The medical profession underwent its own revolution in the wake of France’s great political Revolution: it took on overtly anthropological dimensions and claimed authority in various areas of intellectual and social experience.1 Significant changes also occurred in the way that medical theorists conceived of nervous disorders, which were central to the pathologies from which gens de lettres were held to suffer. Enlightenment-era physicians had spoken more or less interchangeably of “nervous,” hypochondriac,” and “hysteric” disorders, a trio of adjectives featured together in a 1765 treatise by the English nerve doctor Robert Whytt; and they generally agreed with the rapprochement of hysteria and hypochondriasis that had been proposed by the seventeenth-century theorists Thomas Willis and Thomas Syndenham—an alignment that made the two disorders “sibling syndromes with similar symptomatologies that traced to the nervous system.”2 That mixed concept (which also included melancholy) was abandoned after 1790, around the same time that a new theory of sexual incommensurability set in across Europe.
A significant body of historical work has been done on the ways in which hysteria was separated out from its former “sibling syndromes” and redefined as a properly female disease at the end of the eighteenth century. One of the best-known contributions to this endeavor was Jean-Baptiste Louyer-Villermay’s Recherches historiques et médicales sur l’hypocondrie, isolée, par l’observation et l’analyse, de l’hystérie et de la mélancolie (1802), which refeminized hysteria by reviving the age-old uterine theory of its origins.3 Less attention has been paid to the efforts made by Villermay and other medical theorists to redefine hypochondria as a male disorder—and to associate it particularly with male intellectuals.
Mental medicine, the field in which those efforts were carried out, took over part of the discussion of “learned” ailments during the Revolutionary and Bonapartist eras. For the most part, the doctors who founded psychiatry in France endorsed the heroic vision of the laboring scholar that had been advanced in many pro-Enlightenment works—thereby positioning themselves against Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to some extent. Some took direct aim at Rousseau’s provocative statement that “if she [Nature] destined us to be healthy, I almost dare to say that the state of reflection is unnatural [un état contre nature], and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal.”4 The alienist Maurice Roubaud-Luce set the phrase in direct contrast with a countercitation from Voltaire, which he considered more “correct” and philosophical: “The mind [L’âme] is a fire that one must feed / And that extinguishes itself if it does not expand.”5 The heroic, Voltairian perspective on intellectual endeavor was also fostered by the new measures that anthropologically minded physicians devised for classifying people and peoples, systems in which “cerebral men” were placed at the top of the chain of human existence.6
A classifying impulse also underpinned hygiene, a branch of medicine that “was institutionalized as a scholarly and pedagogical field only during the Revolution.”7 As this field expanded, theoreticians of hygiene focused increasingly on the laboring classes versus those higher up the chain of identified human types. However, hygienic discourse still produced some works targeted specifically at gens de lettres—including two with particularly grandiose titles, which I will examine in the last part of this chapter: Étienne Brunaud’s De l’hygiène des gens de lettres ou Essai médico-philosophique sur les moyens les plus propres à développer ses talens et son aptitude naturelles pour les sciences, sans nuire à sa santéet sans contracter des maladies (1819), and Joseph-Henri Réveillé-Parise’s Physiologie et hygiène des hommes livrés aux travaux de l’esprit, ou Recherches sur le physique et le moral, les habitudes, les maladies et le régime des gens de lettres (1834).
The early French alienists were not staunchly mentalist in regard to the diseases that they perceived as stemming from intellectual exertion: although clearly intent on identifying psychic disorders, many of these doctors insisted that such disorders had their seat in an organic lesion, usually in the stomach.8 Nor did they maintain that civilization itself placed its inhabitants at dire risk of mental illness.9 Rather, writing in the immediate wake of the Terror and anxious to contribute to the remaking of the nation, these doctors took a guardedly optimistic, meliorist view of civilization. Many belonged to the larger circle of thinkers—linguists and social and moral philosophers, as well as biomedical thinkers—known as the Idéologues, who believed they could build a new set of social institutions on the foundations of reason, and who styled themselves as architects of a healthier, calmer, and more reasonable society.10
When alienists discussed intellectuals as a patient group, they did so in works more generally concerned with the proper classification of nervous or mental disorders. Philippe Pinel was seminal in this regard: his Nosographie philosophique, ou la méthode de l’analyse appliquée à la médecine (1797) was reedited five times, up to 1813. The word névrose wasn’t introduced into French until 1785, when Pinel coined it as an equivalent to the term “neurosis” in his translation of William Cullen’s First Lines of the Practice of Physics (1777).11 However, the general idea of nervous ailments was already well established, thanks both to theoretical developments in neurophysiology and medicine and to the general culture of nervousness that pervaded the eighteenth century.
Early psychiatric depictions of nervous illness carried few of the connotations of flightiness, lethargy, or decreased/fixated psychic vitality associated with neurosis in the modern, Freudian sense.12 Pathological nervousness in the early nineteenth century had both psychological and physical components, particularly in the case of hypochondria. That approach was consistent with the perspective of predecessors like Samuel-Auguste Tissot, who, in De la santé des gens de lettres, divided hypochondria into two species: “the kind that is simply nervous and . . . is the effect of mental exertion,” versus the kind “that depends on the engorgement of the viscera of the lower abdomen and digestive disturbance, which always results from inaction. It is easy to understand how these two sorts of illness are found in combination among Men of Letters. It is rare that they not be affected by them to some degree, and so difficult to cure them entirely” (SGL, 76). Tissot’s suggested therapies to counter hypochondria also interwove the moral and the physical. At one point, after noting that hypochondriacs tend to be glum and silent, he offered a psychological remedy: “I have seen more than once hypochondriacs who began to read aloud, out of a forced courtesy, and who cheered up as they were reading; this aid should often be included in the curative plan proposed for them” (106). At another point, however, he singled out tea as a cause for the rise of hypochondria in his day: teapots, he declared, “spread sadness and despair,” which could be alleviated by stopping or cutting back on tea consumption (192). This flexible perspective persisted in early nineteenth-century accounts of the illness, which often cited symptoms of visceral discomfort along with psychological conditions like taciturn moroseness. Villermay, for example, warned that hypochondria could be induced by undertaking mental work too soon after eating, or by eating and thinking at the same time.13
Well into the 1820s, French doctors maintained that the seat of hypochondria resided in the abdomen, not the brain. In the most radical expression of this view, the controversial medical theorist François-Joseph-Victor Broussais declared that it was all a matter of gastritis.14 Locating hypochondria and its sibling syndromes in the viscera served both practical and theoretical purposes. First, it provided physicians with a justification for prescribing body-based treatment options like exercise and manual labor, purgatives and other digestive remedies, and hydrotherapy. Those therapies persisted despite the introduction of Pinel’s famous moral treatment, which aimed to cure mental illness either by distracting the patient or by shaking up his or her imagination in order to break the “vicious chain of ideas” that had taken hold of it.15 Second, the visceral location of these disorders adhered to the triadic conception of human physiology that had been advanced by the influential vitalist theorists of the Montpellier medical faculty, who regarded the abdomen as one of the body’s three vital centers.16 Finally, it provided a handy anatomical framework for drawing gender distinctions between male versus female sufferers. Following that logic, French doctors tended increasingly to reserve the terms “vaporous” or “hysterical” for women, on the theory that they were suffering from uterine spasms, and to call men “hypochondriacal.” To a degree, therefore, hypochondria made it possible for turn-of-the-century gens de lettres to be nervous in a manly way—and somewhat more curable than the patient groups to which they were set in opposition.
Scholarly men were nonetheless seen as vulnerable to the full range of mental/nervous disorders explored by these physicians, from hypochondria (the mildest condition), to melancholy (more serious), all the way to stark raving mania. In Nosographie philosophique, Pinel grouped these diseases, along with hysteria, in the general class of nonfebrile “vésanies, or mental alienations” but insisted that men could contract only hypochondria, melancholy, and mania in their true forms. Women, he maintained, could develop those disorders, too, as a result of their extreme sensibility and the energy of their passions, but hysteria almost always complicated their symptoms.17 Villermay systematized this sexually dimorphic view of nervous illness in his Recherches historiques et médicales sur l’hypocondrie, where he declared that “hypochondria almost always follows from the sedentary life and forced work of the library. . . . That is why Hoffmann called it the disease of men of letters; whereas hysteria arises more often from disturbances in the functions exclusive to sex, or in the imperious laws of reproduction.”18
Arguing that earlier theorists had failed to note crucial differences between these different species of nervous disease, Villermay and others in the Pinel circle transformed hysteria into the principal pathological “other” to hypochondria. At the same time, they continued to view melancholy as lurking on the horizon of the hypochondriacal symptoms that seemed so prevalent among men of letters. Hypochondria, as they portrayed it, involved worrisome emotional states as well as abdominal symptoms like constipation, slow digestion, and flatulence. Pinel tied hypochondria to sadness and capriciousness of character (sometimes aggravated by changes in the atmosphere), whereas Villermay proposed a longer list of symptoms that included panic attacks and exaggerated anxieties like fretting about one’s health.19 Melancholy was held to involve more violent, somber, obsessive passions, including a stubborn, sometimes delirious fixation on a single idea. It was also more closely linked than hypochondria to a particular temperament, one that these doctors claimed was most common among dark-haired men with slow gaits and perpetually sad demeanors.20 Yet hypochondria could, they warned, degenerate into melancholy, especially when the viscera remained in a chronic state of irritation due to overstudy, habitual overeating, or other causes.21
What made the nervous suffering of gens de lettres manly, in their estimation, was the relentless, exhausting mental exertion and deep reflection that underpinned it—qualities that were utterly incompatible with women’s moral and physical nature, according to the dimorphic vision of the sexes to which these doctors subscribed. Specialists of mental medicine depicted great male thinkers who succumbed to nervous or mental ailments as driven by an extraordinary need for sensations, which derived directly from their exceptionally developed minds.
Dr. Jean-Etienne-Dominique Esquirol, the inventor of such neologisms as lypémanie and the more popular “monomania” (both proposed as replacement terms for melancholy), took that perspective at the outset of his treatise Des maladies mentales (1838), where he refuted Rousseau’s misanthropic boutade about the “unnaturalness” of reflection along with the proximity that the English Restoration poet John Dryden had posited between genius and madness.22 As Esquirol put it:
The most extensive geniuses in the sciences and arts, the greatest poets, the most talented painters have retained their reasoning faculties up to old age. If we have seen some painters, poets, musicians and artists go mad, that is because, on top of having a very active imagination, those individuals had serious lapses in their regimen, to which their constitution made them more vulnerable than other men. It is not because they exercised their intelligence that they lost their minds; it is not the cultivation of sciences, arts and letters that is to blame: men endowed with great powers of thought and imagination have a great need for sensations.23
This view made nervous and mental disorders a consequence not of civilization, tout court, but of the needs and bad habits typical of those with a certain temperament. Pinel had made a similar argument earlier in his Nosographie philosophique, where he emphasized that it was the lack of moderation and method in conducting intellectual work that placed scholars at risk for nervous diseases. Evoking the “wise precepts established by Plutarque, Ramazzini, Tissot,” he criticized the misguided notion to which many scholars subscribed that they had to sacrifice their health to succeed in the world of learning. Philosophical medicine could, he assured, guide intellectuals toward ways of developing their talents without contracting illnesses.24
Broadly speaking, early French psychiatrists echoed Xavier Bichat’s insistence that it was impossible for any one person to perfect all of humankind’s various sensory and intellectual capacities; this was one of the consequences he drew from his theory of “limited vital energy.” As Bichat put it in his Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (1802), “The universality of knowledge in a single individual is a chimera; that notion goes against [physical] organization, and if history presents a few examples of extraordinary geniuses who were equally brilliant in several fields of knowledge, they were exceptions to those rules.”25 Arguing that the average person’s aptitude for a given profession was determined by the organ that he or she exercised most frequently, Bichat divided human occupations into three general classes.26 In the first class, he placed fields that mainly used the senses, like painting, music, sculpture, the arts of the perfumer, and haute cuisine. The second comprised professions that involved brain work, a grouping Bichat subdivided into imagination-based occupations like poetry, memory-driven fields like nomenclature, and judgment-dominated professions like the advanced sciences. In the third class, he placed professions that required muscular prowess, such as dance, equitation, and the mechanical arts. And to prove his thesis that no one could excel in more than one of these occupational classes, Bichat sketched a portrait of a hopelessly uncoordinated scholar: “Look at that scholar who, in his abstract meditations, constantly exercises his internal senses and, in the silence of his study, condemns to inaction his external senses and locomotive organs; if you see him trying out, by chance, a bodily exercise, you will laugh at his clumsiness and his awkward air. His sublime conceptions astonished you, but the slowness of his movements will amuse you.”27 He then offered a counterportrait of a dancer who, although gracious and captivating in motion, was quite dull in conversation. Bichat added that just as the locomotive organs, brain organs, and senses couldn’t be perfected simultaneously, a man shouldn’t be forced to undertake several different sorts of study all at once—a verity he considered to be not just a philosophical maxim, but also a physio-anatomic fact: “to increase the strength of one organ, you have to diminish it in others.”28
Aptitude or lack of aptitude for particular fields of study was a common theme among alienists who discussed gens de lettres in their writings. For example, Jean-Pierre Falret, a Restoration-era physician who specialized in hypochondria and suicide, warned that “when intellectual work is not in harmony with the particular disposition of the individual’s mind, or when it goes violently against the grain of a natural penchant, it can predispose the person to suicide.”29 By the 1830s, it was a truism in French psychiatric discourse that the different thinking professions had varying degrees of susceptibility to nervous and mental illnesses.
While many alienists simply repeated some version of Pinel’s declaration that musicians, poets, and artists were at the top of the “at-risk” list for madness because they tended to overwork their imaginations, Esquirol’s protégé Étienne-Jean Georget offered a more fine-tuned ranking of intellectual professions in De la physiologie du système nerveux, et spécialement du cerveau (1821). Initially, Georget took a broad view, arguing that “almost all gens de lettres, scholars, philosophers, etc.,” were susceptible to chronic hypochondriacal ailments because they tended to ignore the warning signs of imminent physical dysfunction: for example, irascibility and hypersensitivity to both cold and heat (this discussion is part of a long section entitled “Travaux intellectuels ou de l’esprit,” full of dramatic anecdotes of overstudy—many drawn directly from Tissot’s De la santé des gens de lettres).30 The laws of nature eventually took their revenge on those who overtaxed their brains, leaving them with weakened faculties, chronically dysfunctional stomachs, and little hope of producing vigorous offspring (dangers that, as Georget noted, had been sounded earlier by Tissot).31 Yet Georget then proceeded to exempt some intellectuals from this general rule: namely, those who engaged in mental operations involving memory, or the accumulation and combination of facts.32 Professions that involved that sort of thinking seldom damaged mental health or health in general. By contrast, those that placed the mind in an exalted state wore out its organic ressorts, triggering a cerebral excitation that could become pathological. Thus, Georget concluded—citing for support the eighteenth-century naturalist Bonnet—“Scholars who are only observers, like chemists, naturalists, and botanists, are generally in better health than poets, philosophers, and artists.”33 Observational knowledge, in other words, was healthier and saner because it strained the brain less than did more complicated or abstract forms of thinking.
Georget’s explanation of the varying incidence of nervous disorders among different varieties of intellectuals may have been inspired by the work of the phrenologists Franz-Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, who had recently undertaken to pinpoint loci or “organs” within the brain where specific sorts of ideation and feeling were seated. His admiration for their work was a departure from the reaction of some other alienists, including Pinel, who opposed the anatomical approach Gall and Spurzheim took to mental function.34 In any case, Georget’s typology did little more than confirm the emerging image of gens de lettres in alienist discourse, according to which scholars working in the exact sciences—except for those with a pronounced speculative bent, like mathematicians—were less inclined to fall ill than those specializing in imagination-bound or passion-stirring modes of cerebration.
Interestingly, doctors placed themselves in the high-risk category for hypochondria and melancholy, arguing that the training and practice involved in the medical profession endangered the mental health of those who took it up. First, studying medicine was dangerous because of the sort of reading it entailed, which could cause the reader to develop symptoms of whatever disease he or she read about (a similar effect of misplaced identification was, we should remember, commonly attributed to novel reading).35 Alienists reported having observed this phenomenon not just among fretful nonprofessional readers—a group that they sometimes depicted in tones evocative of Molière’s famous “imaginary invalid”—but also among medical students and established physicians.36 Second, the sort of thinking done by physicians was itself mentally distressing: Villermay commented that practicing medicine produced an abundance of serious, severe, often sad ideas that made physicians vulnerable to nervous and mental disorders.37 In his essay on hypochondria as a possible cause of suicide, Falret combined the two arguments to insist that hypochondria did not originate in the stomach, after all: the fact that doctors sometimes came down with it after seeing a number of patients and reading medical books proved that its true seat was not visceral but cerebral—by which he meant, rooted in the brain tissue.38
On balance, these doctors’ attitudes toward study-induced nervous and mental ailments were ambivalent. Although they bemoaned the apparent prevalence of hypochondria and melancholy among Bens de lettres, they also spoke of these diseases as an inevitable side effect of the glorious contributions scholars were making to the advancement of humankind’s collective knowledge. In the words of Georget, “the progress of civilization and development of the human understanding” should be counted among the chief predisposing causes of hypochondria.39 He included among those achievements the hard-earned advances that he and his fellow physicians were making, sometimes at the cost of their own health.
Georget—who, like Falret, regarded hypochondria as cerebrally located—provided an exceptionally detailed account of the five-month bout of hypochondria that he had himself endured as a result of excessive mental exertion. He fell ill in early March 1820, when, after approximately eighteen months of “continuous mental labors,” he was suddenly struck with a “dull but continuous cephalagia” and “some difficulty in forming ideas, without any disorder in the other organs.”40 He persisted in his work but was soon overcome with fatigue and a great heaviness in his head; but when he lay down, the blood rushed to his head, which became hot and very painful. Other symptoms included ringing in the ears, troubled sleep, bloodshot eyes, and difficulty in forming ideas, all of which made it impossible for him to work for more than a few hours each day. Although he exhibited no signs of muscular weakness or spasmodic contractions and had only a slight loss of appetite, he experienced some “sympathetic” symptoms in his heart and lungs: heart palpitations, pain in his lungs, and dry cough, all of which made him worry that he had tuberculosis.41 He nonetheless pursued his research and writing as much as possible until April 17, when his symptoms became so bad that he had to give up his studies altogether. Because he appeared healthy, his attending physician regarded him as an “imaginary invalid” and prescribed fifteen days of rest and two bleedings, some cold applications on his head, tepid baths, and mustard-plaster footbaths. Thanks to these remedies, he was able to finish the writing project he was so reluctant to abandon, although he continued to suffer in his head, lungs, and heart (but never in the stomach). After twenty-five days of rest and recreation, he recovered completely, and by September he was able to resume his project without danger. During the next spring, he felt a slight tinge of hypochondria, which dissipated and then reappeared several times; however, he had no symptoms whatsoever the following summer. Georget concluded, “It appears that my brain has been toughened [aguerri] and gotten used to intellectual exercise.”42
We can draw three general lessons from Georget’s personal illness narrative. First, the “thinking as labor” paradigm was just as compelling for him and other alienists writing in the 1820s as it had been for eighteenth-century physicians. Second, far from exempting themselves from the nervous diseases incident to mental labor, these doctors saw themselves as acutely susceptible to them. Finally, Georget’s concluding line suggests that scholars could overcome study-induced hypochondria and accustom themselves to the rigors of intellectual exercise. That was a common refrain in alienist discourse, although it coexisted with the observation that certain nerve-sick gens de lettres never recovered. The latter observation was often illustrated by the example of Nicolas Gilbert, a failed poet and anti-philosophe of the late eighteenth century who (by some accounts) succumbed to suicidal melancholy after being snubbed by the literary-philosophical establishment. Jean-Guillaume Fourcade-Prunet summed up that case as follows: “Gilbert, unhappy, persecuted, fell into the most pronounced melancholy and soon into complete dementia.”43
Georget’s emphasis on toughening up the brain echoed some of the arguments that were advanced by medical “invigorators” like Pierre-Éloi Fouquier de Maissemy. Author of the dissertation Avantages d’une constitution faible (1802), Fouquier argued that although the current generation of intellectuals was not as vigorous as their more solitary precursors from France’s glory days (by which he meant the seventeenth century), their frailty was not necessarily unhealthy and could be remedied through fortifying methods. There were, he proclaimed, advantages to be found in the constitutions of “sickly poets” like Voltaire and Rousseau: although lacking in brawn, they possessed the heightened sensitivity and perfected intelligence toward which contemporary European society was evolving.44 Although Fouquier was keen in his practice to increase the muscular strength of nervous sorts—for example, by administering nux vomica, also known as strychnine, with which he experimented extensively on his patients—he was also intent on refuting the notion that the human race was declining in Europe: “what people call degeneration is, in the human race, a true improvement.”45
Some contemporaries regarded Fouquier’s thesis as a clever paradox, like its reviewer in the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales of 1815.46 However, others echoed his emphasis on the positive aspects of the nerve-dominated bodily constitution they deemed typical of scholars. Dr. Étienne Tourtelle of Strasbourg included a special appendix on gens de lettres in his Éléments d’hygiène (1796–97), where he argued that study, when pursued moderately, was as useful to the mind as exercise and labor were to the body. Both sorts of activities induced a sense of enjoyment that spread via the nerves throughout the organs, helping to maintain the balance of action among the different centers of sensibility and the harmony of functions that ensured good health; it was therefore not unusual, Tourtelle noted, to see men who were accustomed to regular study fall seriously ill when they interrupted their mental efforts.47 Tourtelle’s work was reprinted in 1838 under the title Traité d’hygiène in a volume that also included writings by Jean-Noël Hallé, a nephew of Anne-Charles Lorry, and the first holder of the Chair of Hygiene at the Paris Faculté de Médecine.48 In 1798, Hallé had proposed a new hygienic category called “percepta,” or the study of the sensations and intellectual and affective functions.49 Both of these physicians contested the notion that the exercise of the mind necessarily shortens life; at the same time, however, they repeated the standard caution that excessive mental work could destroy even the strongest constitution.
These theoreticians worked within a conceptual framework still dominated by the psycho-physiology of sensation and stimuli. That perspective, as Philip Sarasin puts it, created “dangerous possibilities—excess, illness, and early death”; the task that hygienists assigned themselves was to reduce those dangers by showing that the body could be both knowable and controllable.50 Health could be achieved by scrutinizing the body’s signs and regulating the stimuli to which it was exposed, with the aim of keeping in check the tendency of individual parts to seek out more stimuli, more pleasure, than was good for the whole. Although it may not have had the poetic appeal of the Romantic ethos of intense living, the ethic of moderation underpinned much of the writing that hygienists directed at Bens de lettres in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Intellectual pathologies were, in their minds, a true risk, but they were also reversible.
The medical Idéologue Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis also presented a normative image of the scholarly constitution in the Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (1802), an influential contribution to early nineteenth-century medical and social theory. Cabanis’s book was controversial in some French intellectual circles because of the comparison he made between the stomach and the brain in his remark “the brain digests impressions, as it were, and produces organically the secretion of thought.”51 Viscera interested Cabanis for reasons that extended beyond that notorious analogy: he saw visceral weakness not just as a consequence of overstudy but also as a prerequisite for intellectual talent. As he argued, “The greatest aptitude for work that requires either a strong, active imagination, or persistent and profound meditations, often depends on a generally ill state introduced into the system by the disturbance of the functions of certain abdominal organs.”52
To appreciate the implications of that claim, we should consider the context in which it was made: memoir 5 of the Rapports du physique et du moral, where Cabanis addressed the influence of sex differences on the character of ideas. As he described it there, dyspepsia was a specifically masculine trait, one analogous to—but not conflatable with—the generally weak, excitable, capricious state created in the female system by the functions of the uterus and ovaries. Chronic visceral disturbance, in other words, had different consequences for each sex. It was a constitutional factor that enabled men of a certain temperament to excel in the intellectual realm, even as it exposed them to hypochondriacal nervous affections.53 For women, by contrast, this sort of disturbance was directed downward toward their reproductive organs, whose eminent sensibility was accompanied in the female body by a general softness that extended to the “cerebral pulp.”54 Women were simply not capable of deep thinking, in Cabanis’s estimation: the healthy woman, although naturally intelligent, was “rightly put off by intellectual work that can’t be carried out without long and profound meditations”; she preferred lighter subjects that required no more than a lively wit and imagination.55 In response to reports that nervous ailments gave some women patients enhanced intellectual powers—as, for example, in bouts of vapors—he insisted that the effect was temporary: “nothing is less rare than to see them acquire during their vaporous attacks a penetration, a wit, an elevation of ideas and eloquence that they didn’t have; those advantages, which are simply the result of the illness, disappear when health is restored.”56 He returned to this question in memoir 7, on the influence of illness on ideas, where he alluded to the claims made by magnetizers like the Lyon doctor Jacques-Henri-Désiré Petetin (author of the Mémoire sur la découverte des phénomènes que présentent la catalepsie et le somnabulisme, 1787) that female cataleptics exhibited symptoms like heightened intelligence and the ability to see and even smell through their internal organs. Cabanis dismissed such claims by declaring that “catalepsies, ecstasies, and all states of exaltation that are characterized by ideas and an eloquence that rise above the education and habits of the individual, are usually due to spasms in the organs of generation”—which is why those illnesses and the enhanced intelligence they sometimes produced were observed “mainly in women.”57
By contrast, the enhancement effect was permanent in men who had an innately melancholic temperament or who had acquired a chronically dyspeptic state through force of habit. As he explained in memoir 7 of the Rapports, nervous affections in melancholic men “are conducive to attention and meditation; they accustom the senses and the organ of thought to exhaust, in a sense, the subjects of study to which they are attached. They expose the individual to all the errors of the imagination; but they can also enrich the genius with several precious qualities; they often lend talent a great deal of elevation, strength, and brilliance.”58 Cabanis thus gave an intriguing spin to the scholar’s age-old “bad stomach” complaint: he interwove it with the sexually dimorphic model of human nature popularized by Rousseau and Roussel, while also linking it to the theory of limited perfectibility to which he, like his contemporary Bichat, subscribed. Seen from this perspective, visceral sickliness in men was not the result of but the enabling mechanism of sustained, intense mental labor.
This view of nervous affections provided a new way of finding value in the pathologies connected to thinking. The anecdotes reported (and sometimes dismissed) by Cabanis that patients suffering from a nervous or mental disorder sometimes exhibited extraordinary intelligence can be tied to a longer tradition, reaching back to Montaigne, of philosophical musing on the vagaries of the human mind and body. Denis Diderot made a brief but piquant contribution to that tradition: “A given person may be a fool while awake, and dream like a witty man [un homme d’esprit]. The variety of spasms which the intestines can create on their own corresponds to all the variety of dreams and all the variety of deliriums, to the full range of dreams of the healthy man who sleeps, and the full range of deliriums of the sick man who is awake but not in possession of his senses.”59 We can consider Diderot’s clever-dreaming stupid man a cousin to the temporarily smart and eloquent cataleptic woman described by Cabanis: both personae morphed back into their true, dim-witted selves when they woke up or emerged from a trance. By contrast, the dyspeptic male cerebralist envisioned by Cabanis was likely to stay brilliant: his constitution, shaped both by habits and his melancholic temperament, tended to make him perpetually sickly—but also well disposed to intellectual exertion of the highest order.
This sort of reasoning was repeated in the section on education in De la physiologie du système nerveux, where Georget gallantly excluded women from the ranks of serious thinkers by arguing that Venus’s forehead was too petite and pretty to support the same intensity of thought as Apollo’s “handsome” profile—a comparison intended to illustrate the idea that women could not possess the power of reasoning, depth of mind, or power of meditation possible in men.60 Although a woman might be sagacious, she would rarely have the “sublime faculty” necessary for abstract thinking, and the existence of a small number of exceptions to that rule did not refute the rule itself. As Georget put it, “We won’t turn Woman into a metaphysician, a philosopher, a legislator; her powers cannot lift her to those heights, and her social duties do not agree with that sort of study.”61 Women could, however, fruitfully cultivate the sciences of observation, the fine arts, languages, and literature: even though they were ordinarily inferior to men in those fields, they could acquire enough to know and judge competently.
Around the same time, Julien-Joseph Virey advanced a more rigid and sweeping theoretical justification for the exclusion of women from scholarly pursuit, including the “softer” fields of literature and the arts. As he declared, the “ardent transports of genius” could be enjoyed only by males who had reached the so-called virile age, which was also the age at which study-induced hypochondria typically began.62 Although he strongly disliked Cabanis’s materialism, Virey shared his emphasis on the interdependence of body and mind, and a similar conviction that one of the primary tasks of contemporary medicine was to establish a system of human types—with sex difference leading his list of factors to be analyzed.63 Virey first discussed women writers and intellectuals in De l’influence des femmes sur le goût dans la littérature et les beaux-arts (1810), later republished as the final section of his global analysis of female nature, De la femme sous ses rapports physiologique, moral et littéraire (1823). In a long note to De la femme entitled “The Influences of Love and of the Generative Functions on the Mind and Moral Character of the Feminine Sex,” he rebutted the “zealous admirers of the fair sex” who claimed that women could produce literary works as brilliant as men’s: “Does one find in them [women’s writings] that sublimeness, that virile energy, that elevation or depth of thought that is the indelible mark of true genius, I would even say of the force of generation?” He explained the existence of great woman writers like the Greek poet Sappho by analyzing her personal history, from which he concluded that Sappho was a genius only because her “ardent, fiery temperament . . . made her almost a man,” as evidenced by the “erotomania” she expressed in her poetry (442). All the women who had excelled in literature did so only because they had a “more masculine complexion,” which gave them brief flashes of genius but also an unladylike lust. However “virile” they were, not a single one of these “impassioned Héloïses” escaped the mental and physical ravages of hysteria, a dire illness caused by the strange and overpowering impressions the uterus made upon the female mind, which usually led to madness (443–45).
In short, Virey maintained that the misplaced virility of exceptionally intelligent women did little more than make them oversexed: nature eventually avenged itself for their abnormal mental faculties through channels proper to the female body. True virility, as he conceived it, was “the greatest vital energy,” a glorious creative force that only men could possess because they had sperm (427–28, 442). However, according to his peculiar application of the principle of limited vital energy, male scholars had to observe extreme caution while engaging in acts of physical virility—that is, sexual intercourse—lest they exhaust their mental powers through the “abuse of voluptuous pleasures” (442–43). Better yet, they should abstain from carnal relations altogether: “By abstaining from bodily generation, one becomes more capable of intellectual generation, one has more internal genius [ingenium], and for the same reason men of genius are less capable of engendering physically. . . . Newton died a virgin, as did W. Pitt, so they say. Kant hated women, and none of the great men of antiquity was very keen on women, according to Bacon of Verulam” (439–40). Although Virey took that theory to an extreme, most particularly in an 1840 speech, “Du contraste entre le pôle génital et le pôle cérébral dans l’homme et la série des animaux,” the idea itself was not unique to him. The hygienists Tourtelle and Hallé also warned that “gens de lettres should rarely indulge in the pleasures of love, which are not only detrimental to their health, but also weaken the energy of the brain, necessary for the production of thought. Minerva rarely frequents the gardens of Idalie.”64
Deterministic perspectives on the scholarly constitution also abounded in Brunaud’s De l’hygiène des gens de lettres and Réveillé-Parise’s Physiologie et hygiène des hommes livrés aux travaux de l’esprit. These armchair physicians lavished praise on intellectuals for perfecting the human spirit through their mental labors. They also proposed to guide them toward better, more healthful habits, ranging from how to eat to what sorts of women to frequent. If the mission of the early French alienists was to “console and classify” or “understand and treat,” then one might say that Brunaud and Réveillé-Parise sought to preserve and glamorize the intellectual as a type.65
Brunaud, a Strasbourg physician and corresponding member of the Paris Société Médicale de l’Emulation, had published little before his medico-philosophical essay De l’hygiène des gens de lettres, other than a medical thesis and a short observation in the 1810 Bulletin des sciences médicales on the extraordinary expansion of the bladder that he had noticed in some cases of urinary retention. Although not an alienist, Brunaud dedicated his essay to Pinel and presented it as an answer to the question raised in Pinel’s Nosographie philosophique regarding the health dangers of intellectual pursuit. Departing deliberately from Rousseau, Brunaud took a positive view of the moral and social effects of learning.66 His goal in writing was to “direct wisely the zeal and ardor of those who, through extensive and diversified fields of knowledge, enlighten the human race and contribute so powerfully to the order and harmony of the social body”—and to avoid provoking in his scholarly readers “vain or exaggerated fears about the dangers they face” (18). Brunaud aligned his project with that of “the doctor of Lausanne”—that is, Tissot.
Like Tissot, Brunaud stressed how difficult it was to persuade Bens de lettres to adopt healthful practices: they were inclined to find happiness only in “the continuous exercise of the operations of the intelligence,” and their love of glory often seemed to stifle the natural desire for self-conservation (18). Doctors should therefore foster in these patients an “irresistible penchant” for other, more recreational sorts of pleasure, like music, gardening, hiking, and social commerce (22). Brunaud emphasized that the mind of the homme de lettres was utterly different from that of the homme du monde in its constitution and inclinations. The worldly man, while capable of keen focus, never drifted off into “that state of isolation of thought that detaches the attention from all surrounding objects; never does he experience the impetuous leaps of the imagination that transport the soul and engender genius” (41–42). The scholar, by contrast, lived in a perpetual state of distraction, and when gripped by an idea, he slipped into trances of ecstatic absorption: all the muscles of his face tensed, as if in a convulsion; his eyes became fixed, red, and bloodshot; and he didn’t really see the objects in front of his eyes. Brunaud’s portrait of the absorbed scholar then became downright erotic: when excited by the pleasures of study, the brain experienced a fever, or “erection,” accompanied by a rapid influx of blood to it and to the face, followed by a climax in the form of a dramatic gushing forth of ideas (45).
Given the intensity of the pleasures derived from knowledge seeking, it was no easy task for doctors to convince scholars to balance them with more moderate, sociable enjoyments. Like Tissot, Brunaud believed that excessive absorption in intellectual matters could have worrisome side effects. Disregard for domestic affairs had, he warned, led to paternal negligence in the case of Corneille, and to death for Archimedes and the humanist Guillaume Budé (46–48). He also drew attention to the tendency of Bens de lettres to neglect their bodies, which were typically scrawny and underdeveloped as a result of inaction. Rousseau, for example, had remarkably thin legs by the end of his life, perhaps because all the blood and vital action had been constantly carried to his head in order to fuel his literary genius (50). Similarly, the astronomer Lalande had a head much bigger than his other body parts, particularly his abdomen, which was extremely thin and frail (51). Whereas scholars could remedy the first problem by changing their bad habits, the second was more intractable because it arose from the peculiar bodily conformation that developed when one repeatedly exerted one’s mind.
Brunaud used a curious sort of analogical reasoning to demonstrate this last theory. He compared the brain to three lower internal organs: the stomach, the bladder (the subject of his 1810 essay), and the uterus. Just as those organs acquired an exceptional degree of strength and volume when used habitually—as in men inclined to overeat, people with the “vicious” habit of retaining their urine for a long time, and women who were frequently pregnant—so, too, the scholarly brain expanded in size and power “through the effect of long and habitually sustained exercises and efforts” (37). As a consequence, they had larger, more developed brains than individuals whose intellectual faculties were rarely exercised. This was proven, Brunaud argued, by Pinel’s observation in the Traité de la manie that people afflicted with idiotism had smaller cranial cavities than those of normal intelligence (39).
Although Brunaud’s brain-bladder comparison was unconventional, his belief that great minds were housed in big skulls, with disproportionately smaller body parts elsewhere, echoed ideas in other strands of early nineteenth-century biomedical discourse. For example, the alienist Georget emphasized that the forehead was typically quite large on thinkers, judging from the busts that had been sculpted of Socrates, Bacon, Locke, Leibniz, Voltaire, and Rousseau.67 As Michael Hagner explains, the brains and skulls of geniuses were a topic of keen interest to anatomists and anthropologists like Franz Joseph Gall, who by the end of his life “possessed a huge collection of skulls, casts of heads, and casts of brains,” including anatomical exemplars of 103 illustrious men.68 Brunaud did not entirely approve of Gall’s organology: although he praised him as a skilled anatomist, he shied away from a system that seemed to threaten the unity of the thinking/feeling self (38–39). Yet he clearly agreed with Gall’s idea that the brains of geniuses were bigger and heavier than others.
However, what concerned Brunaud more than big head size were the potentially life-shortening aspects of the muscular weakness, nervous ailments, and digestive disorders produced by unrelenting sedentary library work. For scholars, the key to long life was prudence in managing “the cerebral excitation produced by sustained intellectual activities”; the scholar should thus avoid overly prolonged study and regularly seek out moderating diversions (85–86). Nonetheless, a cloistered, studious existence had some healthful advantages over the constant agitation and noisy pleasures of worldly life, in that it protected the scholar against “intense and hotheaded passions” (82–85). Echoing the quantitative approach of Louis-René Villermé, Adolphe Quetelet, and other leaders of the early nineteenth-century public health movement, Brunaud gave some statistics.69 He cited the theoretical estimate of seventy years as the maximum average human life span, which Buffon had made in the Histoire naturelle de l’homme (1749), applied it to a sample set of famous scholars, and found the results to be encouraging. He supported this with a statistical table showing the ages that had been attained by approximately three hundred men who had distinguished themselves through the sciences or letters; these examples ranged from Winkelmann, who died the youngest (of murder) at age 50, to Hippocrates, purported to have lived to 109 (490–96). Based on these findings, Brunaud calculated that cerebralists who led a sober, healthy life typically exceeded the average life span by six years, regardless of the climate in which they lived and the degree of “ardor” with which they pursued their studies (88).
Good scholarly hygiene, as Brunaud described it, entailed careful attention to all of the circumstances surrounding study. Those included the care that tutors should take to adapt their young charges’ reading to their tastes and capacities (120–21); the small social circles that gens de lettres should form among themselves (179–96); the women of wit, refinement, and modesty whom they should seek out (207–17); and the attention they should pay to the nonnaturals—from air and diet to the secretion of seminal fluid, about which scholars should be extremely careful, given their tendency toward excessive excitation of the cerebral sort (360).
In short, Brunaud’s De l’hygiène des gens de lettres was a compilation of received ideas regarding scholars intermingled with some curious new elements, like his orgasmic model of the brain in action, his brain-bladder analogy, and the correlation he drew between big brains and thin legs. It is worth noting that Brunaud took a somewhat more catholic view of genius vis-à-vis gender than did some contemporaries. Even while echoing the standard admonition that women should not seek to appear learned simply to burnish their social reputation, he praised women whose exceptional scientific talents “had elevated them to the highest conceptions,” like Hypatia, Caroline Herschel, and the Marquise Du Châtelet, and those who had excelled in literature, such as Marguerite de Navarre, Mlle de Gournay, and Mesdames Deshoulières, Graffigny, de Puisieux, La Fayette, and de Staël (212). Nonetheless, the real value Brunaud saw in learned women was the exceptionally rich conversation they could provide for male scholars, an idea he underscored by setting his illustrious examples side by side with women who had inspired or encouraged figures like Descartes, Condillac, Zimmermann, and Frederick of Prussia (208–9, 213).
Many of those ideas reappear in Joseph-Henri Réveillé-Parise’s three-part treatise Physiologie et hygiène des hommes livrés aux travaux de l’esprit, which built upon his Considérations médico-philosophiques sur ce mot d’Aristote, “Que la plupart des hommes célèbres sont atteints de mélancolie” (1833).70 According to one biography of Réveillé-Parise, he published a well-received treatise on ocular hygiene in 1816, became a member of the French Académie de Médecine in 1823, and served as a “major surgeon in the elite gendarmerie” until losing that position as a result of the 1830 Revolution, after which “he retreated into the practice of his art and his literary work, through which he has earned a distinguished rank among contemporary scholars.”71
Thinkers clearly had a special physiology in Réveillé-Parise’s estimation—and never more so than in the modern era, when the demands of social life were so pressing that few could lead the quiet, uniform life enjoyed by intellectuals in bygone days. Although contemporary scholars and littérateurs were no less driven than their predecessors by the “lively passion” for study, they were “devoured” by public life as well.72 The increased social importance of gens de lettres had its benefits, in that it had made their profession more “dignified,” respected, and influential, especially given their prominent role in journalism (vol. 2, 432). At the same time, however, it added to the sources of exhaustion with which they had to contend: by participating in the social whirlwind, intellectuals multiplied the passions to which they were susceptible, and their ardent internal constitutions drove them to be just as consumed by public affairs as they were by the quest to create something glorious and immortal.
What Réveillé-Parise saw when he perused the field of contemporary intellectual life was both the culmination of humankind’s ongoing march toward greater complexity or “perfection” and the ravages created by a bodily organization in which sensibility was disproportionately concentrated in the brain and nerves. Those endowed with such a constitution embodied human perfectibility: “In truth, they are more men than other men, for good or for bad. . . . Physiological preeminence is the principle for supremacy in intelligence, and consequently for social preeminence. It has been said that great men are the aristocracy of our species, and that is true. . . . Their power is truly by divine right” (vol. 1, 102). However, such a physiology had its drawbacks by intensifying the passions: “The privileged men thus endowed have more joy, more chagrin, more love, more aversion, more transports, more ardor, more passions, more happiness and unhappiness than those with an inferior organization. . . . They are both the weak and the strong members of the human race, Heaven’s chosen ones, the delight of their century and of posterity and yet, too often, the wretched of this world.” There was, in other words, a price to pay for the privilege of residing at the top of the great chain of intelligent being: great thinkers felt everything too well and too much.
This argument was not, of course entirely new: it echoed the melancholic theories on perfectibility and superiority that had been proposed earlier in the century by Staël and Benjamin Constant.73 However, Réveillé- Parise gave those theories a pronounced physiological aspect (one that those earlier theoreticians, who contested philosophical sensualism, would probably have rejected). He contended that the heightened vitality of the thinker’s brain and nerves caused an imbalance in the distribution of the body’s forces, creating (among other things) a deficit in the muscular realm: “The most poetically organized man is, in truth, lacking in material strength; that, perhaps, is the meaning of the saying of an ancient writer: ‘heroic souls have no bodies’ ” (vol. 1, 104). To illustrate this thesis, he cited the irregular circulatory function observed in some superior minds, like the palpitations that Staël reported having experienced in her youth while reading Clarissa, especially the kidnapping scene (vol. 1, 108). He also evoked the frail, almost ethereal physique of other illustrious thinkers, attributing it to the intense mental activity taking place within their brains. Here, he cited the portrait of Voltaire sketched by Count Louis-Philippe Ségur: “His leanness bore witness to his long, incessant labors. . . . His piercing eye sparkled with genius and sarcasm . . . while his thin and bending form seemed nothing more than a slight envelope, almost transparent, through which beamed his genius and his soul.”74 As Réveillé-Parise described it, cerebral intensity exerted a physical effect more profound than upsetting the stomach or wearing out the eyes: it literally burned up the thinker’s vital force.
Réveillé-Parise also ascribed disruptive moral consequences to the poetic constitution: the “great nervous mobility” it fostered sometimes produced abruptly changing moods and an “irascible” susceptibility to criticism and contradiction—traits shown by various famous thinkers, including Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Queen Christine of Sweden (vol. 1, 166–67, 190–94). High intelligence could, moreover, coexist with astonishing weakness of character, because the stable energy necessary for moral fortitude was difficult to sustain when one possessed a nervous system that reacted to the slightest impression. That was especially true of intellectuals who embraced an agitated, modern life (vol. 1, 176–77). When male thinkers did not learn how to master their emotions, their nervous constitution approached that of women: they became volatile, capricious, and histrionic, like the men of letters who had been observed crying over a lost parrot or moved to tears by the loveliest passages in Homer and Virgil (vol. 1, 168). All intellectuals, Réveillé-Parise warned, were susceptible to such weaknesses because of the fundamental laws of their physiology: artists, poets, and mathematicians alike exhibited the same “lively sensibility” that impassioned their ideas, and the same enthusiasm or “fanaticism” for their works, theories, or systems (vol. 1, 132). There was simply something in their nerves, veins, and fibers that moved them to exaggerate their feelings, ideas, or actions—that is, to experience life in “excess,” in both moral and physical terms (vol. 1, 129–30).
However, although he worried about the volatility of “poetically” organized people, Réveillé-Parise plainly saw them as the embodiment of humanity at its best: “the poet, the artist, the scientist, the philosopher is the human being par excellence, the social and progressive being” (vol. 1, 172). He went to great lengths to glorify the toil and ardor involved in creative or scholarly production. This is particularly pronounced in chapter 15 of part I of Physiologie et hygiène, entitled “De l’enthousiasme, de la verve ou orgasme cérébral,” where, citing Richerand, Réveillé-Parise waxed lyrical about the cerebral “oestrus” by which great thinkers worked themselves up into orgasmic-like explosions of ideas. That creative state could trigger a crisis in various body parts, evident in such examples as Grétry spitting up mouthfuls of blood, Mozart losing his senses, Montesquieu’s hair turning white, Lagrange feeling his pulse become irregular, Rousseau suffering a fit of fever, Dryden experiencing a general trembling, and Alfieri’s eyesight dimming (vol. 1, 306–11). Indeed, the effects of such cerebral “orgasms” could be so intense as to make the thinker lose all sense of self—a sort of madness through which the genius plummeted down from the summit of humanity into a bizarre, brutish state:
Another no less remarkable effect of these impetuous movements, and without a doubt the saddest of all, is the loss of the sense of personality. . . . The concentration of repeated thinking force, pushed to its extreme, sometimes overwhelms and stupefies the nervous system. The man of genius suddenly descends to a state lower than the animal, who is at least guided by its instinct. Although in a minority, some poets, artists, and philosophers have lost their minds by wanting to fly too high or plunge too deeply into the obscure depths of metaphysics. (Vol. 1, 312)
Even in less extreme cases, long intellectual endeavors have scarred those who pursued them: “one could call them the marginal beings of our species, either because of the singularity of their opinions, which are at odds with those of their era, or because of the strangeness of their behavior and their states of almost somnambulic distraction.”
Réveillé-Parise thus portrayed intellectuals as living in a state of mental intensity that was both devastating and sublime: although it overwhelmed their nerves and depleted their material bodies, it was also the motor of civilization and social progress. In keeping with the grand sweep of his vision—and his clear determination to make the most of the fifteen years that (according to his “Avant-Propos”) he had devoted to consulting medical works, ancient and modern biographies, memoirs, and letters written by the most famous men in various fields (vol. 1, i–ii)—his pantheon of superior minds featured not just scholarly and literary celebrities but also political giants like Napoleon. In Réveillé-Parise’s eyes, Napoleon deserved inclusion for multiple reasons: not only had he created ideas that changed the destiny of his era, but, like history’s intellectual luminaries, he possessed a special physiology that concentrated his vital forces in his nerves and brain. This was proven by Napoleon’s large, painfully sensitive head and the crushing melancholy he suffered in his final days (vol. 1, 59, 128; vol. 2, 358). In fact, Napoleon is surpassed only by Voltaire and Rousseau as the most frequently cited celebrity in Physiologie et hygiène, suggesting that Réveillé-Parise may have been eager to contribute to the myth-making particular to his era.
Despite his predilection for glamorizing the sufferings of civilization’s giants, Réveillé-Parise adhered to the conventions of scholarly hygiene discourse by preaching the value of moderation in the name of health and self-preservation. Borrowing from Fouquier’s Avantages d’une constitution faible, he maintained that those endowed with the nervous, intellectual temperament were generally better than muscular sorts at managing their health because their heightened sensitivity constantly alerted them to potential dangers (vol. 1, 318–19). Thus, although gens de lettres often experienced minor ailments, they succumbed less often to serious illness than did those with a more fleshy, “plethoric” body type; and, if they were wise, they regarded the temperance they were obliged to observe as a source of happiness and even glory (vol. 1, 320). Réveillé-Parise offered portraits of scholars who had successfully avoided the dangers to which their special physiology exposed them, either because they had “Herculean” muscles as well as energetic nerves, like Plato and Buffon, or because they had adopted a sober, balanced regimen to counterbalance their “extreme” intellectual work (vol. 1, 92; vol. 2, 43). He also included a chapter featuring “biographical proofs” of the power of judicious personal hygiene. Focusing particularly on octogenarian thinkers like Newton, Fontenelle, and Voltaire, he argued that many intellectuals who had enjoyed a long life had started out frail in constitution but mastered early “the art of living and sustaining their strength” (vol. 2, 175). Newton, for example, knew that he had been born weak and delicate and therefore took care to save his strength for his cerebrations: he adhered to an austere dietary regimen, did some physical exercise, stopped working when he was tired, and stayed detached from all passions, even that of glory (vol. 2, 176–78). Fontenelle, for his part, succeeded in juggling the roles of homme de lettres and homme du monde through a clocklike physical regimen and moderation in the moral realm (vol. 2, 179–80).
Réveillé-Parise insisted that preserving one’s health was a mode of self-knowledge that each individual scholar should develop. Accomplishing this entailed scrutinizing three things: first, one’s constitution, by which one could establish the “individual vital dynamometry” specific to one’s body type; second, the specific “modifying agents” that exerted an influence on one’s organic functions; and, third, the effects of those agents on the overall organism or animal economy (vol. 2, 159–61). When they had gathered all of that information, scholars could establish the rule for healthy living that best suited their temperament and circumstances, thus ensuring “full use and free expansion of the intellectual faculties” (vol. 2, 161).
Réveillé-Parise was less inclined to glean case histories directly from medical practice (to which he seems to have devoted less time than to his literary pursuits, after 1830) than to draw on historical and biographical literature about famous thinkers. He justified this choice by arguing that it was the best way for a physician to get behind-the-scenes glimpses of their habits and temperaments (vol. 2, 176). He also interwove into Physiologie et hygiène the voices of some possibly fictional gens de lettres. One was a skeptical magistrate to whom he addressed a long letter near the end of part III in order to present his views on the health effects of the passions and defend them against the charge of materialism (vol. 2, 298–347). Another was a “man of letters, long in my care,” who appeared in a chapter on the patient-doctor relationship. In response to this character’s arguments that the doctor’s prescriptions were overly restrictive for a person who was addicted to the heady pleasures of scholarly life, Réveillé-Parise countered that health, not glory, was the first and most important of all riches for the intellectual, and that physical suffering should not be regarded as the inevitable companion to the cultivation of talent and genius (vol. 2, 116–32). However, he also addressed doctors, offering them practical tips on treating the illnesses of intellectuals. First, they should never forget that this patient group typically had an overactive nervous system, which made “sedative” measures the most effective remedies for most of their ailments (vol. 2, 79). Second, they should remember that scholars seldom gave up their intellectual work voluntarily, which meant that moral therapies were especially important for dealing with them. A wise doctor could, for example, cure a melancholic poet simply by giving him an audience for his work (vol. 2, 96–97). The lucky scholar was one who found a doctor who was not only skilled in the medical arts but also “a compassionate friend” who sympathized with his suffering, knew the traits and anomalies of intellectuals, and understood the sensitive, sometimes stormy nature of “all those whom genius, talents, and celebrity drag from the sleep of the mind and the habits of average life” (vol. 2, 109).
In sum, Réveillé-Parise combined two rather different sorts of discourse in his treatise: idealization of the “poetic” constitution, and the more pedestrian genre of the personal hygiene manual. This mixture was evident even when he responded to philosophical objections that he was “animalizing” genius: alluding to the reactionary spiritualism of Joseph de Maistre, Réveillé-Parise denied that he was a materialist but nonetheless insisted that there was no use denying that history’s great thinkers had huge heads, nervous ailments, and all of the other bodily symptoms that he had described over the course of his treatise (vol. 2, 302). Biography and posthumous observation proved that there was, indeed, a correlation between intelligence and bodily organization. Despite objecting to some of Gall’s theories on that topic, he agreed that there was a direct correlation between the perfection of the brain and its volume (vol. 2, 293). This hypothesis was supported by the postmortem appearance of the heads of several famous thinkers—Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mme de Staël, Napoleon Bonaparte, Byron, Cuvier, and Gall himself—some of which had been kept in jars, autopsied, or measured for circumference, and all of which contained a considerable quantity of cerebral matter (vol. 2, 296–301).
Physiologie et hygiène des hommes livrés aux travaux de l’esprit enjoyed considerable success: after winning a Prix Montyon in 1835, it was reedited three times, reprinted regularly until 1881, and translated into German and Italian. The Italian criminologist Cesar Lombroso referred to it at the outset of his influential work L’uomo di genio: In rapporto alla psichiatria, alla storia ed all’estetica (1888; English translation, The Man of Genius [1891]) while reviewing earlier books that had supplied “proofs” of the tendency of men of genius to experience hallucinations or monomania.75 Dr. Édouard Toulouse also cited it, approvingly, in the introduction to his 1896 study Émile Zola: Enquête médico-psychologique sur les rapports de la supériorité intellectuelle avec la névropathie, where he singled out Réveillé-Parise’s observation that “the faculty of feeling, of having emotions, grows with the intelligence, as much in the series of living beings as in the range going from savages to civilized men.”76 The work’s reputation as a hygiene guide for scholars endured as late as 1921, when the Dominican priest and philosopher Antonin Gilbert Sertillanges praised its fundamental idea: namely, that “the thinker has a special physiology: he must look after it, and not hesitate to seek out expert advice on the matter.”77