ABSTRACT
How can we be cheerful when our nerves are shattered? (Peacock, Nightmare Abbey)
Beddoes conjured up, I have been arguing, a theatre of health in which the life styles o f the giddy and the gay were under mining well-being. Patient patronage was exacerbating the problem, by neutralizing the powers o f medicine. I wish now to show that Beddoes’s critique of the health threats o f enlight ened living in commercial society expressed a widely shared medical diagnosis o f the pitfalls of progress. I shall examine two themes in particular; first, ‘nervousness’, with its associated notion o f addiction; and then the problem atization o f ‘consumption’.
