ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the part sometimes played by pleasure, delirium and hypochondria in the history of the perception and misperception of health. By contemplating the extraordinary and extreme aspects of the unreasonable mind, it is arguably easier to think of oneself as having a reasonable mind. The same is probably true of those instances when people have contemplated ‘the mad’ misperceiving their health. Here, qualities ordinarily associated with health become to bystanders perceptibly distorted or exaggerated and thus tend to emerge from and strengthen strong associations between health and certain qualities, and the underlying idea of health’s perceptibility. This chapter focus on one of these qualities—sickly pleasure—across hundreds of years of western history. It also explores the category of the hypochondriac and health-like states sometimes observed in the delirious. Key sources include Plato, Aristotle, Aulus Cornelius Celsus, Augustine of Hippo, Charles Darwin, John Pringle, Charles Murchison, James Boswell and Christopher Isherwood.
