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The Reverend John Wesley (1703–1791) is historically remembered as the founder of the Methodist Church. Largely forgotten is his long-standing involvement in medical matters, as an advisor of healthy regimens and collector of helpful remedies. Still active at 79 years of age he publishes the anonymous pamphlet, (1782), and at 81 he writes “Thoughts on Nervous Disorders” (1784), sending it to press in the for January–February 1786. In both of these compositions, the aged Wesley is aware of the growing problem of nervous complaints in English society, with an eye to its effect on Methodist people, who are part of that society: especially focuses on the numbers; and “Thoughts” on the cause and treatment of said disorders.

In the late eighteenth century, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) promulgated “animal magnetism” as a pervasive property of nature that could be channeled as an effective therapy for a wide variety of conditions (Fig. 1). His claims of dramatic therapeutic success were supported by glowing testimonials, in some cases from socially prominent individuals. However, mainstream medical practitioners, professional societies, and political bodies rejected Mesmer and his treatment, and ultimately moved to eliminate Mesmer’s practice and that of his disciples. In retrospect it is clear that traditional physicians in the late eighteenth century had little to offer their patients therapeutically that had any real possibility of benefit, and instead, often harmed their patients with their treatments, whereas Mesmer could demonstrate cases “cured” by his treatment that had previously failed all conventional approaches. While one might be tempted to dismiss his therapeutic successes as only applicable to hysterical or imagined illness, some of his patients went on to lead quite functional lives when before they were deemed hopeless invalids, a point that even his detractors acknowledged.

In her study “Hysteria: The history of a disease” (1965) Ilza Veith referred to the eighteenth century as “controversial.” It was indeed controversial in that there were competing and changing theories of the nature of hysteria. These depended upon the scientific discoveries and changing theories that influenced medical thought. However, the term “hysteria,” while convenient for the historian, did not reflect the most common usage during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The term “hysteria” has as its etymology the Greek and Latin term for the womb. However, the Greek physician, Galen (c. AD130–c. 200) noted that “hysterical passion is just one name; varied and innumerable, however, are the forms which it encompasses” (cited in Veith, 1965, p. 39). Indeed, physicians and laymen alike in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries described the extraordinary behaviors that they witnessed as fits, suffocation of the mother, spleen, vapors, hysteric distemper, nerves, etc. As late as 1788, William Rowley (1742–1806) gave the following title to his work “A Treatise on female, nervous, hysterical, hypochondriacal, bilious, convulsive Diseases …” Thus the term “hysteria” raises problems. As Hunter and McAlpine (1963, p. 288) point out, “The concept of ‘Vapours’ or ‘Hysterick Fits’ which was popular in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries illustrates one of the pitfalls of tracing the history of mental illness down the centuries by terminology.” The historian’s difficult task is to find the underlying meanings and theories that underpin the medical language and also to examine and describe some of the different medical practices and therapeutics.

The confusion of ideas, theory, and medical practice during the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries coincided with the end to witch hunts, which often involved women who displayed hysteric-like behavior or other signs of mental disturbance. These women had been thought to be possessed by the devil by their inquisitors, sometimes armed with the “Malleus Maleficarum” as a guide.

The changing outlook stemmed from individuals such as Edward Jorden (1578–1632), who became involved in the trial of a woman accused of having put a spell on a 14-year-old girl. In his defence of the “witch,” Jorden argued that the child was suffering from a natural disorder of the mind and behavior. Still, the court found the woman guilty of witchcraft. In 1603, Jorden wrote a treatise to acquaint the medical profession above all, with those behaviors that should be considered clinical signs and not the work of the devil. Thus, new explanations and theories for certain aberrant behaviors began to take hold in the seventeenth century.

Metaphors and explanatory models referring to cultural artefacts, especially machines and symbolic representations, are commonly used in modern neuroscience. One often pictures the brain as a complex machine. Today the brain is usually compared to a computer that manipulates symbolic representations according to syntactic rules. The retention of information is often explained by “memory traces” stored in the brain. Such technological and semiotic metaphors have ancient roots, but they were especially popular during the eighteenth century after Descartes had pictured the human body as a machine. Thus many philosophers and scientists attempted to give explanations of psychological phenomena by referring to underlying neural mechanism. It was also during the Enlightenment that one started to emphasize that mental functions should be studied as material phenomena. Philosophers who wanted to examine mental phenomena in the context of materialist ontology criticized the traditional dualist ontology that emphasized the distinctness of the mental and the material. Surprisingly, these two aspects of modern neuroscience, the first related to reductionist explanatory models and the second to the ontology of scientific explanations, were, however, not so closely coupled in the eighteenth century as they are today. On the contrary, in the eighteenth century, these features usually appeared in opposing camps. Dualists like Charles Bonnet were keen in propounding explanations of mental phenomena in terms of neural mechanism. In this they differed from the medically oriented materialist philosophers like La Mettrie and Diderot who – although they used mechanical metaphors – were not so much interested in suggesting mechanistic explanatory models as they were in criticizing dualist metaphysics and the mechanistic explanatory models attached to it. In this article, I shall examine how the dualists and the materialists differed in their respective ways of relying on mechanistic metaphors and models.

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was one of the most celebrated political satirists of his age. However, embedded in his writing are numerous astute observations on the mind and brain. Today, Swift is perhaps best remembered as the literary author of (1726). However, to his contemporaries he was considered a leading commentator on the politics of England’s relations with Ireland, and a significant spiritual head of the Church as the Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin for over 30 years (from 1713 to the time of his death in 1745). An underlying theme that runs throughout many of his political and satirical writings (e.g. the ) was an interest in madness and mental states. This chapter considers the numerous original insights and reflections on neuroscientific topics in Swift’s writings.

“Temperament, [is] a moderate and proportionable mixture of any thing, but more peculiarly of the four humours of the body” (Phillips, 1658: sub “Temperament”)

One of our most acclaimed social scientists, Harvard psychology professor Jerome Kagan, has spent much of his professional career studying temperament as the key to human individuality. The titles of his recent books speak for themselves: (1989); (1994); (1998), the salient one being (2004); and dozens of articles featuring temperament as pivotal. Awarded this place of privilege, temperament is the superlative operative word in Kagan’s conceptual framework. His theory, in brief, is that every human inherits a physiology determining the emotional temperament and shapes the larger psychological profile when combined with experience. The aim of this essay is to understand why a major psychologist of Kagan’s international stature should have chosen temperament; and secondly to historicize Kagan’s enterprise and inquire what, if anything, the eighteenth century contributed to temperament’s historical map.

This goal is worthwhile for several reasons: it explains the historical foundations on which one of the most prominent historical psychologists of our generation has worked and how he selected “temperament” above all other concepts; it serves to highlight Kagan’s sites of originality and account for those that are derivative; it unpacks a concept – temperament – that recently has fallen into disuse and dropped out of the historical vocabulary despite Kagan; and – most crucial for this book – it focuses squarely on the eighteenth-century contributions to temperament. It also demonstrates why a book about eighteenth-century neuroscience, whose three key concepts are brain, mind, and medicine, cannot afford to omit temperament, or if it does, does so at its own peril. These goals may be accomplished in addition to glossing the larger perennial riddle about who we are and how we got to be that way.