenomena in the same way that Vaughan pathologized the inspiration of John S., rejecting the contention that the gyrations and spasms of those stricken with the spirit were evidence of “favourable religious visitations from the Deity” in favor of interpreting them as an outbreak of “epidemic chorea.” Charging sympathetically through the audience , the etiology of this chorea was both predictable and gender-specific , progressing through the bodily “jerks” and gestures common to men, [44.200.95.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:13 GMT) Celestial Symptoms • to swooning, the “running exercise,” and ultimately to total paroxysm, all spread through the sympathy of mind.4 Although his fellow physician William Young disputed Robertson’s contention that the exercises were the product of an “idiopathic bodily disease ” like chorea, he nevertheless saw the “convulsive operation of the moral faculty upon...