Johann Georg Zimmermann—königlich großbritannischer Leibarzt (1728-1795) (review)

Anita Guerrini. Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Times of George Cheyne. Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory, Series for Science and Culture, vol. 3. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. xx + 283 pp. $29.95 (0-8061-3159-4).

The Scotsman George Cheyne lived during a generation (1700-1740) of moralists spinning "systems" in every shape and hue, among which his own was one of the more colorful and disorganized. His unique talent was not in systematic medicine, but in an ability to engage the famous and great as a medical guru and spiritual savant. His interaction with the beau monde, particularly the literati, was not limited to corresponding with them about their aches and pains: he also explored the similarity of their plight as (what we would call) creative types to the spiritual journey of sufferers from heightened imagination, including the mentally sick, the religiously enthusiastic, and the spiritually fallen. He wrote about virtually everything then important, and quickly became an authority on all the topics he discussed: on health and longevity, on body and soul, on diet and disease, on the very fashionable gout diagnosis, on comparative national maladies (English, Dutch, French, etc.), on psychosomatic illnesses and nervous conditions, and--not least intriguing--on the infirmities of the sedentary, many of whom were his patients.

Two of these conditions--obesity and depression--form the conceptual focus of this well-researched book. Anita Guerrini could have selected other pairs, but she stuck with the two most visually prominent to Cheyne's contemporaries, especially those who watched him swell to hippopotamus proportions, and those who saw how depressed he had been about the developments of his own life. Guerrini's dyadic tack is admirable; the problem is the lack of any historical discourse, or metaphor, in which to locate both prominent categories constituting the book's heartland.

Obesity--like its opposite, exiguity--remains a fascinating but unexplored domain of the Enlightenment mentality. The jolly fiction of the era brims with Hogarthian figures of fun, both fat and thin--one way or another, obsessed with their weight and its consequences. But no one has yet configured this discourse of bodily size in any way that permits historical scholars to place Cheyne in a meaningful historical context.

Likewise depression, which is even more problematic than conceptualizations of the obese. Was depression (which then barely existed as a psychological category of the body-mind dyad) melancholy, or madness, or something else altogether? Was it just low spirits, gendered--in which case it ought to have been feminine (the wandering womb) and immune from the likes of blubbery Cheyne--or was depression an enduring crise de conscience over religious doubt in an age being swept over by secularism? These are crucial matters that should have been confronted, even if not explored, in a "life and times" book about "obesity and depression in the Enlightenment"; but the material is not to be found here. Neither word even figures in the index, which contains plenty of abstract concepts and ideas: Calvinism, diet, Newtonianism, etc.

It would be wrong, however, not to applaud what is well executed. Guerrini reads primary documents and knows what to do with one when she stares it in the face. She understands the Enlightenment's deep-layered history of science and glimpses its contradictions. She locates figures such as Cheyne on their native heath--whether in Scotland, London, or Bath--and works hard to fix the facts of their lives. She dispraises fictions and has little time for those who aim to pass them off as facts. She "disagrees," and even claims "I do not agree with [George] Rousseau's interpretation of Cheyne" (p. 188); this presumably because I have argued that he deserves more credit than he has received for his role in consuming and disseminating the...