The Dietetics of the Soul in Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century

Doctors since ancient times had generally assumed that the emotions, “the passions of the soul,” such as sadness, lust, love, despair and fear, could have a potent effect on the health of the mind and body. As Kennaway shows, eighteenth-century physicians and lay observers continued in these assumptions, with little evidence of any strict division between the two that some have believed to have been ushered in by the work of Descartes. He also stresses the continuity in the centrality of the digestive system in the physiological basis for the link between body and mind and argues that the historiography has hitherto often seriously exaggerated the shift from the guts to the nerves. In line with many others in this volume, this chapter stresses the role of morality in discussions of regimen. Stoic, Christian and bourgeois notions of emotional restraint can often be seen in medical guise. External stimuli, especially those perceived as modern, that threatened to provoke excessive feeling, whether in the form of music, books, love or “enthusiastic” religion, were thus widely regarded as dubious by medical writers.