Suffering Scholars: Pathologies of the Intellectual in Enlightenment France by Anne C. Vila (review)

Anne C. Vila's rich and engaging study both diagnoses and explores what she calls 'a central paradox of the eighteenth century': the fact that 'the so-called Age of Reason, when intellectuals enjoyed unprecedented powers and influence throughout Europe, was also the era that gave birth to the nosological category of illnesses proper to the intelligentsia' (p. 20). Held as a philosophical and social ideal and yet supposedly beset by 'a dangerous combination of nervous constitution, bad hygiene, and questionable work habits' (p. 30), the intellectual played a complex role in the eighteenth-century imagination. Vila's corpus, which covers a range of French-language material from the 1720s until the 1840s — the point at which, she demonstrates, medical interest in the intellectual dropped off dramatically — is wide and in some respects eclectic, but unified with some common concerns. Vila argues that the French-speaking world had a particularly acute sense of 'the link between mental endeavour and disorder' (p. 2), stemming in part from its own particular understanding of sensibility as something concerning not simply the nerves and brain but as permeating the whole body (p. 5). Taking what she calls a 'synthetic approach', Vila reads works by medical professionals both famous (Samuel-Auguste Tissot) and less so (Pinel, Fourcade-Prunet) alongside the writings of the period's key thinkers and contemporary literary works (such as the Lettres persanes, Marivaux's comedies, and — in a rare moment of perhaps only tangential relevance — Le Neveu de Rameau). The first chapter traces the pathologization of intellectual endeavour in the years leading up to the Revolution, focusing above all on thinking as physical labour and the perils of an excessive passion for learning, while the second explores the intellectual pleasures of mental exertion in the popular and literary imagination. The third explores the role of the passions in popular ideas of the public intellectual or philosophe in comic and satirical works, thus paving the way for the case studies of the next two chapters — chapters that aim, in the words of Christopher Forth, 'to put intellectuals back in their bodies' (p. 16). Chapter 4 explores how two intellectuals, Voltaire and Diderot, constructed their own social personae as intellectuals in part through their bodiliness; Voltaire's well-publicized dyspepsia, for example, conformed to 'contemporary medical notions about the abdomen's centrality in the health and illness of gens de lettres'(p. 93). Turning to Switzerland, Chapter 5 traces the shifting associations between melancholy and genius — two conditions 'which were undergoing a major theoretical reappraisal, along with an upsurge in cultural prestige' (p. 124) — through Rousseau and Staël, whom she reads in the light of their compatriots Tissot and Johann Georg Zimmermann. Finally, Chapter 6 and the Epilogue trace the decline of interest in the specific medical concerns of intellectuals in the post-Revolutionary period and the nineteenth century. All in all, this is an intriguing and fascinating study that not only 'puts intellectuals back in their bodies' but also suggests how those bodies might themselves be interpreted, and lived, through intellectual constructs.