Letters and diaries from the early modern era often refer to emotions, which were the
topic of published work as well. In his enormous consideration of illness in the human
body, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), for example, Robert Burton viewed emotions
and mental states as linked to imbalances in the four bodily humors: too much blood
made one bold, courageous, and sanguine (from the Latin word for blood, sanguis );
too much phlegm made one sluggish, apathetic and phlegmatic ; too much yellow bile
(choler) made one angry, irritated, and choleric ; too much black bile made one sad,
depressed, and melancholy .
Melancholy was the most worrisome of these states. A certain amount of melancholy
could be a source of genius, inspiring music and poetry, but too much
could lead to madness and both physical and mental illness. Physicians prescribed
physical and spiritual treatments for their melancholic patients: a change in diet or
sleeping patterns, vomits, bleeding, travel to a different climate, sex, music, astrology,
wearing amulets, magic, prayer. In the early seventeenth century – the height
of the witch hunts, as we will see in chapter 11 – a few medical thinkers speculated
about the demonic sources of mental illness, but both learned and unlearned
people generally differentiated between people who appeared to be possessed and
those whose problems originated in their own bodies. Those judged mentally ill
were usually cared for by their own families, though from the sixteenth century
onward public hospitals and private asylums were also available in some places.
Some patients were confined, though others worked in the surrounding town or
countryside to support themselves if they were able. The postal service run by the
Taxis family, for example, hired patients at asylums in central Germany to deliver
letters and packages, regarding them as reliable messengers.
Melancholy was linked to love as well as mental illness. Of all the emotions, love
has been the most hotly debated, both by early modern writers and by recent historians.
Romantic love appears as a literary theme in European literature long before
1450, and found expression in the sixteenth century in poetry and drama. From the
late seventeenth century, powerful romantic passion inspired much of the action in
the new literary form of the novel, so much so that moralists recommended young
women be prevented from reading novels so that they did not get too excited. In
the eighteenth century, many of these novels were actually written in the form of
exchanges of letters – what are termed “epistolary novels” – modeling themselves
on the real exchanges of letters people were used to reading. Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), which tells the story of a virtuous servant girl’s
victorious struggle against her master’s attempts to seduce her, was one of the most
popular of these. Similar stories of virtue triumphing over vice, and of chaste love
triumphing over sexual passion, were published by many authors in the eighteenth
century. There were also counter-stories, such as Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les
Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons, 1782), another epistolary novel in which
two amoral people successfully manipulate the passions of a young woman for
their own amusement.
Love, along with other passions, was a matter for philosophical speculation as
well as literature. In his Treatise on the Passions of the Soul (1649), the French philosopher
René Descartes (1596–1650) asserted that the passions subjected the soul
to the desires of the body, though he argued that reason could always triumph over
passion. Descartes did not discuss the role of gender differences in this, though
later philosophers did, contending that men had a more powerful rational capacity,
while women were dominated by their emotions. Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith
developed another line of thought about the passions, arguing that they were all
reflections of human beings’ selfishness and love of themselves. Self-interest could
be a negative force, but it could also be channeled into socially useful activities,
such as (for Hobbes) supporting effective governments or (for Smith) engaging in
trade or manufacturing.
METHODS AND ANALYSIS 9 The meaning of illness
The history of medicine used to be told
primarily as a triumphal story of physicians
and scientists discovering new treatments for
disease as they vanquished ignorance and
superstition. Not surprisingly, many of the
fi rst historians of medicine were physicians
themselves. Today medicine is increasingly
examined not as something apart from the
rest of history, however, but as connected to
broader intellectual, social, and cultural developments.
Historians of medicine continue to
study the ways in which illness was treated in
the past, but they also study the ways in which
illness was understood. They point out that
social and cultural factors shaped the way that
symptoms were interpreted, so that in different
time periods the same symptoms had a
different meaning and thus came to represent
radically different illnesses.
A good example of this is what early modern
people termed “green-sickness,” an ailment
that turned the skin pale or greenish. Young
unmarried women were seen as particularly
likely to suffer from green-sickness – it was
sometimes called the “virgin’s disease” – which
also caused them to stop menstruating. Greensickness
developed, physicians decided, when
a woman repressed feelings of love or refused
to marry. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s father
shrieks, “out you green-sickness carrion,” when
she rejects the man he has chosen for her.
Doctors treated green-sickness with warming
remedies that would heat the body and cause
the thickened blood to fl ow again, of which
the best was sexual intercourse (in marriage,
of course). This would release both the young
woman’s blood and her pent-up sexual desire.
In the nineteenth century, the same set of
symptoms were deemed “chlorosis” (a Latinized
translation of “green-sickness”), and judged to
be the result of iron-defi ciency anemia, which
could be tested by new tools such as the hemoglobinometer
that measured the level of iron
in the blood. The recommended treatment was
still marriage, though now this was seen as a
way to protect women’s frail and weak condition
from the harshness of industrialization,
which was viewed as the cause of chlorosis.
Iron-defi ciency anemia still exists as a medical
condition, though after the 1930s young
unmarried women were no longer seen as especially
susceptible to it. Iron pills or medication
that improves the body’s ability to absorb iron,
not marriage, is the preferred treatment.
Early modern thinkers debated the merits of melancholy or the limits of passion primarily
within the individual, and more recently historians have also been interested in
the role of the emotions in family life. Some argue that the “modern” family, in which
couples choose their own spouses based on romantic sentiments rather than parental
or community preferences, and in which strong emotional bonds develop between
parents and children, originated in the eighteenth century. Before then family interactions
were cold, with mothers indifferent to their infants, siblings jealous of the power
of the oldest brother, parents callous toward their children’s wishes, and spouses formal
and uncaring in their relations with one another. This notion has been countered
by other scholars who have found mothers and fathers deeply saddened, sometimes
to the point of madness or suicide, by the deaths of their children, and spouses at all
social levels affectionate and supportive. There is plenty of evidence to support both
sides of this argument, and it is not something that can be assessed quantitatively, for
the sources are primarily the personal documents discussed above, which are limited
in total number, skewed toward the upper classes, and may not reveal people’s real feelings
in any case.
The quantitative evidence relating to families that does exist is also open to widely
varying interpretations. For example, age at fi rst marriage for women in western
European cities appears to have declined in the eighteenth century, especially among
the poorer classes. Does this mean that young women who had left their villages for
larger towns in search of employment were reveling in their ability to choose a husband
based on love rather than having to go along with their parents’ wishes? Or does
it mean that they unemotionally assessed their opportunities for wages compared with
those of men, and grabbed the fi rst likely prospect for a husband, realizing they would
never earn enough to support themselves on their own? Similarly, do high numbers of
children left at orphanages or foundling homes mean that poor mothers were uncaring,
or that they were willing to put the chances for the survival of their children ahead
of their own feelings? These debates have made most scholars careful about extrapolating
from their own research to making generalizations that apply to all of Europe, or
even to all social classes within one country, but by and large the scholarly consensus
has swung in favor of more continuity than dramatic change in familial and parental
love and affection.
World History
