MA in Medical History. (360G-Wellcome-084075_Z_07_Z)

The mind and its inexorable relationship to the early modern body caught my imagination specifically, and my dissertation was influenced as such. 'Lovesickness' became the core focus of my thesis. Not only did I discover a historiographical lacunae in this field of medical history, but, surprisingly, an incredible amount of source material relating to this disease in both popular and medical tracts of the seventeenth century. Through my research I began to establish the hypothesis that it was this period that witnessed the articulation of the female body as that primarily affected by this disease. Discovering that it was associated with sexual appetite and mental instability, I concluded that lovesickness was grounded deliberately in the fundamental characteristics of the female anatomy in order to posit her gender as sexually and mentally volatile. As such, a diagnosis of 'lovesick' served perfectly to validate a young women's exclusion from the public and intellectual domains, thus supporting the common early modern paradigm of female subjection. Yet while this may have implied the historical fiction of lovesickness, I believe that my analysis also elucidated a genuine disease that may have inspired the invention. Indeed diary entries, newspaper articles, and the predominance of the lovesick maid in popular ballads inferred that real women experienced the tumults of love both physiologically and psychologically. If permitted what I would like to investigate is the disparity in representation between the male and female versions of the disease. Was male lovesickness as much of a cultural phenomenon as the female version, or was it simply a literary relic deriving from the Middle Ages (when the term Amor Heroes implied the masculinity of the disease, as attested by the historian Mary Wack)? Did male lovesickness reside in a different area of the body to that of female lovesickness, and did love enter the body through the same channels? Was the male less, and the female more susceptible to the disease due to their humoral characteristics? Was female lovesickness more innately sexual that male? In medical accounts of authors such as Jacques Ferrand, he seats the disease potentially in the testicles, yet does not link this explicitly to sexual appetite, whilst with the seating of the disease in the womb, he does. Was the male sufferer, therefore, more prone to the melancholic rather than the erotic stage of lovesickness? And as in female accounts of the disease, was the male sufferer always young? And finally, I would like to investigate whether genuine cases of lovesickness inspired the fictive accounts of the male malady, as they did the female. Thus there are an incredible number of avenues to research in this field, if indeed I am granted the opportunity to do so.