The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a quiet revolution in public discourse about the nerves. In the 1750s and early 60s the public was still rapt in the romantic portrayal of nervous conditions presented by George Cheyne in 1733, revelling in the delicate swoons of Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa, with well-to-do ladies and gentlemen congratulating themselves on the superior quality of their nervous sensibilities. Melancholics were creative geniuses, and hypochondriacs were morally superior. By the turn of the century this story had significantly changed. Nervous disease no longer simply implied the progress of civilization; it implied over-civilization, luxury, vanity, sloth, national decline and artificial manners. Nervous sufferers who were once objects of praise, admiration and pity became instead objects of ridicule and scorn. This chapter explores both the medical and social debates that contributed to this radically changed climate of opinion.

Popular discussions of the nerves written and read by the middle- and upper-class laity abounded throughout the century, infiltrating moral, prescriptive, religious and political publications alike. Already in the first half of the century, the reading public was comfortable relating the nerves to wider social phenomena; the Gentleman's Magazine and Scots Magazine persistently associated nervous sensibility with refined modern manners; magazines and prescriptive literature for young ladies tirelessly referred to their appropriately delicate and feminine nerves; religious tracts emphasized the Christian fortitude of sufferers combating nervous disease, and political writings drew hyperbolic and flattering conclusions about Britain's superior civilization in relation to the nervously insensible colonials of its empire.