To date, historians writing on nervous disease have focused largely on celebrities and fictional sufferers for evidence of nervous patients. Hence, the hypochondriac and melancholic sufferings of James Boswell and Samuel Johnson are well documented, as are the constant sniffles of Henry MacKenzie's overly sensitive man of feeling and the nervous swoons of Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa. While such sources reveal much about the public face of, and contemporary response to nervous sufferers, they leave us with very little sense of how the majority of nervous patients experienced their illness. The first part of this chapter seeks answers to this question, examining the symptoms, feelings and concerns of nervous sufferers as revealed by their diaries, letters written to friends and family and letters written to their physicians. The bulk of the material for this section comes from the surviving professional correspondence of the eminent Edinburgh nerve specialist, William Cullen. Housed in the Royal College of Physicians Library in Edinburgh, the several thousand patient letters written to Cullen provide a rare glimpse into the lives and sufferings of numerous nervous, melancholic, hysteric and hypochondriac patients.

The second part of this chapter complements this qualitative material with a more quantitative approach. Through a statistical analysis of surviving hospital records, private case notes, published disease reports and notes and papers written by medical students ‘walking the wards’, this section illuminates important basic details about the presence of nervous sufferers in eighteenth-century Britain, including their average age, sex, class and number.