ABSTRACT
This short chapter examines one period in history when many people appear to have become fascinated by the weird health delusions of the seriously sick. This sickness, however, was one that seemed to many people to have extended itself well beyond the ill and dying and into the very foundations of the societies of a number of European countries. Where the late nineteenth century could be interpreted as a time of mass anxiety, it is also possible sometimes to detect a certain relish with which people represented other people as decadent and degenerate, and as transfixed by the delusion that they were not. This relish seems sometimes to have involved the creation of a delicious illusion of distance, so that the monstrous Other, with its strange and sickly pleasures, could contain (and become responsible for) society’s ills, and the accusers could conversely be left with a pleasurable impression of their own health. Key sources include the work of Théodule-Armand Ribot, Valentin Magnan, Maurice Paul Legrain and the historian Daniel Pick.
