Stress, Strain, and the Nineteenth-Century Medical Marketplace

This paper considers the overstrained nervous system as a critical component of the framework within which late nineteenth-century medical, literary, and popular culture defined itself as modern. Amidst the overwhelmingly fast pace of modern life, the nervous body emerged in this period as an elastic site of stress and overload, which teetered constantly on the verge of collapse. This created a lucrative market for a range of tonics that would supposedly relieve the sufferings of the modern populace. Bolstered by prevailing medical orthodoxies, a host of individuals and companies eagerly capitalised on this cult of nervous valetudinarianism, and popular tonics, often containing powerful narcotics and stimulants, were patented, marketed, and experimented with as a means of countering nervous exhaustion. The proliferation of such medications prompted, this paper argues, an array of scientific and cultural fantasies of nervous evolution and adaptation in which the body might be continually fashioned and re-fashioned in order to produce a high-functioning social subject in a fast-paced modern society.