In a sense, the persona of the sickly scholar that became popular during the eighteenth century was a secularized version of the long-established Christian paradigm of suffering—with the frame of reference shifted away from religious belief and toward the realm of secular learning. Whereas Pascal called illness “the true state of the Christian,” some Enlightenment-era commentators regarded illness as the true state of the knowledge seeker.1 The latter idea illustrates a central paradox of the eighteenth century: 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.2
Two themes pervaded the works that physicians wrote to define the distinctive traits of this new class of pathologies. The first was the idea that scholars were more susceptible to disease than many people because of the physical strains caused by excessive use of the mind. The second was a mixture of fascination and perplexity in the face of the intellectual passion that drove certain people to sacrifice their health through the relentless pursuit of knowledge. Both lay the groundwork for the emergence of later jointly cultural and moral syndromes like monomania and obsession, and both contributed to the creation of the various “sick heroes” who became prominent in French culture from approximately 1750 until well into the following century.3
Whether or not this suffering was heroic depended on one’s perspective. In the eyes of François Jean-Pierre Letual, author of an 1810 medical dissertation on melancholy, losing one’s health to the quest for intellectual or artistic fame was a noble sacrifice: “How many men of genius have paid, through the loss of their health, for a celebrity that is honorable but painful!”4 For some of his predecessors, however, the ills associated with scholarly and creative endeavor were more lamentable than honorable. Jean-Jacques Rousseau took the most radical position on the subject: after denouncing the corruptive effects of the arts and sciences in his Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750), he pursued the attack in later texts. In the preface to his play Narcisse (1752), he declared that “library work makes men delicate, weakens their temperament, and the mind [âme] is hard pressed to retain its vigor when the body has lost its own. Study wears out the machine, exhausts the spirits, destroys strength, weakens courage, and that alone shows sufficiently that it is not made for us. This is how one becomes faint-hearted, incapable of resisting both pain and the passions.”5 And in his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité (1755), he contended that reflection led people far away from the simple, uniform life for which Nature had originally made humankind: “If she [Nature] destined us to be healthy, I almost dare to say that the state of reflection is an unnatural state [un état contre nature], and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal.”6
Although extreme in formulation, Rousseau’s warnings echoed the century’s more general sense of social and moral crisis.7 Overstudy was commonly cited alongside worldly dissipations like gambling and libertinism as a cause of the frailty that had beset most European nations. By the waning decades of the Old Regime, when the terms “degeneration” and “regeneration” became ubiquitous in French political discourse, learned people were standardly grouped among those judged to be burdened with a weak, oversensitive constitution. Indeed, they enjoyed privileged status as a patient group because doctors had invented a disease category, les maladies des gens de lettres, just for them.
This sort of medical writing is sometimes viewed as an overt expression of Rousseauism, partly because the Lausanne physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot explicitly quoted Rousseau’s “Préface à Narcisse” in the best-known contribution to the genre, La santé des gens de lettres (first ed., 1768).8 However, when Tissot revised his treatise in 1775, he cautiously retreated from endorsing Rousseau’s polemical attack against learning. Moreover, he and the other doctors who wrote about illnesses associated with mental application were just as inclined to cite authors from antiquity or the Renaissance as their famous contemporary “Jean-Jacques.”
Concern over the infirmities caused by intensive study was tied to the growth of hygiene, which became an important part of the medical curriculum during the eighteenth century; manuals on the art of conserving health became popular, and occupational medicine was born.9 It was also related to the trend of “charitable” medical books, in which doctors assumed the posture of a specialist writing specifically for a nonprofessional public: the Jansenist Parisian physician Philippe Hecquet, for instance, devoted a chapter to the diseases of the learned in his posthumously published La Médecine, la chirurgie et la pharmacie des pauvres (1740).10 Finally, it was connected to commerce: a blend of health activism and entrepreneurialism underpinned the effort to identify and treat the health problems of learned people, among other groups.
Like the period’s more general discourse on nervous ailments, books that addressed les maladies des gens de lettres were sometimes designed to attract patients to a specific mineral-water spa for treatment, or to promote a particular diet or curative program. Take, for example, the well-known Essai sur les affections vaporeuses des deux sexes (1760), in which Pierre Pomme attributed vapors in men to “mental application of all sorts” and lumped together, in a single patient group, “gens de lettres, studious, meditative, and contemplative recluses” along with debauched libertines, drunkards, and people who consumed too much coffee or chocolate.11 Dr. Pomme proposed the same cure for all of them: ice baths.
From a commercial perspective, the production of works on the special health needs of scholars was not as extensive as that of books about the vapors. However, gens de lettres sometimes appeared there, too. Like Pomme, the vapors specialist Jean-Baptiste Pressavin included studious application, especially the sort that involved abstract sciences, among the “distant” causes of the vapors; other causes Pressavin cited were excessive eating or drinking and immoderate sexual intercourse.12
Historians generally trace the rise of medical concern over intellectual pathologies to Bernardino Ramazzini’s De Morbis Artificium diatriba (1700), translated into English in 1705 as Treatise of the Diseases of Tradesmen, whose Latin and English versions concluded with a long chapter titled “The Diseases of Learned Men.” Ramazzini presented such diseases as the product of professional circumstances rather than innate temperament. After apologizing to scholarly readers who might “take it ill to find themselves rank’d in the Class of Tradesmen,” he warned that they were just as susceptible to occupation-specific infirmities as were the metal-diggers, blacksmiths, washerwomen, and other artisans he also discussed.13 Ramazzini singled out the sedentariness and bad posture of studious people: they were “as Slothful and Idle in their Body, as they are active in their Mind and Brain” (247), and spent too much time hunched over books. This was to blame for the weak stomachs they typically suffered (an ancient notion, first popularized by Aulus Cornelius Celsus), along with their susceptibility to compressed pancreatic juices and “Nephrtick and Athritick Disorders” (250). By classifying scholars in terms of the bodily effects of their labor, Ramazzini made their diseases medicable in a way that they had not been before: he inspired physicians to extend their attention beyond the scholar’s specific dietary needs (an approach already well established in the European medical and moralist tradition) into other areas of the scholarly life and work routine.
Although the invention of this nosological category was an offshoot of professional medicine, it also had a special resonance for the physicians who contributed to its creation. Their worries over the dangers of mental application were clearly more personal than those they expressed about the work-related disorders of other at-risk groups like hatters, spinners, or goldsmiths.14 We should bear in mind that when doctors took up the pen to warn the public about the health risks of mental work, they were also writing about themselves and their brethren: even when they did not publish actively, physicians belonged to the Republic of Letters through their academic affiliations, their membership in medical and philosophical societies, their correspondence, and the fashionable circles they sometimes frequented. Moreover, they actively participated in the campaign to bathe great thinkers in an aura of heroism via testimonials and eulogies—a mode of discourse that also contributed to the development of the “suffering scholar” syndrome.15
The first wave of physicians to heed Ramazzini’s call for closer attention to the working and living circumstances of the studious were the English “hyp” doctors of the 1720s and 1730s, like Bernard Mandeville, Nicholas Robinson, and George Cheyne.16 Contending that nervous disorders were on the rise among Britain’s social elite, these physicians singled out learned people and other refined sorts as prone to “spleen,” an ailment that involved bad digestion as well as depression. The causes they cited for spleen included both uncontrollable factors, such as individual nervous temperament, geography, and climate (England’s cool, damp weather was a factor), and controllable things like bad habits, which for the scholar included sedentariness, neglect of the body, and a “labouring Imagination” that focused the mind unhealthfully on a single subject.17 Cheyne, the most famous and professionally successful of the “hyp” doctors, gave a distinctly intimate tone to his famous treatise The English Malady (1733): he included an account of his own bout with spleen and used a “humanitarian” narrative style to elicit sympathy for the other suffering patients whose case histories he related.18
From midcentury onward, doctors on the Continent published a steady stream of works in the vernacular that addressed the physical and moral effects of study. A few were reassuring, like La Médecine de l’esprit (first ed., 1753) by the Parisian Doctor-Regent Antoine Le Camus, who offered precise dietary and hygienic regimens on how to reach and maintain one’s full intellectual potential.19 Alarmism was the more prevalent tone in the contributions made to the genre by two famous Swiss doctors, Johann-Georg Zimmermann and Tissot. Zimmermann included a long chapter on the effects of excessive mental exertion in his treatise on experience in medicine, Von der Erfahrung in der Arzneikunst (1763; translated into French as Traité de l’expérience en général et en particulier dans l’art de guérir in 1774), where he spoke of the love of learning as a noble but dangerous passion. Those who applied their minds too intensely were, he warned, liable to suffer digestive disorders, incapacitating headaches, weakened nerves, loss of vision and hearing, and hypochondria (a disease defined as physical as well as moral, and related to melancholy).20 Finally, in 1768, Tissot published De la santé des gens de lettres. Filled with frightening tales of people who had destroyed their health because of excessive mental application, this book was read by some of the most illustrious members of the European intellectual elite.
Physicians who wrote on the health effects of mental application were aware of emerging theories of genius and sublime ecstasy—both of which tended to place certain sorts of thinkers, especially artists and literary writers, on a higher level of sentient existence. This view became more pronounced as the century progressed. Pierre Fabre included in his 1785 Essai sur les facultés de l’âme a long digression on the revolutionary effect that Corneillian tragedy had exerted on the physio-aesthetic sensibility of the entire French nation.21 In 1800, Philippe Pinel identified several artists, musicians, and “versifiers enraptured by their productions” among the patients at the Bicêtre insane asylum but reported finding not a single naturalist, physicist, chemist, or geometer (he did, however, count a fair number of mentally deranged lawyers).22 Finer distinctions between different sorts of mental work were also supported by the new doctrine of human types promoted by Revolutionary-era biomedical theorists affiliated with the Idéologue school, like Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis and Xavier Bichat. These and other factors led turn-of-the-century physicians to regard certain cerebral states, like poetic reverie or absorption in philosophical abstractions, as particularly apt to induce illness.
Prior to that, however, the discourse on intellectual pathologies had a leveling quality: it applied not just to philosophical, scientific, and literary luminaries but also the “pauvres diables” who had to write for a living, and to failed aspirants to intellectual celebrity.23 Not everyone agreed with this lack of qualitative distinctions. For example, Ramazzini’s French translator, Fourcroy, left out the chapter on the diseases of the learned from his 1777 Essai sur les maladies des artisans, traduit du latin de Ramazzini. Fourcroy’s intent, as Dinah Ribard explains, was to make it more clearly “a book on the illnesses of the people, in the sense of the lower ranks of the social world (from which he sought to exclude those whom he didn’t believe belonged there).”24 Generally, though, physicians retained Ramazzini’s labor-based approach to intellectual pathologies. Tissot, for instance, clearly read De Morbis Artificium diatriba in Latin, and he cautioned that heads of state and barristers could fall ill to the same ailments as metaphysicians if they strained their brains. So, too, could women who got swept up in the craze for novel reading, or people who applied their minds too intently to thoughts of God. As he emphasized, “One shouldn’t think that study, properly speaking, is the only cause that can produce the illnesses I am describing; any strong tension of the mind can produce the same effect.”25
As any academic who circulates in the wider world can attest, the notion that thinking entails real, sweat-breaking work is far from universally accepted. Indeed, the perception of thinking as the very opposite of work is deeply ingrained in our culture because of the enduring popularity of otium, or philosophical leisure, as an element in the self-construction of the intellectual.26 The eighteenth century was certainly not lacking in writers who embraced otium as a value. The Hebrew professor Jean-Jacques Garnier, for example, described the scholarly mode of leisure as radically distinct from—and superior to—the dissipated leisure life of the aristocracy.27 Indolence was also championed in works like Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux’s Spectateur français and Rousseau’s Rêveries du promeneur solitaire.28 In general, however, this was a deeply utilitarian period, and those who strove to portray scholarship as useful stressed the sheer effort it required. Such rhetoric sometimes had a sociopolitical dimension: borrowing metaphors of pain and exhaustion from the language of physical labor, apologists of intellectual labor argued that the scholar and the farmhand were equally useful and necessary to the healthy functioning of the state.29
We find an early example of the view of thinking as labor in Montesquieu’s “Discours prononcé à la rentrée de l’Académie de Bordeaux” (1717):
If we weren’t driven by a beautiful zeal for honor and the perfection of the sciences, there is no one amongst us who would not regard the title of academician as an onerous title, and these very sciences in which we engage as a means more likely to torment us than to instruct us. An undertaking that is often useless; systems that are undone almost as quickly as they are established; the despair of discovering that one’s expectations have been dashed; the continuous fatigue of chasing after a fleeting truth; the emulation that reigns with no less power over the minds of philosophes than does base jealousy over vulgar minds; the long meditations in which the mind turns in on itself, and fixes upon an object; the sleepless nights, and the anxious days passed in sweat that follow them: you will recognize there, Sirs, the life of men of letters.30
For a devoted polymath like Montesquieu—who, in 1717, was just as busy examining renal glands, sheep tongues, and the cause of echoes as he was analyzing the underlying principles of society and government—the quest after truth was exhausting and often frustrating. As he depicted it, studious life involved long and intense meditations, sleepless nights, and days bathed in perspiration, all of which would be a torment for scholars if they were not driven by the passion of emulation and zeal to contribute to the honor and improvement of knowledge.
Eighteenth-century commentators did not jettison all differences between manual versus mental work. Quite the contrary: a fundamental distinction persisted between the mechanical and the liberal arts, as did distinctions based on the exercise of intelligence within the category of gens de métier.31 For instance, although the Encyclopedists strove to integrate artisans into the collective enterprise of gathering together the various branches of human knowledge, they also maintained a hierarchy that placed gens de lettres above craftsmen in their capacity to articulate the savoir-faire involved in the mechanical arts; and Louis de Jaucourt’s entry “Profession” carefully distinguished a merely “honest” profession like cultivating the earth from a “glorious” one like cultivating knowledge.32 Moreover, moralists and physicians sometimes used the figure of the laborer as a healthful countermodel to the frail, urbane homme de lettres, emphasizing the former’s simple life and putative simplicity of mind.33 However, according to the “Ramazzinian” perspective on the health of the learned, intellectuals were just as susceptible as manual laborers to the bodily fatigue and dysfunction brought on by the pursuit of their line of work. What mattered, from this perspective, was not the social standing of the worker or even the particular nature of his or her labors. Rather, it was the intensity of that work, along with its disruptive effect on the organism.
One consequence of this concern over study as work was increased concern about its ambient conditions: for example, the lighting, temperature, and air quality of scholarly cabinets. Yet doctors also paid increasing attention to the act of study itself, painting it in terms of threats that came as much from within the individual as from without. That sense of threat was inscribed in the very term used to characterize serious thinking: la contention d’esprit, or mental exertion. The application of the term contention to mental activity was a fairly recent phenomenon: contention had originally denoted battle or dispute.34 By midcentury, however, the default meaning of the term was mental—as is illustrated by Denis Diderot’s short entry in the Encyclopédie:
CONTENTION [EXERTION] (Gramm. & Métaph.): Long, strong, and painful application of the mind to some object of meditation. Exertion supposes difficulty, importance on the part of the subject matter, and persistence and fatigue on the part of the philosophe. There are things that one can understand only through exertion. . . . There is only a difference of degree between exertion and application. Exertion is distinguished from meditation by the ideas of persistence, duration, and fatigue, which exertion supposes, and meditation does not. Exertion is the result of reiterated efforts.35
No flesh-and-blood adversary is present in the battle described here: the struggle is solitary, internal, and cerebral. This brief portrait of the philosophe engaged in intense mental application emphasizes both the necessity of contention for grasping difficult ideas and the fatigue brought on by the effort. And fatigue, as Diderot underscored in a different article, was the inevitable effect of any “considerable effort”—whether the part at work was the body or the mind.36 It is worth noting that the term surmener applied only to horses and other beasts of burden at this time: not until the 1840s was its derivative surmenage invented (in a veterinary context, according to the Trésor de la langue française); and not until the 1880s was its meaning extended to humans, to denote mental fatigue.37
This image of gens de lettres as exhausted by incessant mental exertion was promoted in a variety of contexts, including academic éloges and conduct books. The Parisian polygraph Jean André Perreau made this remark in his Instruction du peuple (1786): “It is true that only the common people undertake physical work, but there are other sorts of work that may not seem so tiring but may be even more. What, then, is this sort of work? It is the work of the mind, the work of business.”38 A similar view of mental work was promoted in treatises directed at medical students: Marin-Jacques-Clair Robert told those readers that major mental exertion triggered body-shaking spasms in the entire organism, creating enormous tension in the thinker who engaged in serious meditation.39 The medical popularizer Charles Augustin Vandermonde also tied mental work to overexertion of the nervous system in the long section of his Dictionnaire portatif de santé (first ed., 1759) that dealt with the illnesses of scholars: “Gens de lettres typically err through an excess opposite to that committed by manual workers: they have their minds continuously strained and occupied, which taxes the nerves and makes the functions languish, the stomach lazy, and digestion slow.”40
Dr. Paul-Victor de Sèze presented a full cascade of study-induced bodily events in the chapter on sex in his Recherches physiologiques et philosophiques sur la sensibilité (1786):
At the moment when a man fixes all of his attention on the object of his research, his brain swells: its fibers stretch and attract a greater portion of the body’s general activity. . . . However, the action of the brain does not suffice on its own: it must be reinforced by a strong tension in the phrenic center, in the intestines and all of the viscera of the lower abdomen. One can see, when a person has meditated a long while, that the diaphragm, stretched and hampered in its movements, impedes freedom of respiration and even suspends it, such that the person is forced to sigh from time to time. The constriction of the epigastrum and of the entire intestinal canal supposes an effort that can be made only at the expense of the exterior organ [the skin], which remains inactive.41
Full concentration, as Sèze described it, virtually shut down the sense organs: “a man plunged in mental work does not see, even though he has his eyes open; his senses are inactive; only the head and the epigastrum are in action.” If the scholar had the intestinal fortitude necessary to counterbalance the swelling and tension of his brain, then he could emerge relatively unscathed from the experience. However, if his viscera were weak, his intense mental action would wreak havoc by slowing down the functions of the abdominal organs.42 Sèze then compared the brain’s disruptive effects on the scholarly body to those created by the uterus in the female body, which was held to take its revenge for “unnatural,” worldly living by causing hysteria (his purpose there was to discourage female readers from even attempting study).
The intense, exhausting mental effort that physicians attributed to the cerebralist did, of course, coexist with sedentariness, a condition doctors commonly sought to cure by prescribing exercise, including manual labor.43 However, French and Swiss doctors referred less often to the dangers of physical inactivity for intellectuals than did their British counterparts.44 It may be that, in the eyes of their physicians, French-speaking gens de lettres partook of the frenetic qualities that Montesquieu had famously attributed to his countrymen in Les Lettres persanes (1721), where he mocked the nation’s presumptions to have reached one of the summits of human achievement by maintaining a social pace that (as his character Rica described it) was so overactive as to approach the superhuman.45 Judging from the astounding rate of literary production among the French Enlightenment’s most celebrated authors, the Republic of Letters in which they dwelled did, indeed, seem to operate at an exhausting pace. The view of thinking as labor was clearly in keeping with their self-image as heroically active.
Medical warnings about the pathogenic effects of intellectual work typically evoked some combination of physical and moral causes. Authors who emphasized the first saw the problem as residing in the mechanics of thinking itself: sustained mental work upset the overall animal economy, causing too much nervous fluid to be retained in the brain. Such a state shut down the senses, dried out the viscera, and suspended essential bodily functions like digestion and evacuation. However alarming, this view allowed its proponents to maintain that the damage of study could be corrected through gentle diets and exercise programs that would restore health and regularity to the scholarly body. The other, more morally slanted perspective on overstudy blamed more intractable causes for the rise of maladies des gens de lettres: for example, the zeal that some intellectuals exhibited for solitary reading, writing, and meditation; and the popularization of the sciences and arts, which had expanded the ranks of avid readers and aspirants to learning.
From the 1750s onward, intellectuals as a group were held to embody a dangerous combination of nervous constitution, bad hygiene, and questionable work habits. Passion played a role in this perception, in that doctors attributed the ailments rampant among gens de lettres not just to the work involved in study but also to the immoderate pursuit of intellectual pleasure. As Vandermonde declared, when the man of letters chased after the “insidiously flattering” pleasure of discovering truths, he strained his nerves beyond their natural capacity and harmed their spirits, by either corrupting them or draining them away from their normal channels. The damage done was easy to see: he cited, as proof, the heaviness and weakness that scholars commonly felt when they had worked too much, as well as their reddened, inflamed faces.46
The dangers of scholarly ardor were also singled out by the Parisian doctor Anne-Charles Lorry in the second, expanded edition of his Essai sur l’usage des alimens (1757). Lorry framed his discussion of the special dietary needs of intellectuals with sobering reflections on their generally frail health. Although he praised study as the source of humanity’s greatest achievements, he emphasized the high price that scholars paid for their intellectual zeal: it led many toward a premature death. He then painted this dark portrait of a meditator: “If you look at the face of a man who is completely applied to his object [of study], you will see him in a sort of ecstasy. He neither sees nor hears, and he barely breathes. If you take his pulse, you’ll find it even, well-developed, but slow. His evacuations are suspended; he doesn’t perspire or urinate. . . . The state produced in the body by work and application can be compared only to the effects of chagrin and fear, in which the mind, likewise occupied by an object, can be distracted by no other.”47 Although he used the term “ecstasy,” what Lorry perceived when he regarded a man lost in thought was the opposite of exaltation: he saw disruption of the bodily functions, suffering induced in the lowly viscera, and a fearsome fixity in the mind.
The passion for study was thus a significant factor in the etiology of the diseases to which scholars were deemed vulnerable during the Enlightenment. As Zimmermann put it, “The desire to acquire enlightenment or to make use of the knowledge which one has acquired can easily be ranked among the passions, because it is so strong in some people that it absorbs almost all their other passions.”48 Even while expressing admiration for those driven by this sort of desire (volupté), Zimmermann cautioned that it was appreciated by precious few in society at large.49 Dr. Jean Jacques Ménuret de Chambaud likewise warned in the Encyclopédie that an unbridled zeal for certain intellectual subjects made people particularly susceptible to mania: “Those who are . . . endowed with a lively, penetrating mind, Poets, Philosophers, Mathematicians, those who give themselves over passionately to algebraic analyses, are the most liable to fall ill to this disease.”50
In short, these doctors offered deliberately unpleasant portraits of people in the grips of the passion that drove deep cerebration. Their rhetoric even brings to mind the defamiliarizing techniques popular in exotic novels like Montesquieu’s Les Lettres persanes and Graffigny’s Les Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747), where everyday things like city streets or scissors are transformed into bewildering objects when seen through a foreigner’s eyes. These physicians aimed to offer their scholarly readers both an unsettling mirror in which to see themselves and some vivid lessons on the dangerous results of intellectual intemperance. Their descriptions read almost like an inversion of the popular sensationalist fable—put forth in Condillac’s Traité des sensations (1754), among other texts—of the statue who came to life through the successive activation of the sense organs. Whereas the statue enjoyed expansive sentience starting with the smell of the rose, overzealous scholars became stuporous.
I rightly regard this work, so well conceived and so
well written, as the breviary of gens de lettres.
—Charles Bonnet, letter to Tissot
No single medical doctor was more effective at scaring eighteenth-century gens de lettres about their health than Tissot.51 Trained in Montpellier and closely affiliated with many major scientific figures of the Enlightenment, he was a highly sought practitioner who attracted patients from all over Europe to his home city of Lausanne, a phenomenon noted by Isabelle de Charrière in her 1785 novel Lettres écrites de Lausanne.52 However, what has kept Tissot in the spotlight was his fame as a medical writer. In addition to lending his voice to the campaign in favor of inoculation (L’Inoculation justifiée, 1754), he wrote the best-selling works De l’onanisme (1760) and Avis au peuple sur sa santé (1761) before turning to the problem of maladies des gens de lettres.53 His works illustrate both a Calvinist cautiousness toward the high culture of the day and the extra-metropolitan geographic reach of the French-speaking Enlightenment.
Through the combined effects of his medical practice, teaching activities, books, and extensive correspondence, Tissot was “at the center of a dense scientific and worldly network that covered all of Europe.”54 One senses the complexity of that network in the pages of La santé des gens de lettres, a text that originated as Sermo academicus de valetudine litteratorum, which Tissot delivered in 1766 upon assuming the Académie de Lausanne’s new Chair in Medicine. After the Latin oration appeared in 1767 in the form of a “detestable,” unauthorized Parisian translation, Tissot rushed to translate it himself and had that version published under his watchful eye in 1768. After publishing a slightly modified edition in 1769, he produced a third, substantially revised, and expanded edition of the book in 1775. This edition is not as well known as the book’s original French version, largely because most re-editions and translations are based on the 1768 edition.55 It is, however, the 1775 edition that Tissot regarded as definitive—and that most clearly reflects his views on the health risks created by the studious life, along with his nuanced position on the moral implications of intellectual pursuit.
While acknowledging those who had written before him on the topic, Tissot claimed to be the first physician to offer a systematic account of the health circumstances “that differentiate the state of Scholars from that of other orders of society” (SGL, xii).56 He aimed to make the book a collaborative work between himself, his medical colleagues, and the gens de lettres who read it. Toward the end of the preface to the 1768 edition (reproduced in the 1775 edition), he invited “that respectable segment of men who devote themselves to the instruction of others” to help him perfect his treatise by sending him “the important observations they may have made on their own state” (xii).
In fact, Tissot cited only a few letters from laypersons. One was an unnamed lady’s account of the ills she had contracted from reading too late in the evening (92); another was a “very polite” letter he’d received from a lawyer who wrote to defend tea drinking, a practice that Tissot viewed as pernicious and far too common in Europe (197–99). The new observations added in 1775 came mostly from other sources: his medical practice, from which he drew the poignant story of the “progressive withering away” [dépérissement successif] that had claimed the life of his friend M. de Brenles, inserted into article 12 (34–43)57; academic eulogies and medical books he had recently read, like Johann Jakob Brucker’s “Leibnitii vita” (1768) and Joseph Lieutaud’s 1767 Historia anatomica medica (32–33, 52–53); and the preface written in 1769 by James Kirkpatrick, Tissot’s English translator. One of the observations taken from Kirkpatrick is especially striking: “If one considers a man plunged in meditation, one sees that all the muscles of his face are stretched; they even seem at times to be in convulsion; and in the lovely preface he added to the English translation of this work, Mr. Kirkpatrick cites a fact that must find a place here: ‘I knew,’ says he, ‘a gentleman with a very active genius who, when he thought intensely, had all the fibers of his forehead and a part of his face as visibly agitated as the chords of a harpsichord that is being played in a very lively manner’” (14–15).58 Interestingly, in transcribing this anecdote, Tissot altered the sex of the person depicted, turning Kirkpatrick’s “gentlewoman” into a gentilhomme.59 This addition reinforced a long series of citations emphasizing the physical fatigue induced by thinking, which Tissot drew from sources as diverse as Plato, Ramazzini, Montesquieu, Bonnet, and recent issues of the London biweekly newspaper the Adventurer (he was often very precise in quoting them).
Clearly, through his arresting portraits of scholars laid low by what he poetically called “literary exhaustion” (SGL, 22), intermingled with frequent appeals to the culture of his readers, Tissot sought to address learned people as much as his medical colleagues. As François Rosset notes, “Tissot was, fundamentally, a typical homme de lettres of his time: he had a very solid classical training, knew several European languages, was involved in salons and worldly circles, and was open to current literary and intellectual events, despite having somewhat rigid tastes.”60 Throughout De la santé des gens de lettres, Tissot interwove his own ideas about the causes of illness in scholars with those of his medical contemporaries and notions that had been circulating since antiquity; and he incorporated multiple examples of poets, painters, philosophers, mathematicians, statesmen, and physicians who either had suffered from excessive mental application or had devised ways to counterbalance its deleterious health effects.
Milton was thus enlisted to prove the intellectual’s susceptibility to temperature extremes (SGL, 204), whereas Corneille and Molière served to demonstrate that it is possible to produce literary masterpieces without the benefit of coffee (Tissot’s counterexample here was the Swedish astronomer Celsius, who “killed himself through the use of coffee”; 202). Tissot also cited Rousseau as a patient, in a chapter on kidney stones: “no one is unaware of the cruel pains of this sort to which the illustrious and learned antagonist of the Sciences is subject” (80). In an addition made in 1775, he singled out the houses of Bernouilli and Cassini as exceptions to the general rule that overstudy so weakened men’s seminal fluid that great thinkers rarely sired sons worthy of them (83–84). He even worked himself into the text as a patient on two occasions, citing the eye strain and stomach ailments he had suffered as a result of working too much (60–61, 229–30). Tissot’s list of possible study-induced disorders included everything from poor digestion to more dire conditions like the sensory impairment observed in the renowned Greek scholar Madame Dacier, who, “while reciting Hector’s farewell to Andromache, was so deeply moved that she lost the use of her senses” (19).
Clearly, storytelling was central to Tissot’s effort to make these various ailments recognizable and worrisome to his readers. While many of his tales featured well-known scholars of the past or present day, some involved anonymous victims of excessive mental application. One particularly dramatic example was the case he took from his friend Zimmermann of a young Swiss gentleman who wore himself out by studying metaphysics. Although increasingly weak, the young man intensified his efforts; after six months, his ailment became so severe that “his mind and senses gradually fell into a state of utter stupor” (SGL, 22). His doctors struggled for a year to pull him out of his oblivion, but nothing worked until someone stood very close to the patient and read a letter in a thundering voice, which woke him up painfully, thereby unblocking his ears. That therapy was continued for another year until all of the young man’s senses were restored: “he recovered completely, and is today one of our best philosophers” (24).61
Tissot intermingled success stories like this with rebukes to those who indulged in “literary intemperance” (SGL, 28). However, he refrained from pronouncing a purely negative judgment on the role of study in relation to health, because he did not want his book to be read as a polemical attack on scholarship. Much as De la santé des gens de lettres aimed to shock its readers by diagnosing the many illnesses that could be induced by study, the book’s central mission was to remedy those ills.
Tissot made this clear in a passage added to the very last article of the 1775 edition, where he alluded to the “famous trial” that Rousseau had launched at midcentury with his First Discourse:
My book offers a picture of the ills produced by an excessive attachment to study, but readers should refrain from concluding that I regard studying as dangerous and seek to put people off of it. This great question is unresolved, and I am far from wanting to enter into that famous trial which never should have existed; even if it were true, which I don’t believe, that learning doesn’t contribute to the happiness of society considered in general, one cannot deny that the knowledge of Letters increases the happiness of the person who possesses it, when he has not acquired it at the expense of his duties or at the cost of his health. (SGL, 240)
One of the puzzling aspects of De la santé des gens de lettres is, in fact, the seemingly paradoxical stance it takes in regard to Rousseau’s already paradoxical “famous trial.”62 On the one hand, to lend credence to the argument that spending too much time hunched over books made gens de lettres fearful and melancholic, Tissot cited the passage from the “Préface à Narcisse” in which Rousseau blamed the arts and sciences for weakening men’s moral and physical nature (31). He also assumed an overtly Rousseauistic tone in a long footnote to a later article, where he identified “the love of the Sciences and the much expanded culture of Letters” as one of the causes for the contemporary explosion of nervous maladies (185–89). Tissot clearly admired Rousseau: the two men exchanged cordial letters during the 1760s, and Tissot was greatly impressed by Rousseau when they met in person in July 1762.63
Yet for all of that, Tissot ended the 1775 edition of La santé with an emphatic defense of learned endeavor: “While reproaching those who devote themselves too passionately to study, I have not been referring to those who cultivate knowledge [les sciences] in a prudent fashion; and if one exposes oneself to the most unfortunate illnesses by sacrificing everything to the love of learning, one exposes oneself to shame by remaining in ignorance. . . . Let the detractors of study not be mistaken: one must adopt one or the other of these principles, either that the cultivation of the mind is a true good, or that the stupidest of animals is happier than man” (241). This passage directly echoed a remark Zimmermann had made in his treatise on experience: “The great benefit of knowledge [les sciences] for the individual is to save us from ennui, which I regard as the greatest enemy of the mind and body alike. Knowledge makes our lives less animal, less limited to the dust on which we tread.”64 In other words, the two Swiss physicians took a nuanced perspective toward Rousseau. On the one hand, they echoed some of his moral hygiene precepts, like his warnings on the influence of the passions over the mind, and his promotion of the curative powers of mountain air;65 on the other hand, they did not agree with his argument that knowledge seeking was, in itself, pathological.
Curiously enough, Tissot provided a way of resolving this apparent contradiction in an earlier work, De l’onanisme (1760). In a recent reevaluation of that famous book, Patrick Singy refutes the conventional interpretation of De l’onanisme as a religiously motivated antimasturbation screed: he underscores that the “sinful” aspect of masturbation was not the main issue that preoccupied Tissot and the laypeople who wrote to him for advice on the health problems they associated with their sexual activities (solitary or otherwise).66 The central problem, in their eyes, was not sex per se but, rather, excess: that is, the immoderate loss of semen, held at the time to be one of the body’s most precious fluids. Singy emphasizes the particularity of the perspective taken by Tissot’s correspondents: they “did not isolate sex from other problems that we, as modern people, would tend to keep clearly separated. . . . Bertrand Duclaux, who wrote for a sick friend, grouped together ‘venereal acts,’ the study of abstract sciences, and food. . . . Coffee, alcohol, food, studying, dance, gambling, hunting, late nights, hiking—and sex.”67
The conceptual framework underlying this way of thinking was the ancient doctrine of the nonnaturals, which were defined as air, food and drink, exercise and sleep, bodily retentions and evacuations, and the passions of the soul (the last term was generally used by physicians and philosophers to designate moral causes and their bodily effects).68 The driving logic of the nonnaturals doctrine was more quantitative than qualitative. According to this logic, excess in one hygienic category could be remedied through moderation in another, because all the nonnaturals had the same mechanical effects on the animal economy: depletion or restoration of a necessary vital resource. Too much sexual activity—whether it involved masturbation or “the use of women”—could therefore be compensated by giving up coffee and following soothing therapies like drinking petit-lait and taking tepid baths.69
A close reading of De la santé des gens de lettres leads to a similar conclusion: the central problem, in Tissot’s eyes, was not study in and of itself, but rather an excessive “attachment” or “passion” or “love” for letters or the sciences (SGL, 32, 80, 185, 235, 240, and passim). This is consistent with the remark he made in an unpublished manuscript: “A wise doctor, consulted on the rules to follow to conserve health in a man with a good temperament, reduced them all to this one: avoid excess. Clearly, the term excess needs to be understood here in relation to age, strength, and sex.”70 Although Tissot recommended relative moderation in all bodily functions, he also believed that one could compensate for excess in one area through asceticism in another: for example, sexual—or intellectual—excess could be counterbalanced and corrected by dietary asceticism. A quantitative vision of health as the avoidance of excess pervades La santé just as much as it does De l’onanisme. It may, in fact, be this quantifying reasoning that most distinguishes Tissot’s hygienic perspective on intellectual labor from the moralistic view of Rousseau, who condemned the pursuit of learning for all but the greatest geniuses.71
As Tissot’s modern biographer, Antoinette Emch-Dériaz, points out, the thematic structure of De la santé des gens de lettres follows the standard categories of medical hygiene: the book covers all the ways in which scholars used and misused the six nonnaturals.72 The topics of food and drink take up a good fifty pages of the book (articles 57–73, out of a total of 92), not including the discussions devoted to intellectuals’ notoriously weak stomachs. Among other things, Tissot took scholars to task for their bad table habits, like hasty eating and inadequate chewing (SGL, 173). He considered them overly susceptible to fads and excesses of the gastronomic variety, like tea drinking.73 He also warned against overeating, both in this book and in his mémoires de consultation. For Tissot and like-minded doctors, appetite was “the somatic locus where powers of mind might be overwhelmed by bodily desires.”74
Tissot also had plenty to say about air quality, sleep, and bodily retentions and evacuations. He chastised scholars for their tendency to work late at night in the stuffy air of their studies (SGL, 89–94) and to delay urination and defecation, a bad habit he attributed to “the ardor for work taken to a ridiculous and blameful excess that does not allow a person to take the time to eat or drink” (97; my emphasis).
Quantifying reasoning is evident at many points in De la santé des gens de lettres, particularly in passages devoted to the laws of the animal economy (SGL, articles 14–17) or to the principles of sound hygiene. Take, for instance, Tissot’s emphasis on the sensitivity of scholars to changes in temperature: “gens de lettres are living barometers who feel most cruelly all the changes in the weather” (83). This, he explained, was a result of a reduction in “subtle transpiration” (transpiration insensible), which afflicted learned people because of their physical inactivity. Another example is his suggestion that they would enjoy healthier, longer lives if they balanced the hours they devoted to their studies with time spent on civic duties (like the exemplary Professor Polier, the “ornament” of the Lausanne academy for over fifty years; 63) as well as on recreational activities. On the subject of exercise, Tissot encouraged gens de lettres to make a habit of strolling in the open air and playing lively games like tennis and pall-mall. One of the main reasons Tissot viewed scholars as prone to illness was purely physical: neglect of the body’s basic needs had as much to do with their sickliness as did ardent mental work.
Few people, Tissot emphasized, were born with the strong constitution necessary to perform unremitting intellectual labor without suffering the unfortunate consequences. As he argued in another addition to the 1775 edition, this time alluding to Voltaire, “the example of an illustrious man who was already writing very pretty verses at the age of six, and who, at the age of eighty, is writing with as much fire and even more gaiety than when he was thirty, may be a unique example” (127–28). Considering that Voltaire’s chronic health problems had attracted significant attention since the 1720s—not least through his very public self-fashioning as the “old invalid from Ferney”—this example merely reinforces the more general law that structures the argumentation in La santé des gens de lettres: thinking sapped the health of those who undertook it without sufficient precaution. Tissot directed that warning at both ends of the age spectrum: people of advancing age who became overly enthused for a new field of learning (122), and young people whose instructors pushed them precociously into intensive study. Too many talented young minds, he declared, had been ruined by such hothouse pedagogical methods: “I have seen children full of wit attacked by this literary frenzy beyond their years, and I have predicted with pain the destiny that awaited them: they start by being prodigies and end up as idiots” (114).75
However, despite the many pages Tissot devoted to diet and recreation, the most fundamental category of the nonnaturals at issue in De la santé des gens de lettres is the sixth one, the passions of the soul. The passions held serious health dangers for scholars because they were so obstinately attached to their studies, “too subject to go to extremes” about other things (including exercise; 150), and susceptible to intense, irrational fears because they overworked their brains. Passions are, in fact, the theme of the most dramatic tales Tissot recounted, like the vignettes of Tasso, Spinello, Pascal, and other famous thinkers, writers, and artists who went totally or partially insane (44–51). The chain of causation in their pathologies started in the mind, proving the general principle that “the mind long occupied has impressed too strong an action upon the brain and is no longer able to suppress it.” In physical terms, prolonged mental application was like a “ligature” applied to all of the nerves at once (43); when the mind upset the organism to such an extent, the results were catastrophic.
Tissot’s moralizing rhetoric is most pronounced in the article that marks the midpoint of La santé des gens de lettres: article 52, where he shifted from the grim recounting of ailments induced by overstudy into an explanation of the practical measures by which scholars could restore and maintain their health. Noting that gens de lettres were typically difficult patients to treat, he compared them to “lovers who fly off the handle when one dares to say that the object of their passion has defects; moreover, they almost all have the sort of fixity in their ideas that is created by study” (132). He also lamented their delusional belief that they could somehow escape the ravages of excessive mental work:
Warn, reason, plead, scold, it’s often a waste of time; they delude themselves in a thousand different ways. One counts on the vigor of his temperament, the other on the force of habit; this one hopes to avoid the punishment because he hasn’t yet been punished; that one justifies his behavior by citing outside examples that prove nothing about his particular case. All of them counter the Doctor with an obstination that they regard as a laudable firmness, and to which they fall victim. Far from fearing the danger to come, they don’t even want to pay attention to the ill at hand, or rather, the greatest of all ills is to be deprived of their work. (132–33)
This strategy of incrimination continued in the next article, where Tissot compared gens de lettres to selfish gluttons: “most of them don’t even have the public in mind, and devour study only as the gourmand devours meat: to assuage his passion. Too often, this leads them to neglect many essential duties. Rush them, drag them out of their cabinet, force them to engage in rest and entertainments that will ward off ills and restore their strength” (134–35). Interestingly, however, Tissot then did an about-face and declared that, by spending time outside of their libraries, scholars “will come back to their work with a new ardor, and a few moments devoted every day to leisure will be well compensated by the enjoyment of a long health which will prolong the time of their studies” (135).
In short, the key to health and longevity was not to avoid study altogether but, rather, to engage in it moderately. That meant avoiding “literary intemperance,” a term Tissot used to refer to any sort of overly assiduous reading or studious reflection: “I have myself seen patients who were punished by this literary intemperance, first through the loss of appetite, the absolute cessation of digestion resulting in a general weakness, weight loss, atrophy, and then by spasms, convulsions, and finally the loss of all their physical senses” (28). Intellectuals could, he reassured his readers, cultivate their chosen specialty if they interrupted their studies often enough to restore balance in their lives and in their bodies (135). At bottom, it all came down to sobriety, broadly construed: gens de lettres had to learn to control their extraordinary appetites for learning. And when they fell ill, they needed to follow their doctors’ orders and take their convalescence seriously:
By neglecting their convalescence, Gens de Lettres risk never recovering their health altogether and making themselves incapable of any great literary undertaking. It is a bad calculation to sacrifice one’s well-being to the pleasure of engaging a few more days in the object of one’s passion, but passions are not calculated, and the passion for learning is, perhaps, the blindest of all. It destroys all the others, as Aretaeus said, the love of one’s country, filial love, fraternal love, even the love of one’s own conservation; what doesn’t it destroy? (235; emphasis in the original)
A key step was to overcome scholars’ tendency to isolate themselves in their study and avoid social commerce. As he reminded his readers, “Men were created to be men; their mutual commerce has advantages that one cannot abandon with impunity, and it has rightly been observed that solitude leads to languor [CICERO de offic. l. 3. cap. I.]. Nothing in the world contributes more to health than the gaiety which society animates and which retreat kills” (99–100). Socially engaged intellectuals might end up succumbing anyway to overstudy, like Tissot’s much regretted late friend M. de Brenles; their sacrifice, however, was noble and selfless.
Less than ten years after its first French edition, Tissot’s book had already been translated into English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Polish. It was pressed into service by the Christian apologist Abbé Jean Sauri in his Cours de philosophie: Élémens de métaphysique, ou Préservatif contre le matérialisme et le déisme (1773), whose entire chapter on the influence of mental application on health consisted of passages lifted from De la santé.76 Tissot’s precepts on the hygiene of intellectuals were also subtly “anglicized” by J.-D. Duplanil, who translated William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine (first ed., 1771) into French in 1775: Duplanil made Buchan’s original chapter “Of the Studious” twice as long in La Médecine domestique by inserting numerous excerpts taken verbatim from La santé des gens de lettres. Some of these additions were duly attributed to Tissot, but others were close paraphrases (like a passage dealing with the bookish “gluttony” of the studious).77 Thanks to this intertextual strategy, Tissot’s opinions on the dangers of intellectual work intertwined with those of Buchan, one of the most famous medical vulgarizers of the day.78
De la santé des gens de lettres would continue to be reprinted regularly until 1859, when Dr. Guillaume-Scipion Bertrand de Saint-Germain reedited it in tandem with the Essai sur les maladies des gens du monde (first ed., 1770). In his preface, Saint-Germain emphasized both the book’s continued utility and its historical value for understanding what he called “the feverish class of gens de lettres” that appeared in the eighteenth century, a time when “gens de lettres formed a militia, and took on the privileges of the vanquishing soldier, the disdain for all constraint, and the ardent pursuit of the pleasures of the mind and of the senses; . . . The alteration of health became an almost constant result of the intemperate cultivation of the arts and sciences.”79
In 1895, the American doctor James Henrie Lloyd sized up De la santé des gens de lettres in these terms: “This essay is elegant in style but not always convincing in matter, because it has the still prevailing trait of ascribing too much to the alleged cause. In the cases of Tissot’s scholars and literati, every ache, every symptom is to be ascribed to their occupation. The stone in the bladder is with him a concretion of learning. A most instructive case of hysterical sleep in a young man, lasting for a year, is an evidence of nothing but overstudy. The most notable part of his book is the description of neurasthenia (called by other names) due to mental overwork.”80 Lloyd offered a trenchant critique of the obsessively systematic causal logic that Tissot applied to the diseases that he imputed to overstudy. His use of the more modern term “hysterical sleep” to refer to the case of the young Swiss gentleman (SGL, 22) also provides a glimpse at one direction in which the discourse on maladies des gens de lettres would go in the nineteenth century: toward psychiatry, and the rise of neurasthenia as a disease syndrome (held, initially, to be particularly prevalent among Americans).81
We should note, however, that readers in Tissot’s day were often quite fully convinced by the matter of his treatise. It was enthusiastically received by his scholarly friends: in a letter to Tissot, Charles Bonnet related that he had felt “goose bumps from head to feet” while reading it, and he complained that he had not yet succeeded in “evangelizing” their mutual friend Albrecht von Haller (a notorious workhorse) on the subject of the hygienic principles Tissot had established for the scholarly regimen.82 It also got an avid reception from some of Tissot’s patients, who were eager to see their own symptoms reflected in the pages of his book. Take, for example, M. Gringet, who wrote this to Dr. Tissot in 1784: “Sir, when your treatise on La santé des gens de lettres fell into my hands, I recognized myself with the greatest fright in the different symptoms that you describe with such precision. I saw myself carried to the tragic end of most of the examples you cite. . . . For as long as I can remember, I have been pale, sad, sensitive and timid, loving retreat, reading, painting and music.”83 Séverine Pilloud points out that Gringet may not have qualified for the title of homme de lettres, strictly speaking, given that he was an artisan; however, his love of reading—particularly, of reading medical books—allowed him to identify with the suffering scholars depicted in Tissot’s work and to construct a personal narrative on that basis.84
In short, the way in which lay readers responded to De la santé des gens de lettres sometimes illustrated the syndrome of “pathogenic” reading, a mode of imaginary illness rooted in overidentification with the symptoms described in the pages of a medical book. This problem, widely recognized by contemporary physicians, prompted an amusing comment by Diderot: “There are no books that I read more readily than medical books, no men whose conversation I find more interesting than physicians; but that is when I am feeling well.”85 However, the risk of pathogenic reading did not keep Dr. F.-G. Boisseau, the editor of the 1826 re-edition of De la santé, from declaring: “Of all books of medicine, this is the only one that is without danger for gens de lettres, and the only one that they can consult fruitfully. The author has omitted nothing essential; few writers have better understood the difficult art of composing a book.”86 Writing forty years later, Émile Beaugrand likewise underscored the book’s usefulness in a medical dictionary entry entitled “Lettres (Gens de), Hygiène”: “From a practical point of view, this is still today the best work that has been written on the topic.”87 As we shall see in Chapters 5 and 6, Tissot’s ideas about intellectual pathologies would be widely cited and imitated by various nineteenth-century physicians.
Even Rousseau, despite his general disdain for medicine and doctors, was an avid reader of Tissot. In the correspondence that followed their brief meeting in 1762, Rousseau not only expressed admiration for De l’onanisme and Avis au peuple sur sa santé, but also sought out the Lausanne physician’s opinion on health problems—sometimes on behalf of friends and sometimes on his own behalf.88 Although Rousseau generally disliked the tendency evident among contemporary physicians to transform him into a clinical case, he made an exception for his friend Tissot. In January 1769, Rousseau sent Tissot a consultation letter describing the stomach swelling and other symptoms he had been suffering for two months, and he ended his missive with a tribute and invitation: “Add this illness, Monsieur, to your registers if you think it is worth it, and may it provide you with some instructive reflections, either for the conservation of this short and miserable human life, or to teach men not to value it for more than it is worth. For me, I will take some consolation as I see the end of mine approach if that occasion can attract some testimony of your remembrance and friendship.”89 If De la santé des gens de lettres can be taken as evidence, Tissot clearly regarded Rousseau’s case as a source of highly instructive reflections.
In the end, however, Tissot’s most significant reader was probably his friend and colleague Zimmermann. Despite the fact that they met only once in person (in 1775), Tissot and Zimmermann maintained a private correspondence that started in 1754, soon after the publication of Tissot’s L’Inoculation justifiée, and lasted for over forty years. Each drew on those letters to craft pathographies of the other, which they featured in their publications. In Traité de l’expérience, Zimmermann evoked the six-week bout with brain exhaustion brought on by dyspepsia, which Tissot had endured in early 1763.90 Tissot, in turn, used the case of Zimmermann to illustrate the horrendous headaches and vision disorders that could be caused by mental exertion (SGL, 53–54, 104). This exchange of letters seems to have served as a sort of sounding board for each man’s thinking on the health and pathologies of gens de lettres.
One of the most remarkable traits of De la santé des gens de lettres may, in fact, be the extent to which it was shaped by the friendship between two of Enlightenment Europe’s most prominent physicians—a friendship carried out in epistolary form, through writing, reading, and shared tales of suffering. Ultimately, it is this correspondence that shows most clearly the sentiments and judgments of Tissot and Zimmermann on the events, people, and great debates of their century—including the polemics surrounding the dangers and advantages of intellectual work. And even though they admired and felt sympathy for Rousseau, these doctors ultimately adopted a more Voltairian perspective that glorified the toll such work took on health.91
Tissot even went so far as to propose the reading of Candide (1759) as a remedy for Zimmermann when, as a Swiss ex-patriot practicing in Hanover, he suffered bouts of profound Heimweh, or nostalgic homesickness, complicated by a case of bodily hypochondria—that is, an illness affecting the organs and viscera of the lower abdomen. As Zimmermann related on September 26, 1768, “I am inclined to believe that I am corporeally ill, and that I have hypochondria to the greatest degree. . . . What I enjoy most is to recount my pains.”92 The treatments proposed by Tissot were a typical assortment for the time: cold or slightly tepid baths, moderate bleedings, mercury, and changes in diet, all accompanied by moral remedies. For example, Tissot encouraged Zimmermann to travel by accepting patients in neighboring cities, to focus his mind on educating his son, and to read entertaining books: “Busy yourself with the sorts of things that provide diversion without being tiring, and that are necessary to you in the state of despondency in which you find yourself. Read pleasant, lighthearted things like Horace, Petroneus, Montaigne, Candide. If Trimalcion and the six Majesties who went to spend Carnival in Venice don’t make you laugh, I regard your hypochondria as incurable.”93 Candide did, indeed, help to alleviate Zimmermann’s overwhelming depression, as he reported five months later: “Three Christian doctors, Mess. Muller, Meyer and Wichmann, and a Jewish doctor were assembled today in the room next to the Hole where I sleep. I had my wife tell them that I was sleeping deeply, whereas in truth I wrote this letter and read Candide cover to cover.”94 Unfortunately, the cure did not last long: Zimmermann’s homesick melancholy soon returned, and within a few months his letters were given over to a new source of sadness, the deteriorating health of his beloved first wife, who died the following year.
Judging from the Vie de Zimmermann, which Tissot wrote shortly after the death of his dear friend, it was Zimmermann, as much as Rousseau, who illustrated the tendencies of the ardent genius. And whereas Zimmermann called De la santé “my breviary,” Tissot showered praise upon all the books of his late friend in his final eulogy, which he began with this epigraph: “He lived long enough for his glory, but not long enough for humanity.”95