Madame--, aet. 26, of great mental and
physical sensibility, was the mother of three children. Her health was
good, until the persevering attentions of a visiting acquaintance completely
gained her affections. Filled with ideas of her duty, she resisted the
seducing influence, and kept the secret of violent passion buried in her
heart. This constraint gradually affected her health; she began to suffer
from palpation, sensation of fullness at the chest, and indescribable morbid
symptoms. The appetite failed, the gastric region felt painful, and stitches
were felt in the side. To these actual sensations were associated the most
peculiar and sad ideas concerning her health. She believed sometimes that
she suffered from aneurysm, sometimes from cancer of the stomach, sometimes
and most frequently from consumption. Indeed, a feeling of tenseness, cough
and abundant expectoration, feverishness and nocturnal perspirations, had
established themselves. The doctor suspected phthisis,
and sent the patient to the South of Europe. On her journey she consulted
me. I found her mental condition much affected, and her imagination seriously
involved. Her sufferings were, according to her own testimony, actually
fearful; sharp, red hot irons were forced through her flesh, the fibres
of which were torn as if by pincers. She did not, however, complain much
of the pulmonary organs. After six months' residence in the South of France
she was neither bodily nor mentally improved. The pulmonary affection seemed
not to have extended , but her imagination was far more disordered she
exhibited a greater tendency to view everything its worst light; and on
her return to Paris her state became still worse.
Gender, Sex, and Lovesickness. Mary E. Fissell
Treating
Lovesickness. Denis Diderot
Madame-- (p153) There she again saw
the object of her passion, succumbed, abandoned her husband and family
and fled with her seducer. Six months afterwards i saw her again. I could
scarcely recognize her. Beauty, freshness, and fulness were in the place
of a condition bordering on marasmus. There was no longer cough, expectoration,
palpitation, gastric affection, pain or any disease. The gratification
of her passion had reestablished her health and disipated the dark ideas
of hypochondriasis.
For more on Lovesickness
The relationships of disturbed mental states to love have been conceived of in many different ways and have been given many different names. Love-melancholy came into prominence with Robert Burton's [1577-1640] use of the term in his lengthy section on such matters. But over the centuries there have been terms such as love-sickness, love-madness, amor hereos, amor heroicus, heroical love, the malady of heroes, the lover's malady, erotomania, and others. Sometimes apparently synonyms and sometimes clearly not, these different names have often been a source of confusion in themselves. But then what they referred to has also varied a great deal-- from relatively unproblematic states of love to the sad, pining distress of unrequited love, to the agitated furor and derangemrnt of an erotically aroused lover who finds no satisfaction, to the erotically insatiable conditions. At times some of these various conditions have been considered to be forms of melancholia or to be interwoven with melancholia in some way, but this has not been the case for all mental disturbances associated with love and has not always been the case for any particular type of such disturbance [Jackson, 1986, 352].