tor of the
west, in a little tract he hath written, divides the _Spleen_ and
_Vapours_, not only into the _Hypp_, the _Hyppos_, and the
Hyppocons; but subdivides these divisions into the _Markambles_,
the _Moonpalls_, the _Strong-Fiacs_, and the _Hockogrokles_."

Nicholas Robinson, _A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and
Hypochondriack Melancholy_ (London, 1729)

Treatises on hypochondriasis--the seventeenth-century medical term for a
wide range of nervous diseases--were old when "Sir" John Hill, the
eccentric English scientist, physician, apothecary, and hack writer,
published his _Hypochondriasis_ in 1766.[1] For at least a century and a
half medical writers as well as lay authors had been writing literature
of all types (treatises, pamphlets, poems, sermons, epigrams) on this
most fashionable of English maladies under the variant names of
"melancholy," "the spleen," "black melancholy," "hysteria," "nervous
debility," "the hyp." Despite the plethora of _materia scripta_ on the
subject it makes sense to reprint Hill's _Hypochondriasis_, because it
is indeed a "practical treatise" and because it offers the modern
student of neoclassical literature a clear summary of the best thoughts
that had been put forth on the subject, as well as an explanation of the
causes, symptoms, and cures of this commonplace malady.

No reader of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature
needs to be reminded of the interest of writers of the period in the
condition--"disease" is too confining a term--hypochondriasis.[2] Their
concern is apparent in both the poetry and prose of two centuries. From
Robert Burton's Brobdingnagian exposition in _The Anatomy of Melancholy_
(1621) to Tobias Smollett's depiction of the misanthropic and ailing
Matthew Bramble in _Humphry Clinker_ (1771), and, of course, well into
the nineteenth century, afflicted heroes and weeping heroines populate
the pages of England's literature. There is scarcely a decade in the
period 1600-1800 that does not contribute to the literature of
melancholy; so considerable in number are the works that could be placed
under this heading that it actually makes sense to speak of the
"literature of melancholy." A kaleidoscopic survey of this literature
(exclusive of treatises written on the subject) would include mention of
Milton's "Il Penseroso" and "L'Allegro," the meditative Puritan and
nervous Anglican thinkers of the Restoration (m