By the eighteenth century the disorders ‘commonly called nervous’ already had a long history, stretching back to the Hippocratic writings in the fourth century bc. For hundreds of years doctors and natural philosophers debated the significance of a mind–body connection, the origins of hypochondria and hysteria, and the precise physiology allowing for what was widely acknowledged to be a confusing and inconstant set of symptoms. By the time the eminent nerve doctor Robert Whytt wrote his Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of those Disorders which have been Commonly Called Nervous, Hypochondriac, or Hysteric (1764) in an effort to provide an updated and comprehensive medical text on these matters, the definition of nervous disease was as loaded as its history was long. Cultural implications of suffering from disordered nerves proliferated alongside clinical explanations for nervous disease. Hypochondria, hysteria and general nervous weakness encompassed a befuddling mixture of physical and emotional causes and consequences including emotional superiority, relaxed nervous fibres, wealth, dangerously strong passions, delicate physiology, genius and extreme sympathy between the mind and the malfunctioning body. Opinions regarding the verity and severity of nervous disease were as mixed as these explanations, with sceptics regarding it as an invention of overly sentimental novel readers and obsequious physicians, and believers insisting that anyone who doubted the pain and distress of nervous sufferers was simply ‘ignorant and cruel’.