Transatlantic Irritability: Brunonian sociology, America and mass culture in the nineteenth century

Fashioning Illness in the Long Eighteenth Century

“…11 Romantic medical theory developed the nerves yet further, even to the extent of 'Brunonian' concepts of excitation and under-stimulation of the system that proved to be surprisingly influential in wider literature and culture. 12 As we will see in this volume, aspects of these medical theories combined, usually unevenly, with other discourses to generate understandings of illness that could be fashionable, and even self-fashioned. Even if medical theories might seem remote from the possibly folkloric understandings of the lay population, they nevertheless tended to percolate through various cultural media into the popular imagination, ultimately and profoundly affecting the way people understood themselves as human beings.…”