NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[1] The text here reproduced is that of the copy in the Library of the Royal Society of Medicine, London. Title pages of different copies of the first edition of 1766 vary. For example, the title page of the copy in the British Museum reads, Hypochondriasis; a Practical Treatise On the Nature and Cure of that Disorder, Commonly called the Hyp and the Hypo. The copy in the Royal Society of Medicine contains, among other additions, the words "by Sir John Hill" in pencil, and "8vo Lond. 1766," written in ink and probably a later addition.
[2] Melancholy, hypochondriasis, and the spleen were considered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to be one complex condition, a malady rather than a malaise, which is but a symptom. Distinctions among these, of interest primarily to medical historians, cannot be treated here. As good a definition as any is found in Dr. Johnson's Dictionary (1755): "Hypochondriacal.... 1. Melancholy; disordered in the imagination.... 2. Producing melancholy...." The literature of melancholy has been surveyed in part by C. A. Moore, "The English Malady," Backgrounds of English Literature 1700-1760 (Minneapolis, 1953), pp. 179-235. In medical parlance, "hypochondria" means the soft parts of the body below the costal cartilages, and the singular form of the word, "hypochondrium," means the viscera situated in the hypochondria, i.e., the liver, gall bladder, and spleen.
[3] See Samuel Clifford's The Signs and Causes of Melancholy, with directions suited to the case of those who are afflicted with it. Collected out of the works of Mr. Richard Baxter (London, 1716) in the British Museum.
[4] Backgrounds of English Literature, p. 179.
[5] See my forthcoming biography, _The Literary Quack: A Life of 'Sir' John Hill of London_, and John Kennedy's Some Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. J—— H——, Inspector General of Great Britain (London, 1752).
[6] For some of this background see L. J. Rather, Mind and Body in Eighteenth Century Medicine: A Study Based on Jerome Gaub's De Regimine Mentis (London, 1965), pp. 135-90 passim.
[7] Science and Literature 1700-1740 (London, 1964), pp. 50-51.
[8] A New Theory of Physick (London, 1725), p. 56.
[9] Biberg was a Swedish naturalist and had studied botany under Linnaeus in Uppsala; Réaumur, a French botanist, had contributed papers to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London.
[10] The Power of Water-Dock against the Scurvy whether in the Plain Root or Essence.... (London, 1765), had been published six months earlier than Hypochondriasis and had earned Hill a handsome profit.
[11] I have treated aspects of this subject in my article, "Matt Bramble and The Sulphur Controversy in the XVIIIth Century: Medical Background of Humphry Clinker," JHI, XXVIII (1967), 577-90.
[12] See, for example, Jeremiah Waineright, A Mechanical Account of the Non-Naturals (1707); John Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (1733); Frank Nichols, De Anima Medica (1750).
[13] Hill's correspondence is not published but shall be printed as an appendix to my forthcoming biography.
[14] I have discussed some of these works in connection with the medical background of John Wesley's Primitive Physick (1747). See G. S. Rousseau, Harvard Library Bulletin, XVI (1968), 242-56.
[15] It is difficult to know with certainty when Hill first became interested in the herb. He mentions it in passing in The British Herbal (1756), I, 526 and may have sold it as early as 1742 when he opened an apothecary shop.
[16] Reid's dissertation at Edinburgh, entitled De Insania (1798), contains materials on the relationship of the imagination to all forms of mental disturbance. Secondary literature on hypochondria is plentiful. Works include: R. H. Gillespie, Hypochondria (London, 1928), William K. Richmond, The English Disease (London, 1958), Charles Chenevix Trench, The Royal Malady (New York, 1964), and Ilza Vieth, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago, 1965), and "On Hysterical and Hypochondriacal Afflictions," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, XXX (1956), 233-40.
[17] Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford, 1966), I, 264.
I am indebted to A. D. Morris, M.D., F.R.S.M., for help of various sorts in writing this introduction.