Introduction

The picture of Friedrich Nietzsche which Ferdinand Tonnies draws is one that is recognizable. Surveying the Nietzsche cult that was already in full swing by the late 1890s, the sociologist Tonnies felt moved to denounce the unwholesome influence of Nietzsche’s ‘opinions and errors’ on impressionable young minds. It seems inevitable that many of Nietzsche’s own writings should bear witness to the extraordinary cultural impact of the natural sciences in the late nineteenth century. Nietzsche’s thought may be viewed as a symptom of the wider Victorian crisis of faith engendered by the inexorable rise of science. After physics and biology, the other scientific field with which Nietzsche has regularly been associated is psychology. Gregory Moore explores Nietzsche’s enthusiastic reading of nineteenth-century medical handbooks in order to describe the scientific and cultural context in which Nietzsche understood his own chronic illness and bodily processes, and the ways in which this impacted upon his writing.