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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 (17001740) 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, andnot least intriguingon the inrmities of the sedentary, many
of whom were his patients.
Two of these conditionsobesity and depressionform 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 Cheynes 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.
Guerrinis dyadic tack is admirable; the problem is the lack of any historical
discourse, or metaphor, in which to locate both prominent categories constituting the books heartland.
Obesitylike its opposite, exiguityremains a fascinating but unexplored
domain of the Enlightenment mentality. The jolly ction of the era brims with
Hogarthian gures of fun, both fat and thinone way or another, obsessed with
their weight and its consequences. But no one has yet congured 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, genderedin 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 gures in the index, which contains plenty of abstract concepts and ideas: Calvinism, diet, Newtonianism, etc.
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