ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an introductory account of the context of nerves and neurasthenia, the former of which has existed in some manner since the seventeenth century and persists both conceptually and within the lexicon to this day. The groundbreaking professional treatises and literature of the time that recorded the nervous ailments of individuals are examined in this chapter. Seventeenth-century professional literature challenged the classical humoral theories of diseases and made nerves and nervousness fashionable. After the middle of the eighteenth century, however, nervous ailments were viewed increasingly skeptically. The conceptualization of the pathology of nervous diseases underwent changes, particularly the notion that some diseases occur without discernible physical lesions, later called functional lesions. In 1869 George Beard popularized the term neurasthenia, which spread in both the United States and Europe. After 1869 controversy surrounded neurasthenia’s legitimacy as a clinical concept and the concept declined in the early twentieth century. The social construction of neurasthenia in the West fit a niche of time and place, but its cultural work was short-lived. These discourses of nerves and nervous disease, though, established neurasthenia as a discrete entity or category of diagnosis.
