1733

Publication of George Cheyne’s The English Malady, which consigned nervous disorders solely to the upper classes, holding that one-third of all upper-class disorders were nervous. Nervousness grew out of “the new ‘nervous’ vitalism [which] bound the soul to the body . . . and made it into a material thing that pulsed through it. This could be a Christian soul, as it was for Boerhaave, but it didn’t need be. It could be a mere particle. As medical belief in souls and humours declined even further, more and more doctors became convinced that the body was a material thing” (Chaddock, 141-143).