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"Vila, Anne C., 1961- author"
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Suffering Scholars
As early as Aristotle's Problem XXX , intellectual
superiority has been linked to melancholy. The association between
sickness and genius continued to be a topic for discussion in the
work of early modern writers, most recognizably in Robert Burton's
The Anatomy of Melancholy . But it was not until the
eighteenth century that the phenomenon known as the \"suffering
scholar\" reached its apotheosis, a phenomenon illustrated by the
popularity of works such as Samuel-Auguste Tissot's De la santé
des gens de lettres , first published in 1768. Though hardly
limited to French-speaking Europe, the link between mental endeavor
and physical disorder was embraced with particular vigor there, as
was the tendency to imbue intellectuals with an aura of otherness
and detachment from the world. Intellectuals and artists were
portrayed as peculiarly susceptible to altered states of health as
well as psyche-the combination of mental intensity and somatic
frailty proved both the privileges and the perils of
knowledge-seeking and creative endeavor.
In Suffering Scholars , Anne C. Vila focuses on the
medical and literary dimensions of the cult of celebrity that
developed around great intellectuals during the French
Enlightenment. Beginning with Tissot's work, which launched a
subgenre of health advice aimed specifically at scholars, she
demonstrates how writers like Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mme
de Staël, responded to the \"suffering scholar\" syndrome and helped
to shape it. She traces the ways in which this syndrome influenced
the cultural perceptions of iconic personae such as the
philosophe , the solitary genius, and the learned lady. By
showing how crucial the so-called suffering scholar was to debates
about the mind-body relation as well as to sex and sensibility,
Vila sheds light on the consequences book-learning was thought to
have on both the individual body and the body politic, not only in
the eighteenth century but also into the decades following the
Revolution.
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