* * *
*The god of medicine.
FOURTEEN
Clarissa’s Calories
Long before the founding father of the novel, Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), embarked on his glittering literary career he was a printer of books, and among his most valued clients was the eminent nerve doctor, George Cheyne. In the course of their business correspondence, Cheyne encouraged his printer to confide in him about his ailments, and there developed a friendship which lasted to the day Cheyne died. Richardson valued Cheyne’s letters so much that he had them transcribed into a note book and bound them into a volume with his old doctor’s obituaries – though he honoured Cheyne’s demand that they should never be published. Over the years Cheyne taught Richardson about the link between diet and nervous sensibility; his ideas made their way into Richardson’s novels and thus trickled into the mainstream of eighteenth-century emotional, literary and domestic culture.
Cheyne quickly diagnosed Richardson as having been ‘born originally of weak Nerves’, making him acutely intelligent, imaginative, spiritual and subject to intense emotional experience. He asked Richardson to write to him uninhibitedly about the troubles of his body and soul – to ‘open your Heart frankly and unreservedly’ and write ‘without Restraint in a running Manner’.1
The ‘running Manner’ which Richardson developed in his letters to Cheyne became the distinguishing feature of his novels, Pamela and Clarissa (still the longest novel in the English language), in which his heroines suffer all the anatomical-emotional symptoms of acute nervous sensibility while callous, hard-hearted rakes who assault them display all the disorders of intemperance. Richardson’s novels outstripped even Cheyne’s books with their popularity; Pamela and Clarissa became the defining characters of the culture of sensibility, uniting society in sympathy for their plight.
Before examining Richardson’s novels, I want to reveal the shocking means by which Cheyne secured his power over Richardson. The diet doctor poisoned his patient with mercury.
When Richardson first complained to Cheyne that he was ill, he was suffering from ‘a mere Cold’. To unblock Richardson’s clogged system, Cheyne prescribed him with ten daily pills of his favourite deobstruent, Aethiop’s Mineral, a highly potent mercury composition pounded up with other ingredients to maximise absorption in the gut.2 Similar pills have been found to contain around 9,000 times the level of mercury considered safe today.3 The secrets of Cheyne’s prescriptions are hidden away at the end of his letters in medical notes written in a specialised form of abbreviated Latin for the information of Richardson’s apothecary.
Mercury had long been used as a cure for syphilis, but Cheyne, who thought it a ‘Divine Antidote’, told his readers that ‘There is nothing I could more earnestly wish were brought into the common Practice of Physick, than the more free and general (but cautious) Use of the Preparations of Mercury.’ The round particles of mercury, he explained, were like ‘so many little Bullets, shot against a mud Wall’, making it the most efficient method of unblocking the body’s hydraulic system.4 Cheyne even devised a special formula for increasing absorption by constipating the patient so that the mercury could not be evacuated in diarrhoea.5
Mercury, as we now know, is a virulent neurotoxin. It seems hardly surprising, therefore, that within months of beginning his course of mercurial medicines Richardson was suffering from fits of trembling, twitching, temporary and local paralysis, giddiness, nausea, anxiety, depression, hypersensitivity (erethism) and a tendency to withdraw from social contact.6 This was exactly what Cheyne would have expected, since they were all manifestations of what he called ‘nervous disorders’. Each one of these symptoms, however, as well as Richardson’s micrographia and festinating gait (resulting from damage to the neural heel – toe coordination mechanism), are classic symptoms of mercury poisoning. Cheyne’s response to Richardson’s increasing ‘nervous’ ailments was to prescribe him even more mercury.7
In 1940, during the blitz of London, St Bride’s Church in Fleet Street, took a direct hit from a Nazi bomb and the crypt was blown open exposing 200 lead coffins, among them Samuel Richardson’s. On the basis of his skeletal remains, a group of scientists in the 1990s diagnosed Richardson’s chronic stiff neck as diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH), and although they knew about his nervous problems, they did not look beyond the old speculation that he suffered from Parkinson’s disease, which is unverifiable since it leaves no trace on the skeleton.8
If one accepted that chronic trembling was a sign of Parkinson’s disease then one would be faced with the awkward problem of explaining an apparently massive outbreak of that non-infectious disorder during the eighteenth century affecting probably many thousands of people all over Europe. Contemporaries, including Cheyne, reported that trembling and symptoms as extreme as paralysis reached epidemic proportions in middle-and upper-class society.9 It is common to treat this phenomenon as a cultural construction in which biological reality is of secondary importance. But it has also become common to diagnose retrospectively Parkinson’s, epilepsy and ‘psychiatric disorders’. Any of these might be true, but it is almost certain that the plague of nervous disorders recorded in eighteenth-century Europe was caused in substantial part by the widespread medical use of mercury, of which Cheyne and Richardson were both unfortunate victims.
From 1733 until late 1741 Cheyne made light of Richardson’s ailments saying they were ‘vapourish and nervous, of no Manner of Danger, but extremely frightful and lowering’.10 He explained that it was a ‘scorbutic nervous case’, which meant that corrupt blood and blocked capillaries were causing Richardson’s nervous symptoms. His weak nerves had been wasted and relaxed by his sedentary life, thinking too hard and – Cheyne insisted despite Richardson’s denials – intemperance.11 Richardson’s nerves and other fibres had become so lax that his guts were no longer able to grind animal food,12 so Cheyne prescribed Richardson a temperate, ‘trimming’ diet, with reduced quantities of flesh and wine, and gave him extra doses of mercury.13
When Richardson continued to report that his symptoms were getting worse, and none of Cheyne’s methods was helping, Cheyne – following his usual practice – told Richardson that there was no option left but to give up meat entirely and resort to the pure vegetable diet. The startling thing is that at exactly the same moment as prescribing the vegetable diet for the first time – in late November 1741 – Cheyne stopped the mercurial medicines:14
you have already gone through too tedious a Course of Apothecaries’ Stuff, and if you were my Brother and could have Patience and Perseverance, you should have done both with Apothecaries and Doctors, and trust to God and Providence under the lowest, thinnest, and coolest Diet … In a Word, a Milk and Vegetable Diet with sole Water Beverage is your only certain Defence from a Fit of Apoplexy or Palsy, and I have no Peace till I propose it. Consider of it and let me hear your Resolution.15
The significance of this letter has been overlooked partly because it is placed in the wrong order in Richardson’s letter book, but it reveals an extremely important fact about Cheyne’s medical technique. Unsurprisingly, with the cessation of the mercury pills, Richardson’s health did improve, and Cheyne immediately claimed another success for the vegetable diet.16 This was no accident. Indeed, it was Cheyne’s usual practice. In The English Malady, for example, he reported that he had treated a lady with high doses of mercury until she was so desperately ill that she accepted his proposal of stopping all medicine and turning instead to the milk and vegetable diet – which inevitably (miraculously) produced a total cure within six months.17
It is hard to believe that Cheyne knowingly poisoned people with mercury until they succumbed to his vegetable diet. But he did know that mercury could cause nervous disorders and paralysis; he publicly admitted this in his books and he experienced its effects himself. He once treated his ulcerated legs with so much mercury that he was overcome by giddiness and convulsions and his shirt buttons were discoloured by the mer
cury coming out in his sweat.18 Richardson himself, when he started taking Cheyne’s medicines, complained that they were making him ill.19 The harmful effects of mercury were well known.20 Thomas Willis, for example, warned that mercury damaged the nerves, causing convulsions, vomiting, blindness, comatosis, anxiety and bloody stools. Willis was so ‘terrified’ of these side effects that when he treated Lady Anne Conway for her chronic headaches he was too scared to use it and declared that it was only appropriate as a punitive medicine for syphilis: ‘that evil Remedy’, he said, ‘ought to be applyed to that evil Distemper’.21
Cheyne probably regarded mercury as a part of the retributive purgation of his patients’ corrupt bodies – a necessary precursor to the purifying vegetable diet. But whether deliberately or simply through his cavalier attitude, Cheyne’s mercury medicines were a crucial instrument in his ‘providentially-guided’ promotion of vegetarianism. By causing Richardson’s nervous ailments and teaching him how to articulate them, Cheyne was a formative influence on the development of Richardson’s novels of sensibility.
Richardson was even more worried about giving up meat than he was about taking mercury, and in the first weeks and months of the vegetable diet, ‘perplexed and puzzled’, he found it extremely hard going.22 Cheyne responded to Richardson’s ‘doubts’ with a barrage of firebrand conversion letters, bullying and terrorising him, just as he did with other patients.23 Abandoning his soothing assurances that Richardson’s malady was minor, Cheyne suddenly insisted, on his authority as world-class physician, that if Richardson did not adopt the vegetable diet he would certainly die in extreme pain and suffering, a death threat he repeated on several occasions. Eating meat, said Cheyne with more than a hint of moral blackmail, was an act of selfish concupiscence which would leave his children fatherless, and would even constitute the damnable sin of suicide.24
Cheyne warned Richardson that friends, family and other doctors would try to get him to eat meat. He contemptuously lumped all those tempters together as ‘free-livers’, ‘Beef-eaters’, ‘cannibals’, ‘Voluptuous and Flesh-eaters’, likening them to carnivorous beasts eating ‘Dog’s meat’, and outrageously suggesting that they were in cahoots with the devil himself.25 Resisting them would be like re-enacting Christ’s passion: Richardson was to respond with the prayer, ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they say or do.’26
In militant opposition to these satanic carnivores, Cheyne gave Richardson the sense of belonging to a vegetarian brotherhood, or ‘Lovers of Virtue’ who had a special means of salvation. He introduced Richardson to other ‘Vegetable Patients’ and encouraged them to correspond between themselves.27 These included Cheyne’s own family whom he had also coaxed into the vegetable diet, especially his daughter Peggy, Richardson’s favourite. The teetotal vegetable regimen was not just a cure, it was an identity, a lifestyle he called ‘living strictly aqueously and vegetably’.28 And as soon as Richardson adopted the diet, Cheyne slammed the door behind him and announced that he must stick to it indefinitely: ‘for when the Stomac and Constitution is once habituated to this Diet it is certain Death to change it at your Time of Life’. Cheyne imagined himself as the priest marrying his patient to the vegetable diet which must be pursued ‘like Matrimony for better and for worse’.29
By the end of the first month Cheyne was bubbling excitedly: ‘I could no longer delay congratulating you upon your entering upon your State of Rejuvinescence.’30 Cheyne told him that the milk and vegetable diet was analogous to spiritual ‘Purification and Regeneration … Repentance, Self-Denial’, and that it inculcated ‘Innocence’ and ‘Simplicity’. It was, furthermore, one of the keys to salvation: living on milk, he preached, ‘is like becoming little Children. Without becoming such our Master tells us we can not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.’31 He assured Richardson that God had providentially afflicted him with illness and was coaxing him away from the carnivorous diet.32 Richardson felt his health improve under Cheyne’s regimen, and was so convinced that, although Cheyne died sixteen months after his conversion, he persisted with it for at least another five or six years, until 1748 or 1749.33 As he wrote to his friend Lady Bradshaigh in 1748, he had been ‘forced… to go into a Regimen, not a Cure to be expected, but merely as a Palliative; and for Seven Years past have forborn Wine, Flesh, and Fish’.34 Although he may eventually have given it up, in the course of their relationship Richardson had been indoctrinated into Cheyne’s vegetarian ideology.
Constantly receiving encouragement from his physico-spiritual doctor, Richardson wrote parts I and II of Pamela in the years running up to 1741 while Cheyne was limiting his flesh intake and telling him to follow ‘Not only a temperate but an abstemious Diet’.35 Clarissa, published in 1747–8, was written while Richardson was rigorously pursuing the vegetable regimen. It is little surprise, therefore, that Pamela and Clarissa are the archetypal heroines of sensibility and obey all Cheyne’s physiological theories of dietary abstinence.
Their foods of choice are bread, butter, water, tea, milk, salad, toast and chocolate.36 More often than not they refuse to eat anything at all, and signify their dissent from the tyrannical patriarchy that oppresses them by refusing to share their predominantly carnivorous meals. Some contemporaries even criticised Pamela for encouraging young ladies to be too weight-conscious – Pamela’s waist is so thin a man could encompass it with his two hands.37 Both Pamela and Clarissa think of themselves as Plutarch’s proverbial ‘old Roman and his lentils’ – a symbol of parsnip-eating protest against luxury.38 Pamela – a servant girl who has been abducted by her master, Mr B. – frequently threatens to escape from his decadent world and return to innocent poverty, living on bread and water, ‘and if I can’t get me Bread,’ she says, ‘I will live like a Bird in Winter upon Hips and Haws, and at other times upon Pig-nuts, and Potatoes, Turneps, or any thing.’39 Clarissa meanwhile makes the classic Cheynian comment that her own peasant-like frugality will be rewarded with health, while her greedy oppressors are repaid with the distempers of luxury.40
Clarissa, like Pamela, is abducted by a young gallant; but whereas Pamela ends up marrying her assailant, Clarissa is raped by Lovelace, precipitating her into a nervous illness and an inability to eat anything ‘nourishing’ at all. In other words, just like Richardson and Cheyne (whose disorders were also exacerbated by grief), the fibres of her body had become so weak that her stomach could no longer digest strong food like meat.41 To resolve this critical juncture in the novel, Richardson brings in an apothecary who may as well have been George Cheyne himself, for instead of prescribing ‘Apothecaries’ Stuff’ he announces to Clarissa: ‘I’ll give you a regimen, madam … which … will make physic unnecessary … Let your breakfast be water-gruel, or milk-pottage, or weak broths: your dinner anything you like, so you will but eat: a dish of tea with milk in the afternoon; and sago for your supper: and my life for yours, this diet and a month’s country air will set you up.’42 Cheyne regularly prescribed his patients sago, milk-pottage, water-gruel, weak broths and country air, and, indeed, Richardson’s novels are populated by a network of sympathetic characters on abstinent regimens.43 Even the wording in Clarissa echoes Cheyne’s letter to Richardson while he was writing the novel: ‘Your new Regimen,’ he wrote, is to ‘Breakfast on Tea, Milk with little thin Bread and Butter, at Noon have Asparagus, roasted Potatoes, Tarts and the like, at Night a Porridge of Bread and Milk.’44
But instead of getting better under her Cheynian regimen, Clarissa wastes away and dies. The exact ‘cause’ of Clarissa’s death has been a matter of intense speculation by literary critics ever since it was first published – anorexia being the favourite retrospective diagnosis of recent years. In the light of the similarities between her diet and her author’s, it seems that Richardson was airing his own anxieties about starving to death on Cheyne’s vegetable diet. Richardson’s friends had scared him with stories about vegetarians who had perished, and he wrote to Cheyne naming Lord Cadogan and Lord Barclay as examples. Cheyne was o
utraged and rebuked Richardson, insisting that Lord Cadogan was not on a vegetable diet and wasn’t dead in any case and Lord Barclay had only died because his doctor, Hermann Boerhaave, was a novice in the use of the vegetable diet, and anyway Barclay had not followed the rules closely enough (a firm warning to Richardson).45
A similar death hit the headlines in 1744 while Richardson was writing Clarissa. Cheyne was already dead, but when the hunchbacked Bath poetess Mary Chandler died everyone attributed it to her strict adherence to Cheyne’s vegetable regimen. As the historian David Shuttleton has pointed out, Richardson knew Mary: he had printed her works, quoted from them in his novels, and had been introduced by Cheyne to her brother Samuel Chandler, the prominent nonconformist divine who ran a bookshop and was another of Cheyne’s vegetarian followers.46
Samuel Chandler explained his sister’s death as a result of the weakening effect of the vegetable diet, but scandalised contemporaries suggested that Mary’s starvation amounted to suicide, and this was also a concern voiced by critics about Clarissa’s apparently voluntary demise. Like Mary Chandler, however, Clarissa composed her own epitaph revealing the true spiritual meaning of her asceticism and death. Just as Samuel Chandler defended his sister from ignominy by emphasising that her diet was a virtuous attempt to suppress fleshly passions in order to raise her spirit, so Richardson indicated that Clarissa’s abstinence freed her soul from her body, preparing it for a higher place in heaven. It seems that Richardson resolved the crisis in his novel by portraying Clarissa as an exemplar of Cheyne’s principles of physical and spiritual purification.47
Just as Cheyne did, Richardson linked his dietary motifs with the principle of sympathy for animals. Where Cheyne compared sensitive people to gentle birds and hard-hearted meat-eaters to beasts of prey,48 so Richardson represented his herbivorous heroines as innocent lambs and doves and their male assailants as meat-gorging predators.49 While Pamela and Clarissa are constantly compared to chickens (for ‘daughters are chickens brought up for the tables of other men’), their abductors frequently eat chicken, especially their freedom-symbolising wings.50 Even from his sick-bed Lovelace cannot forbear sardonic comparisons, writing that he is ‘as patient and passive as the chickens that are brought me in broth’ – a sadistic allusion to his power to destroy helpless creatures laced with a pun on the chicks that are brought to him in broth[el]s.51
The Bloodless Revolution Page 24
