Anyone WHO SPENDS MUCH TIME in the 18th or 19th centuries, reading novels, say, or doing serious historical research, invariably encounters among the educated classes the rampant incidence of chronic illness, fatigue, debility, nervous breakdowns, and all of their medical and cultural sequelae. Natural philosophers and medical men suffered their own varieties of nervous ailments, many of which counted among the occupational diseases to which scholars had always been prone-mental exhaustion, migraines, hallucinations, and so on. It might be easy to assume that such concerns, however serious to the sufferers, remained simply personal or marginal to their achievements, obstacles to be overcome, like the well-known illnesses that delayed Darwin's progress in formulating his grand theory.
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