Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Times of George Cheyne by Anita Guerrini (review)

86 oppressed by bigotry or superstition.’’He alludes, for example, to Toland’s refreshing plea in his Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews (1714) and the legislation of 1753, but then Mr. Porter underplays the tragic outcome: ‘‘publicclamourledtoits revocation in the next year.’’ Violent rioting broke out in London in this disgraceful chauvinist exhibition of English insularity. Nevertheless, this readable book could be useful to readers searching for, yes, lowercase enlightenment, and finding accurate summaries of the main ideas of the figures covered. Mr. Porter provides a rounded picture, for example acknowledging that Tom Paine, the scourge of European aristocracy, for all his radicalism , preached ‘‘‘that property will ever be unequal is certain,’ on account of differentials in talent and industry.’’ Mr. Porter can be one-sided, too. Swift is simply put down as a reactionary. The fourth part of Gulliver’s Travels with its trenchant attack on human potentiality and reason never comes under scrutiny. Pope fares better; An Essay on Man, ‘‘readslikeLockein heroiccouplets.’’Yet Mr. Porter scores the poet for acting as a prince of the pen looking down at the Grub Street drones, foot soldiers of the print revolution bringing light to the masses. Addison and Steele, predictably, are his model men of letters. An excellent Index, scrupulous notes, and a full Bibliography take up the last 200 pages of this encyclopedic tome. ANITA GUERRINI. Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Times of George Cheyne. Norman: Oklahoma, 2000. Pp. 204. $29.95. Ms. Guerrini’s book offers a truly round account of a figure famous in his day, appropriately enough, for rotundity, both physical and intellectual. Long a quintessential denizen of parenthesesand endnotes, Cheyne has emerged in a growing number of recent scholarly works as a touchstone figure deserving of a comprehensive study by a capacious and sensitive mind. Ms. Guerrini does not disappoint ; indeed, one is struck by nothing so much as how sorely we have needed her book. The Editors’Foreword explains that titles in the ‘‘Series on Science and Culture from the Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory’’ are ‘‘postdisciplinary,’’ an appropriate tack for approaching a man who was, as Ms. Guerrini demonstrates, postdisciplinary before postdisciplinary was cool. But while his intellect ranged far and wide, by the age of 34 Cheyne was spectacular primarily for his professional failures and personal failings. Ms. Guerrini traces both through his early writings. As a Newtonian mathematician and strictly ‘‘iatromathematical ’’ physician (following the model of his Scottish mentor, ArchibaldPitcairne), Cheyne attracted few patients, and his Fluxionem methodus inversa (1703) succeeded only ‘‘in offending the easily offended Newton.’’ As a defender of Natural Religion in Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion (1705), Cheyne convinced no one (for no one read his book) and merely frightened himself with his own deistic leanings. As a polemicist on the side of a ‘‘mathematical, demonstrative ’’ approach to natural philosophy and medical practice, he drew ‘‘experimental, empirical’’ antagonists into ad hominem attacks that placed his enormous size(upwards of 400 pounds) and his epicurean bent, sources of primal shame to him, in the public domain. 87 What resulted was Cheyne’s own dark night of the soul and body, a period of utter spiritual ‘‘depression’’ compounded by unprecedented physical ‘‘obesity.’’ But herein lay the key, Ms. Guerrini suggests , to his becoming arguably the principal medical practitioner and theorist of the eighteenth century, a man whose advice and treatment would be sought out during the next three decades by suchdisparate figures as Robert Walpole, Samuel Richardson, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, and John Wesley, not to mention the scores of vaporish women whiling away their time at Bath. As Cheyne’s mental well being declined, his physical health faltered. Or was it vice versa? The two, Cheyne began to recognize after his crisis of 1705, invariably flagged in unison. He thus shifted his attention awayfrom a purely mechanistic theory of health and toward one that encompassed both physical and spiritual dimensions (as charted in Cheyne’sautobiographicalappendixto The English Malady (1733), ‘‘The Case of the Author’’). Cheyne’s new interestin the elastic interaction of matter and spirit was further informed, Ms. Guerrini shows, by his concomitant turn toward mystical Christianity, as found in the writings of...