any of whose narrators,
such as Richard Baxter, author of the _Reliquiae Baxterianae_,[3] are
afflicted), Swift's "School of Spleen" in _A Tale of a Tub_, Pope's
hysterical Belinda in the "Cave of Spleen," the melancholic "I" of
Samuel Richardson's correspondence, Gray's leucocholy, the
psychosomatically ailing characters of _The Vicar of Wakefield_ and
_Tristram Shandy_, Boswell's _Hypochondriack Papers_ (1777-1783)
contributed to the _London Magazine_, and such "sensible" and
"sensitive" women as Mrs. Bennett and Miss Bates in the novels of Jane
Austen. So great in bulk is this literature in the mid eighteenth
century, that C. A. Moore has written, "statistically, this deserves to
be called the Age of Melancholy."[4] The vastness of this literature is
sufficient to justify the reprinting of an unavailable practical
handbook on the subject by a prolific author all too little known.[5]

The medical background of Hill's pamphlet extends further back than the
seventeenth century and Burton's _Anatomy_. The ancient Greeks had
theorized about hypochondria: hypochondriasis signified a disorder
beneath (hypo) the gristle (chondria) and the disease was discussed
principally in physiological terms. The belief that hypochondriasis was
a somatic condition persisted until the second half of the seventeenth
century at which time an innovation was made by Dr. Thomas Sydenham. In
addition to showing that hypochondriasis and hysteria (thought previously
by Sydenham to afflict women only) were the same disease, Sydenham noted
that the external cause of both was a mental disturbance and not a
physiological one. He also had a theory that the internal and immediate
cause was a disorder of the animal spirits arising from a clot and
resulting in pain, spasms, and bodily disorders. By attributing the
onset of the malady to mental phenomena and not to obstructions of the
spleen or viscera, Sydenham was moving towards a psychosomatic theory of
hypochondriasis, one that was to be debated in the next century in
England, Holland, and France.[6] Sydenham's influence on the physicians
of the eighteenth century was profound: Cheyne in England, Boerhaave in
Holland, La Mettrie in France. Once the theory of the nervous origins of
hypochondria gained ground--here I merely note coincidence, not historical
cause and effect--the disease became increasingly fashionable in England,
particularly among the polite, the aristocratic, and the refined. Students
o