The Literary Aesthetics of Neurasthenia

Abstract

A common but unexamined belief about medicine is that it describes "real" phenomena that are always biologically substantiated. One notable exception is the class of neuropsychiatric conditions, somatoform disorders in particular, the constituents of which have tended to fluctuate rather than accumulate over time. This thesis explores one such diagnosis, neurasthenia, as a nosological entity particular to the end of the nineteenth century. It compares disease categories to literary genres in support of its argument that neurasthenia was its era's metaphoric expression of anxiety about the mind-body problem and that different kinds of writing (medical vs. literary) structure this metaphor in complementary ways within a transiently enabling sociopolitical paradigm.