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| GENERAL EDITORS William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles ASSOCIATE EDITOR David S. Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles ADVISORY EDITORS Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan James L. Clifford, Columbia University Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago Louis A. Landa, Princeton University Earl Miner, University of California, Los Angeles Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library James Sutherland, University College, London H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library CORRESPONDING SECRETARY Edna C. Davis, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Mary Kerbret, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library |
"When I first dabbled in this art, the old distemper call'dMelancholy was exchang'd for Vapours, and afterwards for theHypp, and at last took up the now current appellation of theSpleen, which it still retains, tho' a learned doctor of thewest, in a little tract he hath written, divides the Spleen andVapours, not only into the Hypp, the Hyppos, and theHyppocons; but subdivides these divisions into the Markambles,the Moonpalls, the Strong-Fiacs, and the Hockogrokles."
Nicholas Robinson, A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, andHypochondriack Melancholy (London, 1729)
Treatises on hypochondriasis—the seventeenth-century medical term for awide range of nervous diseases—were old when "Sir" John Hill, theeccentric English scientist, physician, apothecary, and hack writer,published his Hypochondriasis in 1766.[1] For at least a century and ahalf medical writers as well as lay authors had been writing literatureof all types (treatises, pamphlets, poems, sermons, epigrams) on thismost fashionable of English maladies under the variant names of"melancholy," "the spleen," "black melancholy," "hysteria," "nervousdebility," "the hyp." Despite the plethora of materia scripta on thesubject it makes sense to reprint Hill's Hypochondriasis, because itis indeed a "practical treatise" and because it offers t