SOURCE: “Honeyed Words: Bernard Mandeville and Medical Discourse,” in Medicine in the Enlightenment, edited by Roy Porter, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995, pp. 223-54.

In the following essay, McKee discusses the language, discourse, and medical knowledge in Bernard Mandeville's 1711 work A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions.

In 1711 Bernard Mandeville published the first edition of one of his best known works, A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions. The book aims to teach patients suffering from hypochondria how to question medical rhetoric and it is woven together from a combination of a wide variety of disparate texts—recipes, stories, quotations, diagnosis, case histories, articles, cited authorities etc. The cumulative effect of this mixture is a questioning of the origins of medical discourse and, indeed, the origin of an illness such as hypochondria or hysteria—pointing out how an illness may be no more than the sum of the...