In his popular self-help guide Domestic Medicine, the physician William Buchan opened his discussion of nervous disease with the claim that, ‘of all diseases incident to mankind, those of the nervous kind are the most complicated and difficult to cure’. There is little doubt that most physicians treating nervous disease agreed with Buchan's statement. While some mercenary ‘third-tier’ medical practitioners like the surgeon Adam Neale brazenly heralded their ability to ‘effectuate a perfect cure’ of nervous disease, most well-trained and well-educated physicians never made such empty promises. Edinburgh's famed nerve expert and Professor of Physic, Robert Whytt, warned readers of his Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of those Disorders which have been Commonly Called Nervous, Hypochondriac, or Hysteric (1764) that nervous disorders ‘scarce ever admit of a thorough cure’. William Cullen similarly noted to one of his nervous patients that it was ‘not possible to give a new set of Nerves’, but that ‘a proper management and a few remedies will do a great deal either to prevent ailments or to render them much less troublesome’.

This chapter explores the various means by which the cure of nervous disease was treated and rendered less troublesome in the late eighteenth century. It begins with the manipulation of the ‘non-naturals’, or, the external factors capable of influencing the body's internal health: regulation of diet, exercise, sleep, emotions, air, evacuations and emotions.