ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the word history of euphoria from Ancient Greece through to the twenty-first century. For much of its history, euphoria has named not extreme or extraordinary experiences of well-being but states of whole or partial health observed in medical settings. This was a word of considerable promise, invoked during the encounter between people and their perceptibly healthy bodies, and thus implicitly emerged from the prevailing idea that health is sometimes perceptible. In the nineteenth century, euphoria also began to name instances of misperceived health. Here, this word came to reflect a different kind of confidence: that of medical researchers when faced with moods and behaviours in their patients that, they believed, could not belong to health. This chapter argues that the word euphoria has reflected and sometimes created a euphoria of understanding: a sense that the relationship between the self, its body and its contexts is always clear and unambiguous. Key sources include Aeschylus, William James, Eduard Levinstein and the seventeenth-century English opium enthusiast John Jones.
