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Health in the Eighteenth Century

This chapter first offers a survey of definitions and conceptions of health in the eighteenth century, drawing on a range of sources including medical textbooks such as Herman Boerhaave’s Institutiones Medicae and Diderot’s Encyclopédie. It then moves on to examine the notion of “sensibility” that offered a link between the organic and the mental and moral spheres of human life. The Swiss thinker Samuel Auguste Tissot is discussed for the close connections he draws between moral and physical deficiency. The role of “sensibility” in accounting for women’s supposed emotional instability is related to anatomical ideas about the gendered body, for instance in Pierre Roussel’s Système physique et moral de la femme. A final section looks at advances made in public health during the period.