576 book reviews Bull. Hist. Med.

, 2001, 75

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 moral-

ists 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 men-
tally 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 mala-
dies (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 constitut-
ing 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 con-
cepts and ideas: Calvinism, diet, Newtonianism, etc.
 book reviews Bull. Hist. Med., 2001, 75 577

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 consum-
ing and disseminating the mystical literature of his epoch. She performs as a
historian ought, producing what Clifford Geertz has called, in another context,
the “thick-layer description” that good history deserves.
Even so, Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment disappoints by misgauging
the pulse and temper of its subject. Neither the “depressed Cheyne” nor the
“obese Cheyne” gets the proper modern (let alone postmodern) hearing he
deserves. If he was, as some have justly claimed, an early psychiatrist himself, his
biographer here is not psychiatrist enough; and sometimes she slights the schol-
arly toil of her predecessors, or pretends that their research does not exist or has
not anticipated hers all along. Yet she herself has discovered few new primary
sources about Cheyne. Perhaps the problem, ultimately, is her distrust of paradox
and incommensurability in reconstructing a biographical life. Both laid heavy
claim on Cheyne’s often-tortured psyche. Yet Guerrini—armed, it seems, with the
determination of a Newtonian literalist—wants to fix all the boundaries: “My goal
in this book is to construct a coherent account of Cheyne’s life and work” (p. xvi).
Coherence may not be possible; even if it were, it may be undesirable to strait-
jacket this figure’s multifaceted significance. The urge to construct a coherent
narrative when subjectivity is as confused as it was for Cheyne may be inadmis-
sible; when the core of that individuality was so unstable, is it sensible to indulge
the dream of coherence? Cheyne was often important precisely because he could
not be pinned down, because he laid claim to expertise in so many different fields
after Newton expelled him from his inner temple of disciples; he steadfastly
refused to confine himself—even his body weight—to just one or two areas.
This book does not revisit Cheyne in a new key, or examine his medical
practice, but aims to fix and freeze him in an old one, to close down rather than
open up. It is not a newly presented Cheyne: the author’s dream of coherence is
too simplistic a biographical model to suit someone so diverse and caught up in
remorse and spiritual crisis. A modern, revived Cheyne requires a different
discourse, at least one incorporating some of the historical annals of depression
and obesity. Falstaffian “Dr. C.” deserved a better read than this.

G. S. Rousseau
De Montfort University