Jefferson's Secrets

Everything in the written record instructs us that this was how Thomas Jefferson imagined a man of science and philosophy ought to look forward to his final rest. All his life, he had divided his time between speculation on natural phenomena and regulation of human society—in either case, improving the world by achieving a better understanding of it. He studied the human body so as to expand his capacity to reason. But, as I have already hinted, to view his interest in science and his political vision separately is to mislead, because science also fueled the politics of liberation for him. His entire conception of America was predicated on a philosophical purpose that mirrored the function of medical research: experiment leading to the mastery of nature, to health, to moral improvement, to a better quality of life, to greater human dignity.

A British visitor to Monticello during Jefferson’s retirement years described the aging president as a man in different guises, and in particular as a man who “shun [ned] none of the humbler duties of private life.” During his brief stay, the visitor looked upon an enthusiast of literature, an avid gardener, a “good neighbour,” and thought it curious besides that Jefferson served not just as an unpaid local lawyer but also as “physician . . . of his vicinity.”² It sounds quaint, but should soon make more sense.

Science could not do without generosity. Too few students of history recognize that the Age of Reason was more than an age of abstract philosophy. Jefferson studied and practiced medicine at home, and occasionally gave out advice. The power of sentiment, like the passion that augmented science, gave him something to do as well as to write about. And because he was Thomas Jefferson, when he wrote, or acted, he changed the way people thought; even small things he did were remembered.

Science solved, sentiment enacted. This is the essence of Jefferson’s affinity for the Enlightenment. Its language imbued him with confidence, not to be afraid of open dialogue or necessary change that he equated with progress. The Enlightenment armed him against the forces of arrogance, pride, and false piety that he observed in his larger community and called by such names as “despotism” and “priestcraft.” He may have pretended to ignore the powerful effect of his own prejudices when he displayed an outward calm meant to convince others that he was somehow immunized from the grip of ordinary passions; but it cannot be denied that he read with the greatest eagerness and relished new ideas.

In retirement, he avidly pursued the “moral sciences”—that was how David Hume classified such forward-looking subjects as sociology, political economy, and education. All depended in some way on research in the field of medicine, and in particular on that which highlighted the sensual nature of the human organism. Jefferson’s metaphors drew upon this conviction, as when he courted “a warm visit from the sun (my almighty physician),” or remarked that “books are the best medicine for the ennui of age.” His use of a medicalized vocabulary also explains why he grew so disturbed when the powers of life diminished for him. As Peter Gay puts it in his classic study of the Enlightenment, “Medicine was the most highly visible and the most heartening index of general improvement.” It was hope for more sustained activity, for the vigorous life, vita activa, that raised spirits among the eighteenth-century intelligentsia.³

Jefferson the learner, educator, philosophic critic, and defiant political healer acquired many of his guiding principles from medical discourse—the French and Swiss, perhaps, more than the English.⁵ One key to understanding his expectations from the vocabulary of medicine is the work of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, whose landmark Treatise on Sensation (1754) is responsive to Locke. Its aim can be summed up in one line: “By observing the birth of sensation, we show how we acquire the use of our faculties.” Perceptions, desires, and all thinking and judgment derive, Condillac said, from inquiétude, or uneasiness; before there is even “the idea,” there is “the will”—choice. In other words, the mind transforms sensation into practical expression. It engages the capacity for feeling and so produces the attentiveness from which memory and judgment are formed.⁶

Breaking down the processes of thought-experience, Condillac considered desire to be merely “la sensation transformée,” sensation transformed, or recalled with pleasure to the imagination. Now think for a moment about Jefferson’s 1825 letter to Dr. Waterhouse, in which he considered the value of long life. If happiness begins in life with the first pleasurable sensation, as Condillac instructs, and happiness compounds as pleasurable sensations grow in number, then the debility of age (and attendant sensations) heighten awareness of declining faculties: memory, imagination, passions. This was clearly on Jefferson’s mind when in 1817 he mused to Abigail Adams that natural processes were “stealing from us, one by one, the faculties of enjoyment.” The reduction of sensations “gradually extinguished ... the wish to stay here,” one’s impulse to survive.⁷

As an eager student of the Enlightenment, seeing the world through the prism of vital sensations, Jefferson insisted that the most striking impressions (pleasure or pain) were the ones to be recalled through life most powerfully. As we shall see repeatedly, the imprint of sensations—memory, imagination, passions—was a powerful instigator in Jefferson’s philosophy of mind and politics alike.

“Where there is life, and sensation, there probably is thought also.” Evidence of Jefferson’s ongoing intellectual interest in nervous sensations. He had read (and apparently reread) the “Chemical Essays” of Bishop Richard Watson, professor at Cambridge, which were published between 1781 and 1787. This excerpt is from a letter Jefferson wrote to François Adrian Van der Kemp, February 9, 1818. Library of Congress.

There is a simple way to demonstrate this: Jefferson’s literary-epistolary persona was decidedly nostalgic. To women he reflexively sang the praises of old friendship, as he lamented the passage of time; or, as in the above-cited letter to Abigail Adams, he fantasized about their meeting again: “. . . and could I, in the spirit of your wish, count backwards a score of years, it would not be long before Ellen [his well-traveled granddaughter] and myself would pay our homage personally to Quincy [the Adamses’ hometown]. But those 20. years, alas! where are they?” To men of the Revolution, Jefferson gave tribute to an eventful moment in history. To his fellow signer of the Declaration, Dr. Rush, he summed up his nostalgia in 1811: “I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man’s milk and restorative cordial.” Reflection on the Revolution was restorative in recalling the human energy applied to the protection of America’s natural abundance. Recollection ruled, memory motivated—it is hardly surprising that the nation’s birth took on affection (as well as authority) in the collective memory of its midwives. The inalterability of the liberty won in the act of declaring independence became an image of hope and a constant refrain for Jefferson, the solid ground on which his country stood.⁸

Just as plainly, the stamp of sensation upon memory could have a negative impact upon political society. It was Jefferson’s overwhelming conviction that blacks and whites were caught in a desperate power struggle that made the emancipation of slaves and their reintegration into American society impossible: Slaves would never be able to overcome the “ten thousand recollections . . . of the injuries they have sustained.” Memory, whether appreciative and hopefilled or decidedly fearful, elicited passion and recorded its influence on Jefferson’s style.⁹

Jefferson and his circle of scientifically influenced correspondents, one and all, regarded the quality of life, the impact of memory, and the power of imagination by how vividly each sensation formed itself amid constant, necessary, invisible movement in the brain. Health and vigor required “due excitement.” When Jefferson reacted to Dr. Rush’s letter proclaiming the public’s esteem for humane propositions in the president’s first inaugural address, he described the effect of Rush’s letter itself: “The pleasing sensations produced in the mind by it’s affectionate contents.” Writing to James Madison on the effect of partisan political galas, Jefferson noted that this kind of event “excites uneasy sensations in some.” To John Adams, early in his retirement, Jefferson reflected on the politicization of religion in their age as “the sensations excited in free yet firm minds, by the terrorism of the day.” (“Terrorism,” at this time, could mean something akin to brainwashing.) But nothing gets the point across better than Jefferson’s 1820 remark to Adams about his “habitual anodyne, ‘I feel: therefore I exist.’” He went on to clarify: “When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind.” In short, sensations described the primary function of the human brain.¹⁰

Why is it so important to establish this? To prove that the Enlightenment was not so much preoccupied with the intellect, as it was influenced by an affective psychology. As logical and rational as Jefferson wished to be in applying his knowledge to his world, his letters show that he embraced Condillac’s terms and understood desires and passions as the first components of human nature. Events always struck him by their “sensible effects.”

In his acceptance of the medical Enlightenment, Jefferson next made the jump from sensationalist philosophy to physiology. Sensations and impressions became less intangible as nerves. Nerves roused heart and arteries into action and produced a visibly “ardent glow over the whole body.” This was especially detected on faces because the skin was abundantly supplied with nerves: Frustration begot “paleness” and “tremor,” and love was exhibited in cheeriness and “vivacity”—the effect of nervous sensation. Dr. George Cheyne’s conspicuous study of “nervous distempers,” The English Malady (1733), called wide attention to the power of the nervous system. He provided an entire vocabulary to a passionate people in their lifelong search for “Fortitude, Patience, Tranquillity.” His very readable three-volume work was subtitled “A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers.” In it, he identified the essential “fibre” behind nervous sensations, which was stimulated into “Spasms and Convulsions.” In suggesting that the human organism was delicately balanced, Cheyne explained: “All the Fibres of the Body . . . are sensible.”¹¹

When he referred, as he did often, to the “sensible” or feeling organism, Jefferson was thinking of Cheyne’s categories, of the fibrous system, the nerve fibers that traversed the body’s sympathetic reactive system that was centered in the “sensorium” of the brain. Eighteenth-century intellectuals were fascinated by states of the body and modes of perception. The Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet pronounced in 1759 that it was through the body that the mind or soul acted: “We know that ideas are attached to the workings of certain fibers: we can thus reason about these fibers because we see fibers; we can study a bit their movements, the results of their movements, and the connections they have among themselves.”¹²

“Fibres” encompassed every imaginable human attribute: from memory to language to abstract ideas of beauty, harmony, liberty, and selfhood. In varying contexts, Jefferson typically wrote that he felt with “every fibre” of his being. He denied his political ambition by saying that “every fibre of that passion has been eradicated.” He would also eradicate “every fibre of aristocracy” from American politics; and, as a mark of patriotism he claimed that he had “not one farthing of interest, nor one fibre of attachment” to anything beyond “my country.” Female hysteria, “uterine fury,” in the language of eighteenth-century medicine, was the result of incompleteness and inquiétude, or “fibres” gone mad. It should not be surprising that the term moral fiber continues as a part of vernacular English.¹³

To understand Jefferson’s imagination, then, we must recover an old vocabulary. We must examine how he linked the physical body and the operations of the mind to the development of a natural amiability and the makings of social policy. His political legacy, in a very real way, has depended on it. The language he drew upon in attempting to fathom human behavior in general and partisan struggle in particular engaged with these connective elements that produced nervous energy. He referred to “vibrations,” “spasms,” “convulsions,” “commotions,” “tremors,” “irritants,” and “agitations.” These seven words, individually and collectively, epitomize the peculiar manner in which Jefferson employed nerve-based imagery to influence others.

This is not to say that the nerves gave expression to fearful prospects only. Jefferson’s was a time when “nervous” could mean “vigorous,” as when the British orator John Wilkes praised Jefferson for giving the Declaration of Independence a “manly, nervous sense,” an effect that moved humanity. In 1819, Jefferson recalled the “nervous” energy of the Revolutionary firebrand Samuel Adams in a similar vein: “I can say that he was truly a great man . . . whose deep conceptions, nervous style, and undaunted firmness made him truly our bulwark in debate.”¹⁴

Whatever the sentiment or interpretation, a nerve-dominated vocabulary generated power. In his first inaugural address, when speaking of political intolerance, Jefferson coupled the “throes and convulsions of the ancient world” with the “agonizing spasms of infuriated man,” metaphors of the agitated body. Writing of European efforts to undo the pernicious effects of arbitrary rule, he claimed he felt “strong spasms of the heart” in favor of this movement, and then pronounced: “I am entirely persuaded that the agitations of the public mind advance it’s powers, and that at every vibration between the points of liberty and despotism, something will be gained for the former” (italics supplied in each case). Valuable clues to a lost emotional universe are embedded in this language.¹⁵

The noun convulsion and the verb convulse will be shown at key moments to be dynamic and revealing words in Jefferson’s vocabulary. They serve as a literary warning mechanism when he contemplates social or sexual dysfunction; they trigger in his anxious mind a rhetorical call to restore stability or balance. This can be said to have begun with his draft of the Declaration of Independence, in which he assessed the threat to the land of America: A suffering people lay “exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without and convulsions within.” As well, near the end of his life, when he refused to commit to political debate, Jefferson wrote: “At the age of 82. I have no inclination to volunteer myself into a question which convulses a nation. Quiet is my wish with the peace and good will of the world. With it’s contentions I have nothing to do.”¹⁶ In Jeffersonian parlance, convulsions disturbed the body politic and prevented affection and harmony from arising out of discord and division.¹⁷

In Jefferson’s metaphorically rich, medically threatening environment, human energy could be used up or wasted, consumption could defeat the will, and nervous convulsion undermined natural serenity or arrested the power to achieve and enjoy tranquil felicity. In his Notes on Virginia, published in 1785, Jefferson described the sublime spectacle of southwest Virginia’s Natural Bridge, a lofty arch of stone and earth on property that he owned: “It is on the ascent of a hill, which seems to have been cloven through its length by some great convulsion.” Crossing on foot and momentarily glancing down, Jefferson suffered “a violent headache.” The Natural Bridge was irresistible yet convulsive; the same can be said about Jefferson’s attraction to the torment of political life. This is a significant statement about the Virginian’s disposition, if not an explanation for his lack of self-diagnosis. Jefferson’s friend Dr. Rush went so far as to attribute all fevers to “convulsive action”—otherwise known at this time as “morbid excitement.”¹⁸

It may have been, at times, a rhetorical strategy, but Jefferson constantly blamed politics for keeping him from his happy pursuit of the sciences and “speculative meditations.” Yet, in his mind, the importance of the American experiment to world historical progress demanded that he commit himself. In 1818, he wrote paradigmatically in this regard: “It was my lot to be cast into being at the period of the commencement of a political convulsion, which has continued since to agitate the whole civilized world.” Though he had grown old, the “convulsion” continued to “agitate”—and to stimulate his mind. What more is there to say in identifying Jefferson’s overriding sense of the world of men? Combining words drawn from the science of nervous physiology was a regular feature of his writing and, as it should be clear by now, not by accident.¹⁹

In his famous dialogue between Head and Heart, a twelve-page love letter written from Paris to the artist Maria Cosway in 1786, Jefferson contrasted his active Heart to the “gloomy Monk” and the “sublimated philosopher.” He marveled at the human capacity to experience “the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart.” A heart’s “beat,” in his lexicon, did not measure up to the more persuasive power of a heart’s “generous spasm.” In the dialogue, Jefferson’s Head vainly reasoned in its effort to overcome primal sensations: “The art of life is the art of avoiding pain.” The Heart insisted that reason alone was “frigid,” “unsocial,” and, in neurological terms, dulling. As he negotiated between Head and Heart, Jefferson expressed himself best and most humanely when he acknowledged the systemic source of contradiction and common anxieties.²⁰

If these elements of Jeffersonian language and culture still seem a bit intangible, let us think of what they mean through a straightforward analogy to modern concepts of mind. A few decades ago, more than now, physicians routinely diagnosed “nervous breakdowns.” The same phrase could be used colloquially without clinical precision. Someone can be a “nervous wreck” without a distinct pathology, or can remark casually, “My nerves are shot,” to acknowledge ineffectiveness. Our cultural vocabulary may have replaced the activity-generated image of a “nervous breakdown” with the less-sudden phenomenon of “depression,” in clinical as well as everyday discourse, yet our conception that we face “nerve-racking” choices in life, that nerves retain their amorphous yet influential character, is translatable to conversations of Jefferson’s day.

We can appreciate Jefferson’s language better by charting subtle shifts over time that signify larger cultural preferences. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, doctors still spoke of the nerves as “impressions” generated by “fibers,” and still noted that we feel, move, and think through the nervous system. But they now found equivalence in a mid-century invention: “The construction of the nervous system, and its manner of action, may be compared to the arrangement of a common electric battery used in telegraphy.” Nerves had become electrical.²¹ Today’s scientists tend to describe the nervous system’s operation through the unemotional metaphor of communication: Nerves carry information to the brain for analysis, and the brain generates a response. But we still draw liberally on nervous physiology when we use “body language” as part of our cultural vocabulary. We know what someone is referring to when he or she has a “gut feeling.” These are other examples of medical referents that have crossed into vernacular speech.²²

His great rival, Alexander Hamilton of New York, interacted with Jefferson in President Washington’s cabinet, and marvelously spoofed the Virginian when he published a piece in the newspaper referring to “plain Thomas J—; wonderful humility on all occasions.”²⁴ Clearly, Jefferson used his body, his corporeal style, to convey an aversion to conflict. In a sense, he cheated those who expected (and might have preferred) the directness of a political battler, which Jefferson’s pen proved him to be many times over during his career in government.

His most thorough nineteenth-century biographer, Henry S. Randall, had regular access to Jefferson’s grandchildren and others who knew the president. Randall reported on incidents in which everyday people happened upon Jefferson during his travels between Monticello and Washington, started conversations with the “tall stranger,” and sometimes berated Jefferson the man or his policies without recognizing him in their presence. In every such vignette, Jefferson is unruffled, even playful, offering no resistance, but perhaps wryly offering a useful homily about withholding censure if it concerns someone you do not know firsthand. Randall shows how in the presence of “servants, and, indeed, of all plain and ignorant men,” Jefferson did not appear imposing and formidable, as one might expect a lordly southerner to appear: “His look . . . fell benignantly and lovingly upon the weak, the simple, and the lowly, and they at once felt and returned the sympathy.”²⁵

Whether the above are exaggerated events or in large measure true aspects of Jefferson’s life matters less than the fact that they are consistently reflected in Jefferson’s self-projection in letters. As president, he refused to make an official goodwill tour of the northern states, as George Washington had done, because of concern about the sensations such a trip would produce. “I confess I am not reconciled to the idea of a chief magistrate parading himself through the several States, as an object of public gaze, and in quest of an applause which, to be valuable, should be purely voluntary. I had rather acquire silent good will by a faithful discharge of my duties.” Traveling as a private citizen, after retirement, would, he said, “better harmonize” with his feelings.²⁶

In modern times, the contrast between Jefferson’s modest demeanor and fighting words—his partisan personality—has been lost to the great mass of Americans. He appeals broadly across the political spectrum today as the first national leader to herald the concept of “representative democracy.” But that is not how he was perceived two hundred years ago. He seized upon inquiétude and converted it into political action. He roused ordinary citizens to demand protection from excess power. He was especially sensitive to, and explicitly identified, abuses of authority among the self-satisfied Hamiltonian Federalists of the chronically turbulent 1790s, who questioned the wisdom of the people at large and insisted that society’s “better sorts” should direct the course of political improvement. For Jefferson, the hardened Federalists were betraying the Revolution. That is why he, along with the then congressman James Madison, organized a political party to challenge them.

The important thing to remember is that Jefferson constructed a language of body, mind, and sensations that proved to be an integral part of his political message. He fashioned his words so that they effervesced and incited, yet they were meant to be read as advocating harmony and common understanding. The language of sensation helped his words come to life, and penetrate, and stimulate.

Because physical sensation was the vital force behind the human personality, rich drama flowed from human activity. Even when Jefferson’s words did not borrow directly from the science of sensation, they were shaped by it. Here are random examples of his literary genius that affect in this manner, the key words italicized:

“The good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army.... Cherish therefore the spirit of our people and keep alive their attention.”

“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive.... I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere.”

“I appeal to the true fountains of evidence, the head & heart of every rational & honest man. It is there nature has written her moral laws, & where every man may read them for himself.”

“Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant.”²⁷

Read together, we can see how the dramatic, euphonic intermingling of words might appeal to an alert sense of right and wrong. Good sense is an army; spirited rebellion is a natural phenomenon; bigotry is a disease. All in all, Jefferson says about himself: I cherish; I keep alive the spirit of honest, moral introspection; I remain healthy through buoyant enthusiasm.

This is why we still like Jefferson. His words uplift. Of course, they also attempt to justify a political ideology—an ideology now well ingrained, but then quite new. Knowing how easy it was for the careful framers of a new republic to fixate on selfishness and corruptibility in society generally, he delivered instead, in adroit and elegant phrasing, a message far more personal. It was a message of liberality and unselfish commitment that emanated from medical understandings of the moral sense as it related to nervous physiology. He kept saying, in the largest sense, in universal strains: By tapping into our innate sensitivity, we can be better as people; we can do more as a government.

For Jefferson, the American people’s essential character was constituted at the precise moment of the nation’s birth, when a rhetorical and actual resistance to tyranny were one. In choosing to preserve (or package) the Revolution’s earliest, purest, most ecstatic moment of optimism in words that exploited the effect of nervous susceptibility on the popular imagination, Jefferson gave his name to a political faith he knew would never go out of style in America. This was his genius, and his historic success. In a highly conscious effort, and by using the most powerful vocabulary he had at hand, he saw to it that his words kept alive the first promise of the struggle for independence: common commitment. The Declaration ends with the signers’ mutual pledge of “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

Jeffersonian democracy was, from the beginning of Jefferson’s career, a radical movement based on sympathy for the people at large. “I am not among those who fear the people,” Jefferson wrote in 1816, well into his retirement. “They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.” He was effusive in his remarks on social equality (“I cannot say things by halves”), without ever transcending the material body of his democracy. He aligned himself with the emotional health of “the corporeal inhabitants” of “this corporeal globe.”²⁸

It is important to pause and explain precisely what “sympathy” meant. Certainly, its meaning coincided with the modern definition of emotional support or generosity of spirit; but it was richer than that. Anyone with the least amount of medical knowledge understood nervous sympathies as constant, perceptible and imperceptible, movement within the body, by which impressions were transmitted from the brain to other organs. For Jefferson’s self-protective Head and outgoing Heart alike, physiological and moral sympathies had considerable bearing on the active imagination. Modern American political life has inherited a Jeffersonian definition of “sympathy” in the public’s embrace of humanitarian commitment as an instrument of policy; but we have not inherited the more visceral sense of the word that Jefferson’s generation possessed, that is, the body-spirit duality it encompassed.²⁹

In his medical school lectures, Dr. Benjamin Rush laid out his thinking on that “certain connection of feeling in the nerves, called sympathy.” This was what caused the salivary glands in a hungry person to respond to the smell of tasty food. Rush theorized that sympathies made it possible to recognize diseases in otherwise “insensible parts”; and sympathies enabled diseases to be “diffused over the whole body” rather than concentrated in a certain organ. As for treatment, “knowing the sympathy between the nose and the intestines, we remove the itching of the nose, by dislodging worms in the intestines.” The same phenomenon “extends to our ideas,” he said, “for [intimate] association is governed by the same laws as [physiological] sympathy.”³⁰

Sympathy explains how “nervous sensibility” became the “culture of sensibility” that caused early Americans to identify philanthropic urges with notions of republican virtue, thereby consummating the marriage of philosophic medicine and republican politics. It was by means of internal sympathies that the sentient mind could respond, remember, and empathize. Under ordinary circumstances, nerves carried a healthy kind of excitement (a desired level of human susceptibility) to the generous soul. This, then, was “sensibility,” the capacity of the soul to find fulfillment in commitment to a cause outside oneself. And yet, so desirable a quality could also prove disruptive. People (women especially, but also men of uncommon compassion) suffered from having too much feeling. Well-being, therefore, for both the private and political Jefferson, had to mean balanced or harmonious living, brought about by monitoring excitable desires.

A lifetime of letters shows that Jefferson was attuned to the enlarged role of sympathy in human affairs, but he felt the bodily part of its dual nature most particularly as he grew older. “The hand of age has more than begun to press upon me,” he wrote DeWitt Clinton of New York in 1815. “And with the diminished vigor of body the mind also has it’s sympathy, ardor sensibly abates in those pursuits which were the delight of earlier years.” Because of sensation and nervous excitability, sympathy was possible. “In a word,” wrote a Philadelphiatrained doctor in his 1799 medical dissertation, “the whole system, mind and body, is one mass of general sympathy.”³¹

None of these ideas about sensation, stimuli, and sociability was homegrown. Jefferson’s friend Dr. Rush, “the American Sydenham,” was, like Caspar Wistar, the other renowned Philadelphia physician in Jefferson’s circle, trained in medicine at the prestigious University of Edinburgh.³² The speculative Rush went even beyond Jefferson in establishing links between the body’s active nerves and the spirit of republican politics or social policy. He actually regarded the American Revolution as a medical phenomenon in which liberty, as a condition of life, affected the relationship between an individual’s health and the health of all.

In his Account of the Influence of the Military and Political Events of the American Revolution upon the Human Body, Rush wrote that oppositional Loyalists suffered mental and physical breakdowns, but hysterical women who welcomed the Revolution were actually cured of their mental condition. After the war, however, Americans’ mental state deteriorated when people failed to check the impulse to enjoy liberty; that is, liberty became an unhealthy addiction: “The excess of the passion for liberty,” wrote Dr. Rush, “inflamed by the successful issue of the war, produced, in many people, opinions and conduct which could not be removed by reason nor restrained by government. For a while, they threatened to render abortive the goodness of heaven to the United States.” This was, he concluded, “a species of insanity,” and he gave a name to the syndrome: “Anarchia.”³³

Jefferson had his own, more positive way of putting this. In his Head and Heart dialogue, written in 1786 for the benefit (and enchantment) of Maria Cosway, he attributed American independence to passion and imagination rather than to rational thinking. Though British power was indisputable from the outset, “we threw up a few pulsations of our warmest blood: we supplied enthusiasm against wealth and numbers.” As it was for sympathy, the dictionary definition of enthusiasm in this era was markedly stronger than our present usage: It meant “heat of imagination; violence of passion.” A passionate, pulsating system explained, in biomedical imagery, the American spirit.³⁴

Yet the spirited patriot publicly contained his passions. More than a thinker, Thomas Jefferson was a strategist. He was different from his conservative political opposition in not being afraid, on paper, of the occasional eruption of passion, if employed in a progressive cause. For most in his world, though, the word passion (other than as a neutral category of neurophysiological study) implied “excess.” Jefferson himself decried “English passions . . . nourished by the newspapers,” “vulgar vehicles of passion” that contributed to war fever.³⁵ Passion served to “distract” or “mislead”; passionate (out-of-balance) behavior was characterized, in more directly medicalized language, as a “deformity,” or a “disorder.” ³⁶ When Jefferson’s old school contemporaries wished to critique Jeffersonian democracy, they noisily branded the third president a social radical who would let loose unhealthy passions.

Using the same nuance of political language, conventional morality demanded an antidote, a cure, for excess passion. It was for a public character to prove “candour” without succumbing to “agitation” or “violent emotions.” For Jefferson himself, “candour” was precisely the personal quality that his supporters most warmly attributed to him and that his vocal detractors doubted he possessed at all.

Jefferson routinely used the word salutary both when he was discussing personal health issues and when he was referring to “republican principles.” In his preference for a sound agrarian lifestyle over the unhealthy urban air, he wrote: “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.”³⁷ (Though Jefferson probably had London in mind, each square mile in New York and Philadelphia in 1800 was home to more than 40,000 people; in the nation as a whole, the number was six per square mile.)³⁸ If we accept that he did not use such language indifferently, but that the vocabulary he drew from medical studies often consisted of weighty words, then we must link that vocabulary to public conflicts and Jefferson’s record on socially disruptive issues, as well as to his private judgments.

America was beginning to separate culturally from England, having already done so politically. The Jeffersonian period, as should already be clear, was a time of profound cultural transformation. As a committed Revolutionary, Jefferson found his enemy in the image of the English aristocrat who loved pomp, craved luxurious living, and enjoyed his pleasures at the expense of others. He gave it as a catechism in 1795: “There is no quarter of the globe so desireable [sic] as America, no state in America so desireable as Virginia, no county in Virginia equal to Albemarle, and no spot in Albemarle to compare to Monticello.” To the Marquis de Lafayette, in 1823, the eighty-year-old Jefferson insisted that no matter how political parties named themselves, the world was naturally divided into Democrat and Aristocrat, and that the latter species was, always, unhealthy: “The sickly, weakly, timid man, fears the people.” Thus the aristocrat was wasteful in his habits, covetous of power, and unrestrained, thoroughly unhealthy, and as much a “sore” on the body politic as the urban squalor Jefferson found symptomatic of the worst kind of social inequality. As a republican, he contrasted this image to his own occupation: grower. He thought of himself as one who created and distributed commodities of real value. He was, comparatively speaking, a fiscal conservative, a hands-on lover of the land, a generous employer, a family man; he idealized his environment, and dubbed it the most healthful on Earth.³⁹

Jefferson learned early on to appreciate the European aesthetic, and he acquired expensive habits. Yet his politics decried the “luxury” attributable to extensive foreign commerce, and the fashions and fineries that ostensibly corrupted a people. The historian Drew R. McCoy offers the following definition of “luxury” as Jefferson understood it: “dangerous forms of sensual excess that accompanied men’s indulgence in artificial and superfluous pleasure.”⁴⁰

It is that sensuousness—unhealthy appetite—that most concerns us here. Jefferson’s premise in opposing “luxury” was that enlightened moderation in all facets of life fed harmony. We can better understand how Jefferson lived when we accept the tension inherent in his situation: He was born to the privilege of America’s landowning elite; he was an art collector, wine lover, epicure, and builder who justified expenditures on grounds of taste. At the same time, he insisted that the national wealth was properly thought of as a function of the judicious use of the Earth’s bounty, not as a means to material comfort.⁴¹

The unavoidable problem with Jefferson’s political economy and his critical assessment of aristocracy was that he lived well at the expense of others. As much as he feared America’s re-creating the British social order under Federalist rule, and as much as he sought to construct a new kind of society predicated on the collapse of inherited privilege, he could not have intended for liberal intellectuals like himself to suffer degradation in their way of life. He had been exposed in the 1780s to the Parisian literati and their opulent liberal friends—noblemen such as Lafayette and the gentle duc de la Rochefoucauld—and he, too, wanted to live the good life. Yet he believed deeply in social justice; that he never feigned, even accepting that his lifestyle required the unpaid exertions of enslaved Africans.

Playing up his rediscovered agricultural identity when he formally retired from politics, the hospitable Jefferson attempted a Virginian’s balancing act: to behave fairly and decently toward people of all social ranks, while squeezing all he could out of his farms; to be a republican, without freeing his slaves, and without selling off lands to support a more moderate domestic economy. In this era preceding what might be called “rampant democracy,” that instability, mutability, and ignorance Alexis de Tocqueville sneered at in the 1830s,⁴² Jefferson lived like an aristocrat without being “known” as an aristocrat, that is, without disparaging the smaller-scale farmer, without denying them their equal rights, without succumbing to aristocratic vices of the dissipated sort that he alluded to in his 1823 letter to Lafayette—the vices thought to bring down empires. His democratic style of aristocratic living was equally a matter of self-definition as publicity. Never mind that his spending appears to us rather extravagant, he would have considered his actions as an effort to achieve the quiet, simple, unostentatious life.

Jefferson could never sustain a life that was truly “simple”. As one who did not easily sit still, he presented himself with massive challenges, even in his retirement. Conceiving and constructing the new and very public University of Virginia, he worked tirelessly, first to gain financial support from the Virginia legislature, and later to attract an excellent faculty. Just as Monticello itself was envisioned as a legendary retreat from the tumult of public disagreement, affording ease, tranquility, and the opportunity for undisturbed self-cultivation, his university was meant to provide physical health along with useful knowledge, to show the way to republican happiness and dissuade a younger generation of Americans from hungering after aristocratic excess and overindulgence.

How exactly, then, did health comport with a rejection of aristocratic pretension? The answer lies in the design of Jefferson’s university. Many have studied in detail its arresting Greek revival architecture, but something further needs to be said about the inspiration behind Jefferson’s ultimate experiment in republican education. It is well known that he made sketches of places he had seen in Europe from 1784 to 1789—the signature dome of Monticello and the Rotunda of the university have their French antecedents. However, far less attention has been given to the medical Enlightenment that animated Jefferson as he contemplated a university suited to his tastes.

As enamored as he was with physician-philosophers during his Paris years, so, too, was Jefferson attracted to the cause of hospital reform that arose among them and flourished just as he arrived there. His friends in France, the liberal intellectuals, shared the view he had expressed in his Notes on Virginia (published in France in 1785), that, except when surgery was needed, “nature and kind nursing” in a home-like setting was superior to a stay in a hospital, “where the sick, the dying, and the dead are crammed together in the same rooms, and often in the same beds.”⁴³ Principals of the Paris Academy of Sciences submitted designs for a new, healthier hospital that would be situated away from the crowded center of the city and built on a garden-like plan.

For centuries, the massive, fusty, unwholesome Hôtel-Dieu had been packing sick people together in a death trap they were unlikely to escape. The new, decentralized health care system placed its emphasis instead on an open-air setting, discriminating among disease types (to separate patients suffering from different illnesses), and attending to sanitation requirements. Such a place would be far better for convalescing patients. This was Jefferson’s concept of progress, too. In 1786, a close friend, the philosophe Marquis de Condorcet, proposed to the Academy of Sciences a plan that would remove responsibility from the church and instead put health care decisions in the hands of local organizations.

Jefferson approved of both the reform impulse and the architectural model of the French hospital plan. This is readily apparent in his layout of the celebrated lawn of the University of Virginia: its parallel walks, marked by symmetrical pavilions—five on each side, and facing. There is little doubt that Jefferson borrowed his design from the Paris hospital plan of the late 1780s, which consisted of the same idea of neoclassical pavilions, albeit with six, rather than five, facing structures. (The opposite sides were divided into wings for male and female patients.) Open gardens for recuperating patients occupied the middle area that forms the lawn in Jefferson’s redesign. At the head of the French archetype was a domed structure similar to Jefferson’s Rotunda. In Jefferson’s proposal, the pavilions featured distinct classrooms at ground level and professors’ quarters above, all connected by a covered porch and walkway to keep the university community dry. Small classrooms made it possible for the air to circulate and promote health; as in the hospital plan, fire and contagious diseases were less likely to spread than they would in a single massive structure.⁴⁴

Even before his project was feasible, Jefferson was excitedly imagining it. In 1800, he wrote to Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen and a political reformer whom he held in the highest esteem, and contrasted the situation of Virginia’s first college, his own alma mater, William & Mary, with the institution he dreamt of building. Thinking medically as well as politically, he called Williamsburg “eccentric in it’s position”—residing near the coast, not very far inland—and thus “exposed to bilious diseases as all the lower country is.” He had a wholesome alternative: “We wish to establish in the upper & healthier country, & more centrally for the state, an University on a plan so broad & liberal & modern, as to be worth patronizing with the public support, and be a temptation to the youth of other states to come and drink of the cup of knowledge & fraternize with us.”⁴⁵ A few years later, as president, with his French experience still in mind, Jefferson wrote to his fellow Virginian (and future U.S. senator) Littleton W. Tazewell: “Large houses are always ugly, inconvenient, exposed to the accident of fire, and bad in case of infection.... In fact a university should not be a house but a village.” To another southern politician, William H. Crawford, he compared America’s “pseudo-citizens” to a “disease” for desiring to remake the country into the unhealthful city of London.⁴⁶

The whole finally came to him in 1810, after his first year in retirement, when he envisioned for Tennessee judge Hugh L. White “an academical village, instead of a large and common den of noise, of filth and of fetid air. It would afford that quiet retirement so friendly to study, and lessen the dangers of fire, infection and tumult.” Knowledge was not only power, as Francis Bacon famously said, but, to Jefferson, it was the source of a healthy and felicitous existence.⁴⁷

As early as the 1800 letter to Priestley, Jefferson specified that anatomy, surgery, and medicine were absolutely essential to his then visionary policy to advance American higher education.⁴⁸ The university took him nearly a decade to realize, and proved to be the great triumph of his retirement years. Beginning in 1816, he managed labor, finance, and curricular affairs, in addition to architectural plans, down to the tiniest details. As a result of his singular efforts, the professors he hired would teach what he wanted them to teach, and the university would function according to his design. It would therefore introduce a path-breaking medical curriculum.

In early 1825, when Dr. Dunglison and two other professors who had sailed with him did not arrive on schedule, Jefferson postponed the university’s opening. He feared the men lost at sea, and a fourteen-week voyage, more than double the average, made his concern legitimate. As a result, he greeted Dunglison’s appearance in Charlottesville that spring as a particular blessing. Dunglison and his bride were able to move right in to a neoclassical apartment on the lawn of the university. The doctor’s first impression of Jefferson was surprise at how energetic he was: In mid-1825, the father of the university was still riding his horse and walking “with all the activity of one twenty or thirty years younger.” Their partnership, though brief, proved to be a highly agreeable one. Young Dr. Dunglison was meticulous and hard working, every bit the scholar Jefferson had hoped for in a professor of medicine.⁴⁹

Nor is it a coincidence that Jefferson had already begun stocking the library with a large selection of medical, surgical, and pharmacological texts, and planning a state-supported clinic that would offer free medical care to those who could not afford it. Jefferson’s goal was charitable, and his method cunning. As he had put it to Priestley back in 1800, in recognizing America’s relative backwardness, “We should propose to draw from Europe the first characters in science, by considerable temptations, which would not need to be repeated after the first set should have prepared fit successors & given reputation to the institution.” It was a patriotic conspiracy, and he saw to its implementation.

He wanted to train America’s top physicians, and he even designed an “Anatomical Theatre” he called “indispensable to the school of Anatomy,”⁵⁰ in which medical students would acquire their skills by learning to perform dissections. His correspondence shows that he scoured the country for preserved specimens of everything from brains to uteruses. To complete his university, he never stopped doing, and it seemed to him perfectly appropriate to “tempt” the first generation of professors away from superior European institutions, with suitable financial incentives to lure them to America. Afterward, their students—Americans—would pass on what they had learned, and in doing so make the initial European connection irrelevant. If the ex-president had his way, the University of Virginia would reach out to meritorious youths, North and South, and bind the nation to the Jeffersonian ideal of liberal erudition.

Just before the start of building, he wrote of the university with a metaphor from nature: “I look to it as a germ from which a great tree may spread itself.”⁵¹ As the university opened, Jefferson, almost as the “nature’s god” of his immortal Declaration, directed operations from Monticello, sitting high above and looking down upon the academical village he had created. From the beginning, he had been its prime mover, and insofar as his associates understood that success or failure would be assigned to him, he executed his plan without interference.⁵²

He was as concerned with the health of the university in its first year as he was with his own sinking health. He continued to oversee the psychological well-being, along with the academic prospects, of the first crop of students. In this mission, he found Dr. Dunglison a useful liaison. Barely a month after his arrival in Charlottesville, and a few days before the Fourth of July, 1825, Dunglison, in his role as secretary to the university faculty, transmitted a request from the student body: The young men petitioned for a Fourth of July vacation.

Although Jefferson protested that as rector of the university he was merely one member of the governing Board of Visitors and did not bear sole responsibility for the decision, he knew otherwise. He made it clear that he took a hard line on time off from studies. As it stood, the only authorized vacation was from December 15 to January 31, to avoid, as he put it, “the common abuse by which 2. or 3. months of the year are lost to the students under the name of vacations. The thread of their studies is broke & more time still to be expended in recovering it.” His message was that education was not a divisible but a combinable product, and not empty ceremony either; the student retained what he learned as he added to it.⁵³

The students had apparently thought they could take advantage of Jefferson’s uniquely sentimental connection to the Fourth of July and so steal a little vacation time. But Jefferson, preoccupied with the future of America’s governance, had labored hard on the university and was unmoved. Indeed, for the old man on the mountain, the students’ minds were unfinished for as long as America was unfinished.

Jefferson had a view toward philanthropy, but he also felt he knew when to overrule. It was the privilege of a founder. His university had been set up as a laboratory, and Jefferson figured he had earned the right to direct its experiments. He never wearied of building, nor of systematizing his own and others’ education. No matter how his physical condition lagged, the search for knowledge never ended. The love of science and the art of living well were one and the same to him.

Sensations, Nerve Fibers, Convulsions, and Spasms

Body Language and the Body Politic

A Salutary Education