ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Habit, Disease, and Heredity in Europe, 1750-1830

• In Event: The Science and Medicine of Habits III: Habits, the Body and Disorder

English Abstract

A key concern in 18th century Europe was the worry that changing forms of social and cultural organisation were giving rise to new forms of disease. For British medics such as William Cullen and Erasmus Darwin, habit played a central role in explaining how new patterns of life could alter the workings of the body and give rise to new diseases such as nervous fevers. Indeed, habit played a central role in Erasmus Darwin’s attempt to explain the baffling complexity of fever, as well as the tendency of chronic fevers to bring about long-term changes in the body.

This paper will discuss the surprising role that ideas habit played in theories of disease in the period 1750-1830, as well as their so far largely unacknowledged, role in the early theories of evolution put forward by Erasmus Darwin, Pierre Cabanis and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Medics of the 18th century and earlier had held that habitual patterns of activity, including habitual fevers, could change how individual bodies worked – and that those changes might in turn become hereditary.

Ideas about habit and disease thus furnished the resources for explaining how biological organisms adapted over time to their environments, passing those adaptations to their off spring. They helped medics not only to explain how socio-economic change might alter the workings of the body, but also prepared the ground for the suggestion that changing environments and patterns of life could give rise to new species of life.

Author

• Alexander Wragge-Morley, Lancaster University