ABSTRACT

The activity of listening to or performing music may be conceived of as a remedy for particular diseases, as a general aid to convalescence, or conversely as a cause of sickness. With few exceptions the diseases involved were those associated with the passions of the mind. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries such ailments were most often addressed in terms of melancholy, but during the eighteenth century emphasis shifted to the nerves and their associated problems. Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy was the first major work in English to treat diseases of the mind, and as people have already suggested it are these which have most connection with music. By the eighteenth century, however, natural magic was no longer fashionable among the academic medical elite, whose preferred discourse was drawn from the fields of mechanics, hydraulics and chemistry which were at the heart of the new experimental philosophy taught at Leiden and Edinburgh.