f the drama will recall Scrub's denial in _The Beaux' Stratagem_ (1707)
of the possibility that Archer has the spleen and Mrs. Sullen's
interjection, "I thought that distemper had been only proper to people of
quality."

Toward the middle of the eighteenth century, hypochondria was so
prevalent in people's minds and mouths that it soon assumed the
abbreviated name "the hyp." Entire poems like William Somervile's _The
Hyp: a Burlesque Poem in Five Canto's_ (1731) and Tim Scrubb's _A Rod
for the Hyp-Doctor_ (1731) were devoted to this strain; others, like
Malcom Flemyng's epic poem, _Neuropathia: sive de morbis hypochondriacis
et hystericis, libri tres, poema medicum_ (1740), were more technical
and scientific. Professor Donald Davie has written that he has often
"heard old fashioned and provincial persons [in England and Scotland]
even in [my] own lifetime say, 'Oh, you give me the hyp,' where we
should say 'You give me a pain in the neck'"[7]; and I myself have heard
the expression, "You give me the pip," where "pip" may be a corruption
of "hyp." As used in the early eighteenth century, the term "hyp" was
perhaps not far from what our century has learned to call _Angst_. It
was also used as a synonym for "lunacy," as the anonymous author of
_Anti-Siris_ (1744), one of the tracts in the tar-water controversy,
informs us that "Berkeley tells his Countrymen, they are all mad, or
_Hypochondriac_, which is but a fashionable name for Madness." Bernard
Mandeville, the Dutch physician and author of _The Fable of the Bees_,
seems to have understood perfectly well that hypochondriasis is a
condition encompassing any number of diseases and not a specific and
readily definable ailment; a condition, moreover, that hovers
precariously and bafflingly in limbo between mind and body, and he
stressed this as the theme of his _Treatise of the Hypochondriack and
Hysteric Passions, Vulgarly Call'd the Hypo in Men and Vapours in Women_
(1711). The mental causes are noted as well in an anonymous pamphlet in
the British Museum, _A Treatise on the Dismal Effects of
Low-Spiritedness_ (1750) and are echoed in many similar early and
mid-eighteenth century works. Some medical writers of the age, like
Nicholas Robinson, had reservations about the external mental bases of
the hyp and preferred to discuss the condition in terms of internal
physiological causes:

...of that Disorder we call the Vapours, or _Hypochondria_; for
they have no m