Suffering scholars: pathologies of the intellectual in Enlightenment France

As early as Aristotle's Problem XXX, intellectual superiority has
been linked to melancholy. The association between sickness and genius
continued to be a topic for discussion in the work of early modern
writers, most recognizably in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy.
But it was not until the eighteenth century that the phenomenon known
as the "suffering scholar" reached its apotheosis, a phenomenon
illustrated by the popularity of works such as Samuel-Auguste Tissot's De la santé des gens de lettres,
first published in 1768. Though hardly limited to French-speaking
Europe, the link between mental endeavor and physical disorder was
embraced with particular vigor there, as was the tendency to imbue
intellectuals with an aura of otherness and detachment from the world.
Intellectuals and artists were portrayed as peculiarly susceptible to
altered states of health as well as psyche—the combination of mental
intensity and somatic frailty proved both the privileges and the perils
of knowledge-seeking and creative endeavor.
In Suffering Scholars,
Anne C. Vila focuses on the medical and literary dimensions of the cult
of celebrity that developed around great intellectuals during the
French Enlightenment. Beginning with Tissot's work, which launched a
subgenre of health advice aimed specifically at scholars, she
demonstrates how writers like Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mme de
Staël, responded to the "suffering scholar" syndrome and helped to shape
it. She traces the ways in which this syndrome influenced the cultural
perceptions of iconic personae such as the philosophe, the
solitary genius, and the learned lady. By showing how crucial the
so-called suffering scholar was to debates about the mind-body relation
as well as to sex and sensibility, Vila sheds light on the consequences
book-learning was thought to have on both the individual body and the
body politic, not only in the eighteenth century but also into the
decades following the Revolution.