Comparative Critical Studies 2, 2, pp.

227–40 © BCLA 2005

CHAPTER TWO
Burke’s Physiological Iconography of
Aesthetic Perception and the Invention of
Sublime Medicine
 

The publication of Edmund Burke’s (1729–1797) Philosophical Enquiry

into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1757 signals a
critical shift towards the modernisation of art theory. On the one hand,
it reinvigorates the aesthetic category of the sublime – hitherto ‘impolite’
but since rightly described by Jean-François Lyotard as ‘the single
artistic sensibility to characterise the Modern’, affecting ‘all the valences
of the artistic condition’.1 On the other hand, as Lyotard also noted,
the Enquiry innovatively revealed the rising significance of the viewing
experience in the processes of the formation of aesthetic judgement.2
Hereafter viewers would be treated as more important than artworks
and their internal rules of composition; reception would be prioritised
over product and production. Despite the general accuracy of both con-
clusions, Lyotard is not alone in failing to recognise the specific bio-
medical terms in which Burke articulated this new emphasis on aesthetic
reception. From analytical philosophy to history and cultural theory,
scholarship has demonstrated a noticeable underestimation of Burke’s
active engagement in the increasingly popular languages of embodi-
ment specific to the rise of philosophical materialism in this period.3
In this article, by contrast, I aim to explore a specific aspect of this
crossover: the complex encounter – the similarities and the discre-
pancies – between Burke’s Enquiry and two medical texts from his
immediate circle of associates, An Essay on Hydrophobia (1753) written
by his father-in-law Christopher Nugent (d. 1775), and the Reflections
on Antient and Modern Music (1749) by his lifelong friend and
benefactor, Richard Brocklesby (1722–1797). This comparative analysis
should demonstrate the medical erudition and originality of Burke’s
Enquiry, as well as the heterogeneous nature of eighteenth-century
languages of affect. Burke’s Enquiry thus provides us with an
exemplary instance of the period’s distinctively interdisciplinary

227

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 228  
amalgamation of physiological, medical, political and aesthetic concepts
and discourses.
Moreover, within the historiography of ‘literature and medicine’,
Burke’s Enquiry is favourably placed to make some additional important
contributions. Recognised as a great literary work as well as a signi-
ficant milestone in the history of materialist aesthetics, the Enquiry is
situated on the threshold of a complex interface between the histories
of literature, philosophy and medicine.4 Moreover, it is a work of
philosophical criticism, which consciously and self-reflexively takes
this very intersection as its object. Thus, it presents us with a unique
historical case – the first of its kind in modern history – where the
medical rules and aesthetic criteria according to which bodies, art,
literature and nature meet, are systematically surveyed.
In the first section of this article, I will discuss the form, the sources
and context of Burke’s medical language. Here my aim will be to
demonstrate the Enquiry’s intricate and sophisticated dialogue with the
avant-garde trends in of contemporary medicine. In the second section,
I will address the question of the Enquiry’s originality, the new type of
medical economy that this aesthetic physiology produced, and its
radical implications for the emergence of a new politics of power.


Throughout the Enquiry, Burke repeated his definition of the sublime
as a class of sensation specifically dependent on ‘whatever is in any sort
terrible … or operates in manner analogous to terror’, to ‘ideas of pain’
and ‘fear’.5 The direct relevance of these terms to a materialist under-
standing of aesthetic affect was made clear from the beginning. The
sublime affect was entirely predicated on the capacity of aesthetic
objects to stimulate ‘passions which concern self-preservation’, and
‘turn mostly on pain and danger … sickness and death’.6 In Part IV,
Burke sought to consolidate these terms, accurately translating them
into the language of physiology. The direct semantic extension of fear
into physiological language was the concept of physical pain. For
Burke, fear ‘operates in a manner that resembles actual pain’,7 and both
‘act upon the same parts of the body and in the same manner’.8
Moreover, pain and the sublime both agree ‘in producing a tension,
contraction or violent emotion of the nerves’: they are ultimately
reducible to the most simplified physiological species of contraction,
here defined as ‘no more than a violent pulling of the fibres, which

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 Edmund Burke’s Aesthetics 229
compose any muscle or membrane, in whatever way this is done’.9 By
contrast, beauty, which was perceived as the polar antithesis of the
sublime – the product of love rather than fear, of pleasure rather than
pain – operates physiologically under the reverse principles of
‘distension’. Beauty ‘acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system’;
the affect of pleasure inseparable from it is produced by ‘a relaxation
somewhat below the natural tone’.10
From this point, Burke also proceeded to superimpose these
polarities onto those of rest and exercise, health and disease. His
transition from physiological description to more directly medical
concerns may seem obvious today, but, at the time, this allowed him to
make an original contribution by re-organising aesthetic categories as
medical entities. As a result, beauty becomes deleterious insofar as ‘the
nature of rest is to suffer all the part of our bodies to fall into a
relaxation that not only disables the members from performing their
functions’ but, also, ‘takes away the vigorous tone of fibre’.11 By
contrast, the ‘best remedy for all these evils’ is the sublime. The
physical advantages that the sublime offers are modelled upon the
activities of ‘exercise or labour’, understood as ‘an exertion of the
contracting power of the muscles’. Just as the latter ‘preserves the
coarse muscular parts of the constitution’, so the sublime is ‘necessary
to these finer and more delicate organs, on which and by which the
imagination acts’. Without this labour, nerves, sense organs and, even-
tually, the imagination itself ‘would become languid, and diseased’.12
Burke’s medical rhetoric is dominated by a mechanical physiology of
the solids (fibres, nerves and muscles), which, at first glance, seems
almost embarrassingly crude. However, it is crucial to realise that,
written during a transitional period in medical history, the Enquiry is
part of a broader phenomenon, which has, for similar reasons, caused
no less puzzlement among medical historians themselves. Starting with
a strong shake-up of medical knowledge and ending with a deep
disillusionment with refined chemical, physical and mathematical
theory,13 the first part of the eighteenth century has traditionally been
branded as ‘the lost half century of English medicine’.14 More recently,
however, an alternative evaluation has been offered: the coarseness of
the type of medicine that followed the demise of medical Newton-
ianism is remodelled as a deliberate process of purification.15 In this
vein, mid-eighteenth century medicine resorted to primitivism as a
way of disposing of inherited postulates such as the existence of an
immaterial soul in medical animism,16 or the outlandish methods and

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 230  
iconographies prevalent in hydraulic, mathematical, chemical or
corpuscular medicine.17 Likewise, at the level of nerves, the hitherto
prevalent hypotheses that nerves were hollow tubes set in motion
either by the circulation of those special ‘subtle juices’ and ‘animal
spirits’ supposedly floating in them, or, like inert cords, by the flow of
fluids in the adjacent arteries or blood vessels, were both abandoned.18
Indeed, when Samuel Johnson defined ‘fibrils’ as ‘the first constituent
parts of bodies’, he was registering the same modernist determination
to view the unanswerable question of the deeper constituency of fibres
and nerves as arcane speculation.19 The return to simpler, more
ancient neural concepts such as those prevailing in the Enquiry, where
fibres and nerves are similarly used as the primary and irreducible
scales of observation, served a self-conscious polemical purpose.
Moreover, medical historians have underlined the crucial role that
this conscious primitivism played in the birth of medical modernity.20
On the one hand, it served as the creative basis for a series of
pioneering propositions immediately related to the rise of modern
neurology and psychology.21 On the other, it is associated with the
adoption of a more empirical and pragmatic approach based on
experimentation and the study of the specificity of living phenomena.22
Burke’s methodological pronouncements and his physiological imagery
participated in and reinforced this broader development.23 He
systematically erased the traces of fluidism from his language of the
sublime, denounced Newton’s ‘aether’ hypothesis, and suppressed any
reference to David Hartley’s popular psycho-physiological corpuscu-
larianism. Moreover, Burke’s unrelenting emphasis on the nervous
system is fully in tune with the avant-garde of his contemporary
medical thinking. The ‘idea that the nervous system is the source of
vitality’ par excellence, and that ‘nearly all human diseases are diseases
of the nerves’ was indeed increasingly gaining ground.24 Burke’s hybrid
of gross physiology and neurology, what I will call his neural solidism, is
a seemingly obsolete but, in fact, fresh and useful discourse.
Hence, if rigorously contextualised, the impression of antiquarianism
and primitivism in Burke’s discourse can be more appropriately recast
as a measure of its sophistication. It is strictly in this paradoxical sense
that I consider Burke’s physiology to be an example of avant-garde
medicine inseparable from its modernity as a set of aesthetic proposi-
tions. Moreover, for his specific model, Burke resorted to a medical
source of an even more archaic nature, the work of his personal
physician and later father-in-law, Christopher Nugent.

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 Edmund Burke’s Aesthetics 231
Nugent (d. 1775) is a neglected figure in the history of medicine,
despite having taken part in contemporary medical controversies and
having occupied a distinguished place in Burke and Johnson’s ‘Literary
Club’ as one of its nine founding and most regular members, together
with such luminaries as Oliver Goldsmith and Sir Joshua Reynolds. A
Fellow of the Royal Society, a licentiate to the College of Physicians
from 1765, Nugent was an ‘amiable man, an esteemed and able
physician’ whose scholarly gravitas is captured in James Barry’s portrait
(Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, 1772).25 Nugent took care of Burke’s health
during the latter’s nervous breakdown between 1750 and 1752 while
the Enquiry was still being written.26 Burke indicates the respect he
had for the talents of his doctor in an emotional poem dedicated to his
benefactor in 1752.27 His admiration is more subtly registered in the
way Burke absorbed Nugent’s medical theory in the Enquiry.
Nugent’s Essay on Hydrophobia has a dual purpose. On the one
hand, it is a meticulous case study of poisoning by dog biting –
Elizabeth Bryan’s hydrophobia; and on the other hand, it constitutes a
theoretical treatise rigorously dealing with issues of human physiology
and pathology. For Nugent, as later for Burke, it is the nervous system
that regulates the totality of the phenomena of life. Here again, the
physiology of nerves is understood, from the solidist’s perspective, as a
function of their contractility or elasticity. Thus, he writes, ‘the structure
of an animal fibre is most prominently characterised by its elasticity; its
Contractions and Dilatations; its being liable to be stimulated into
greater and quicker Efforts of Contraction and Dilatation; and some-
times into constrictive Spasms’.28 Accordingly, for Nugent, the motility
of the nervous system is understood as a product of the mechanical
laws of impact and contiguity, or, as Burke put it, the ‘common laws of
percussion’ of solid bodies.29
Thus conceived, the nervous system also governs the critical
transition from health to disease, from physiology to pathology. Health,
‘the natural and vital action of the Nerves’, consists of ‘natural salutary
oscillations’ and the regular succession of contractions and dilatations.
By contrast, disease is envisioned as a kinetic disorganisation of the
natural motions of the fibres, the result of ‘excited’ and ‘irregular’
spasms in the solids caused by ‘spasmodic strictures’.30 Moreover,
disease has a fixed model of topological progression, proceeding from a
disorder of the most minute filaments up to the most complex plexuses
of nerves and fibres – the human organs.31 Moreover, this advance-
ment has a distinct temporal succession; it is only once the purely

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solidist ‘contagion’ is completed that the fluids are affected. The body,
according to Nugent, ‘consists of solid fibres, which are constantly in
exercise and softer fluids that are constantly in motion’, but their
relative importance for the operations of life is far from equal.32
Nugent developed a solidist approach, which frequently took the
form of a polemical indictment of the numerous forms of medical
fluidism. In this process, dominant medical aetiologies are overturned.
Even poisonous affects, Nugent’s special concern, which were tradi-
tionally understood as fluidist corruptions of the blood caused by
poisonous substances, are seen by Nugent as entirely incidental to
body fluids. By contrast, poisoning is, for Nugent, the effect of a literal
‘tremulous virulence’ of the solids triggered by such dry and external
mechanical forces as biting or the puncture of tendons.33 Reflecting
contemporary disillusionment with the fluidist doctrines of animal
spirits and hollow nerves, humours and blood motion, Nugent insisted
that the malignity of poisons primarily consists in ‘the peculiar kind
and composition of the spasmuli they first excite’ in the solid fibres of
the organs.34 Finally, Nugent’s criticism also took more personalized
forms as in the case of the celebrated Richard Mead, the most
fashionable representative of fluidism, iatrochemistry and hydraulic
physiology, and writer of a standard but very different work on
poisonous affects, the Mechanical Account of Poisons (1702).35
The multiplicity of adversaries that Nugent’s solidism presupposed
leaves us in no doubt as to the level of purposefulness that Burke’s
choice to adopt it must have entailed. However, Nugent’s solidism is a
far more mechanical system than Burke’s. The notions of sensibility
and irritability, of pain and contractility, namely the Enquiry’s equally
important vitalism, are clearly beyond Nugent’s scope – and that of the
present study, too. Yet, as I will show in the next section, Burke’s
Enquiry kept in close touch with Nugent’s book – picking from,
modifying and amplifying on it – even when the two works seem least
related.


Burke’s positive association of the aesthetic delights of the sublime
with the states of pain and maximal contraction involved in his model
of ‘exercise or labour’ was a blatantly iconoclastic proposition. As it
blurred boundaries between mind and body, and between refined
manners and manual activities, exercise was universally mistrusted by

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 Edmund Burke’s Aesthetics 233
the politer upper classes and courtly aristocracy.36 Likewise within
medicine, when not regarded with outright hostility by advocates of
classical moderation, ‘exercise’ was viewed with caution even by such
pioneering advocates of the practice as George Cheyne.37 Furthermore,
to associate the already problematic notion of exercise with what
Thomas Addison had clearly shown to be its impolite foil, namely
‘labour’, was an unprecedented move.38 Even worse: to recast ‘labour’
in the shape of convulsions and spasms, those ‘preternatural states of
contraction’ long recognised by medicine as pathological aberrations,
was a step too far. And yet, this was a step that Burke in the Enquiry
eagerly and repeatedly took.39 Terror, he argued, must be sufficiently
aggressive to produce ‘an unnatural tension and certain violent emo-
tions of the nerves’. 40 Similarly, in sound, the organ of hearing must
‘suffer’ an increasing ‘tension’ and ‘convulsion’; it must be ‘worked up
to such a pitch as to be capable of the sublime’, specifically ‘to the
verge of pain’ that would make the ‘whole fabric consent with it’.41
Finally, darkness owes its terrific sublimity to the way in which the
fibres of the eye ‘come to be so contracted, as to strain the nerves …
beyond their natural tone’, that is, to the point of spasmodic
delirium.42
Still more original was the way in which Burke associated this
impolite aesthetic of maximal contraction with states of optimal activity,
the rewards of health for the sufferer/viewer. This re-imagining and
redefinition of health renders Burke’s propositions wholly inexplicable
by the norms of medicine current in his time. However, although
Nugent, as expected from a responsible physician of his time, under-
stood spasms to be morbid rather than healthful phenomena, his
solidism can again help us to explain the unexpected directions
developed in Burke’s Enquiry.
First, Nugent’s general theory of the economy of life frequently
intersects with Burke’s aesthetic understanding of nature. It is premised
on a similarly sublime principle, and envisioned as a permanent state of
violence rather than rest and order.43 Thus, Nugent writes, ‘all nature
vibrates; the inanimate as well as the animate; and it is in a constant
tenor of pulsation through all its parts’.44 Set in a kind of compulsive
motion by the violence of the primal power, of ‘the great over-ruling
First Cause’, matter, for Nugent, is thus perpetually forced to behave
‘in spite of its own nature’.45 Even more reminiscent of Burke’s
conception of the sublime is Nugent’ s insistence that ‘in the animal
oeconomy, there is not perhaps a fibre that is just in the position it

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 234  
would assume, were it at liberty to change: they are always kept upon
the stretch; always beyond their natural point of rest’.46
Nugent’s vision of medical treatment also bears certain resemblances
to Burke’s maximal understanding of health. Insofar as disease is
primarily an issue of ‘preternatural spasmuli’ acting directly upon the
solids, Nugent’s therapeutic vision consists of ‘changing’, ‘counteracting’
and ‘subduing’ these spasms by other forces ‘of a stronger but less
dangerous kind’ (italics mine). Nugent lists a series of such therapeutic
practices: scorching by fire, searing with caustics, stimulating with salts
and other pungent applications, or chafing with oils.47 Just as Burke
discusses sublime affects as a painful labour – a deliberate and maximal
type of convulsion against the weak and irregular vibrations of Beauty
and disease – Nugent proposes a series of therapeutic techniques whose
aim is to overpower and overwhelm their morbid targets.
Although this therapeutic aggressiveness is as old as humoural
fluidism, Nugent significantly devised a sublime physiological and patho-
logical framework for it. Nugent’s dry physiology of morbid convul-
sions, thought to travel across warped and bungled plexuses of nerves,
no longer necessitated the fluidist notion of discharge; nor did this
physiology require the ultimately palliative action of evacuations, clysters
and blood-lettings. The simple reason for this crucial fissure was that disease
was no longer being conceived in terms of material excess – chunks of
morbid plethora – stuck in the middle of hollow nerves and tubular
arteries impeding the circulation of fluids. For Nugent, it was the notions
of supplementation and augmentation of tension rather than the removal
and mollification of matter that justified his aggressive therapeutics.
Thus in medicine, as in aesthetic theory, forces of the sublime had
been assuming positive functions. This important shift represents a
broader change in medical theory, marked by the emergence of
alternative physiological iconographies and metaphors. A critical factor
in this juncture was the increasingly powerful association of fibres and
nerves with the physiology and sensibility of muscles – another extension
of the gross anatomy of solidism into neurology, described by William
F. Bynum.48 More crucially, the fresh currency of these neuromuscular
models in vitalist and experimental medicine also re-activated a dense
network of ancient metaphors of enhancement.49 As Johnson reminds
us, rooted into the Latin meaning of the word ‘nervus’, the term
‘nerve’ was interchangeable with those of ‘sinews, tendons and
muscles’, all invoking ‘whatever gives strength or compactness’.50 One
of the most prominent meanings of the word ‘nervous’ was, indeed,

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 Edmund Burke’s Aesthetics 235
‘well strung; strong; vigorous’.51 Or, again, in keeping with another
ancient chain of semantic equivalences according to which contractility
was the organic complement of elasticity, nerves could also be under-
stood as types of metal cords. As a result, in the same way that metals
consisted of minute strings, which ‘by being hammered, are rendered
more compact and also more elastic’,52 nerves were also ‘invigorated’
by the increasing exercise of their contractile properties. Following
these metaphorical slippages, Burke’s notion of the medical properties
of the sublime becomes more plausible: it is an extreme order of
environmental stimulation, which provides an organic type of ‘ham-
mering’ invested with similar anticipations of increasing ‘compactness’
and vigour.
These discursive regularities that guided Burke’s rethinking of
medical and aesthetic practice are thrown into even greater relief by his
rejection of traditional fluidism. A work by one of Burke’s closest
friends and political allies, Richard Brocklesby’s Reflections on Antient
and Modern Musick (1749) provides one of the most thorough
recapitulations of this ‘old system of physic’ in medical aesthetics. The
Reflections sets the discursive grounds for Burke’s Enquiry in the sense
that it deals with the curative properties of sense stimuli and the role of
art and music in the prolongation of life. However, although
Brocklesby would later be celebrated for his ground-breaking experi-
mental work on Albrecht von Haller’s theory of sensibility, influencing
to a considerable degree the formation of his friend’s empirical vitalism,
the Reflections is still an early and conservative work.53 At the time of
its composition, Brocklesby was still a young medic, dutifully rehearsing
centuries of fluidism and music therapy practice. Not surprisingly, the
book also validated a polite aesthetic of learning, of classical values and
elegant music, and usefully propelled its author into the lucrative
markets of fashionable society. In effect, Brocklesby’s Reflections
functions as the Enquiry’s reverse at a plethora of different levels.
Firstly, Brocklesby developed the topic through an animistic type of
fluidism, which depended on an understanding of life as a state of
peaceful balance monitored by a moral soul.54 Indeed, for Brocklesby’s
polite medicine, the physiology of health is based on the economical
principle of thriftiness. ‘The chief precaution against death’ and the
key to a prolonged life ‘is to be derived from a conservation of a proper
stock of animal spirits, which are chiefly exhausted by inordinate
passions, an excess of natural evacuations, excruciating bodily pains
and such like causes’.55 It is not difficult to imagine how for this

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 236  
medicine Burke’s ‘hammering of nerves’ could figure as a ‘great waste
and dissipation of the animal spirits’, and, thus, as ‘the principal cause
of decay’ and ‘premature death’.56 Indeed, for Brocklesby, nervous
disease is always plethoric; ‘bodily disorder’ is the result of surplus, of
‘extravagant perturbation’ and ‘violence’ in the disposition of the mind
or the motion of the fluids.57 Moreover, the emotions most promin-
ently associated with the invigorating properties of Burke’s sublime –
‘violent passions’, ‘anger’, ‘grief’, ‘excessive joy’ or ‘fear’ – are all
singled out by Brocklesby as undesirable agents of ‘strange’ and life-
threatening ‘disorders’ and ‘ebullitions’.58 Likewise, at the therapeutic
level, the medicinal role of aesthetics is perceived strictly within the
remit of mollification. Music is invariably called in to ‘curb all
unbounded passions’, to ‘reduce the extravagant sallies of temper’, to
‘allay’ those ‘commotions of the mind’ inappropriately ‘raised to a
violent excess’;59 and, eventually, to lull ‘the turbulent and disorder’d
senses … in pleasing slumbers by the sweet extasies’ of sound.60
In opposition to Burke, Brocklesby placed the positive effects of
music in a catatonic context, in ‘a harmonious economy of subsiding
passions’.61 Whereas Burke, following Nugent, saw the curing of the
diseases of beauty in the painful contractility of the sublime, Brocklesby
saw health as the concomitant of the physical stupefaction induced by
the emollient beauties of polite music. Put in this context, it is not
difficult to understand how radical Burke’s suggestions were. Also it is
now easier to see that Brocklesby’s medicine of fluids was tied to a
cluster of regularities – a homeostatic perception of life, a plethoric
approach to the theory of disease and a cathartic therapeutics – which
were immediately antagonistic to the kind of neural solidism that
Burke adopted.
As a result, Burke’s sublime simultaneously overturned the type of
fashionable medicine Brocklesby sponsored, and challenged the polite
cultures in which the latter operated. Indeed, Burke’s Enquiry invented
both a sublime medicine and an impolite aesthetics, arguably contri-
buting to a larger cultural shift, the ‘hegemonic struggle of the rising
middle class in the first half of the eighteenth century’.62 Viewed from
this perspective, it is unsurprising that Burke’s maximal medicine led
the way to a radical scientific and political future. John Brown’s fierce
therapeutics of excitation closely associated with the revolutionary
politics in 1780s and 1790s Scotland would, in medicine, close the
circle that Burke’s aesthetics opened.63 Following the paths of political
radicalism in the wake of the French Revolution, John Brown’s medical

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 Edmund Burke’s Aesthetics 237
ideology spread across Europe with a tremendous effect. His heterodox
sublime medicine soon became a standard alternative to traditional
medical practice, facilitating at the same time, a series of important
theoretical, biological, political and professional breakthroughs.64
On the other hand, by the 1790s, Burke had already grasped the
inbuilt revolutionary potential of his earlier radical materialism, and,
accordingly, rejected the two pillars of his theory of the sublime,
namely, its scientific language of causality and the maximal economies
of labour and pain. This is why Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in
France (1791) seems so different from his Enquiry, to the puzzlement
of contemporary scholars. Simultaneously succumbing to the principles
of biological and political moderation, and articulated in a metaphorical
and deliberately unscientific language, the sublime of the Reflections on
the Revolution in France is largely corrosive of its prototype in the
Enquiry. Indeed, Burke’s Reflections prove not only that ‘the thread of
speculative Science once broken is not easily spliced again’, as he put it
in 1795,65 but also that the sublime could not maintain its initial thrust
once these ties were broken.
As a result, the modernity of Burke’s Enquiry cannot not be fully
represented by the way in which it brought viewers and reception to
the fore of aesthetic judgement. Neither does it suffice to reiterate the
incisive but rather vague conclusion that the Enquiry proves how
‘aesthetics was born in the mid-eighteenth century as a discourse of the
body’, concerned with ‘the way reality strikes the body on its sensory
surfaces’.66 In my view, more significantly, the Enquiry’s modernity
lies in the way in which it put the body and the micro-management of
its intersection with its natural and social environments at the centre of
a crucial disciplinary crossover. In this sense, Burke invented a new
discursive contract with which he was able to ‘bring and stretch together’
– ‘contract’, in the eighteenth-century sense of the word – environ-
ments, bodies, minds and different bio-medical disciplines in a detailed
and mutually empowering relation that might ‘better strengthen and
support each other’.67
In this context, the aesthetic ‘began life as a primitive proto-
materialism’68 only insofar as it had also been an avant-garde specimen of
modern medical theory. Moreover, it emerged as a ‘politics of the body’69
only to the extent that it had already been conceived as a ‘politics of
health’,70 a bio-political science of self-management, which outlined a
new relation to health and optimal performance, to individuality and
power.

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 238  
NOTES

1 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, Artforum, 22 (1984),

36–43 (p. 40).
2 Ibid., pp. 38–9 and 40–1.
3 In Lock, Burke’s materialism features as a ‘reductive sensationism’, ‘far from
rigorous or consistent’ while for Thomas Weiskel, it represented ‘an antiquated
physiology’, ‘cumbersome, not to say silly’. Even for Terry Eagleton it remained
a ‘strange home-spun psycho-physiology’. See F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, Volume
I: 1730–1784 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 93 and 121; Thomas Weiskel,
The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 88, and Terry
Eagleton, ‘Aesthetics and Politics in Edmund Burke’, History Workshop, 28
(Autumn 1989), pp. 53–62 (pp. 59 and 62).
4 The Enquiry was indeed designed to ‘reflect back on the severer sciences some of
the graces and elegancies of taste’, and was treated as such from the day of its
publication. See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, edited by
David Womersley (London: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 55–6, and Literary
Magazine, 1757, pp. 182–9 (p. 189).
5 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, p. 86.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., p. 101.
8 Ibid., p. 161.
9 Ibid., p. 162.
10 Ibid., p. 177.
11 Ibid., p. 164.
12 Ibid., pp. 164–5.
13 Theodore M. Brown, ‘From Mechanism to Vitalism in Eighteenth-Century
English Physiology, Journal of the History of Biology, 7 (Fall 1974), pp. 179–216.
14 William R. Le Fanu, ‘The Lost Half-Century in English Medicine 1700–1750’,
Bulletin for the History of Medicine, 46 (1972), pp. 319–48.
15 The principles of Newtonian iatromathematics and hydraulic physiology are
explained in Theodore M. Brown, ‘Medicine in the Shadow of the Principia’,
Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (1987), pp. 629–48.
16 Anne Thomson, ‘Materialistic Theories of Mind and Brain’ in Between Leibniz,
Newton and Kant, edited by Wolfgang Lefevre (Dotrecht, London and Amsterdam:
Kluwer Academic, 2001), pp. 149–73 (pp. 157–68). See also The Medical
Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, edited by Andrew Cunningham and
Roger French (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
17 Theodore Brown, The Mechanical Philosophy and the ‘Animal Economy’ (New
York: Arno Press, 1981), pp. 341–66.
18 Georges Rousseau, ‘Nerves, Spirits and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of
Sensibility’, Blue Guitar, 2 (1976), pp. 125–53.
19 ‘Fibre’ in Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1756)
(hereafter Johnson’s Dictionary).
20 W. F. Bynum, ‘Cullen and the Nervous System’ in William Cullen and the

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 Edmund Burke’s Aesthetics 239
Eighteenth Century Medical World, edited by A. Doig, J. P. S. Ferguson, I. A.
Milne and R. Passmore (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), pp. 152–
162, and Roger Smith, ‘The Background of Physiological Psychology in Natural
Philosophy’, History of Science, 11 (1973), pp. 75–123.
21 Thomas S. Hall, ‘On Biological Analogs of Newtonian Paradigms’, Philosophy of
Science, 35 (1968), pp. 6–27; Karl M. Figlio, ‘Theories of Perception and the
Physiology of Mind in the Late Eighteenth Century’, History of Science, 12
(1975), pp. 177–212, and Inci Altug Bowman, ‘William Cullen and the Primacy of
the Nervous System’, PhD Indiana University, 1975.
22 Brown, Mechanical Philosophy, pp. 341–53 and 354–66.
23 Burke, pp. 55 and 159–60.
24 Georges Canguilhem, ‘John Brown’s System: An Example of Medical Ideology’
in Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, trans. by Arthur
Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 41–50 (p. 44). See also
Georges S. Rousseau, ‘Discourses of the Nerve’ in Literature and Science as Modes
of Expression, edited by Frederick Amrine (Dodrecht and London: Kluwer
Academic, 1989), pp. 29–60.
25 James Prior, Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke
(London, 1824), p. 49.
26 The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, edited by Paul Langford and others
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981– ), Vol I edited by T. O. McLoughlin and James
T. Boulton (1997), p. 185.
27 Ibid., pp. 50–3.
28 Christopher Nugent, An Essay on Hydrophobia (London, 1753), p. 45.
29 Burke, p. 160.
30 Nugent, pp. 45–6.
31 Ibid., pp. 83–7, 118–21, 125–9 and 138–40.
32 Ibid., p. 45.
33 Ibid., pp. 83 and 132–52.
34 Ibid., p. 175.
35 Ibid., pp. 124 and 130–4.
36 Akihito Suzuki, ‘Anti-Lockean Enlightenment?: Mind and Body in Early Eighteenth-
Century English Medicine’, in Medicine in the Enlightenment, edited by Roy
Porter, Clio Medica, 29 (1995), pp. 336–59 (pp. 343–52), and Lawrence E. Klein,
‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, The
Historical Journal, 45 (2002), pp. 869–98.
37 Cheyne’s animadversions are illuminating; compare George Cheyne, An Essay of
Health and Long Life (London, 1724), pp. 162–70, and George Cheyne, The
English Malady or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds (1733), edited by Roy
Porter (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 172–83.
38 Thomas Addison, ‘On Labour and Exercise’, Spectator, 12 July 1711, pp. 164–5.
For the same type of distinctions between dangerous ‘labour’ and salutary ‘gentle
exercise’, see T. Addison, ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination’, Spectator, 21
Jun. 1712, p. 594.
39 ‘Contraction’ in Abraham Rees, Cyclopaedia; A Universal Dictionary of Arts and
Sciences (London, 1786) (hereafter Rees’s Cyclopaedia).
40 Burke, p. 166.

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 240  
41 Ibid., p. 169.
42 Ibid., p. 174.
43 Nugent, p. 43.
44 Ibid., p. 42.
45 Ibid., pp. 43–4.
46 Ibid., p. 44.
47 Ibid., pp. 172–6.
48 Bynum, pp. 160–2.
49 Roselyne Rey, The History of Pain (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard
University Press, 1995), pp. 113–30.
50 ‘Sinewy’ and ‘Nerve’, ‘Nervous’, ‘Sinew’ in Johnson’s Dictionary.
51 ‘Nervous’ in Ibid.
52 ‘Elastic Body’ and ‘Contraction’ in Rees’s Cyclopaedia.
53 See Brocklesby’s landmark study ‘An Account of Some Experiments on the
Sensibility and Irritability of the Several Parts of the Animals’, Philosophical
Transactions, 49 (1755–6), pp. 240–5.
54 See Andrew Cunningham and Roger French, eds., The Medical Enlightenment of
the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
55 Richard Brocklesby, Reflections on Antient and Modern Musick, with the Application
to the Cure of Diseases (London, 1749), pp. 72–3.
56 Ibid., p. 71.
57 Ibid., p. 30, 31, 45 and 76.
58 See for example, Ibid., pp. 26–39.
59 Ibid., p. 29 and 37.
60 Ibid., p. 61.
61 Ibid., p. 11.
62 Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political
Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 1.
63 John Brown, Observations on the Principles of the Old System of Physic (Edinburgh,
1787).
64 Canguilhem, ‘John Brown’s System’, pp. 41–50, and Brunonianism in Britain and
Europe, edited by W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, Medical History, Supplement 8
(1988).
65 Quoted in Lock, p. 124.
66 Eagleton, p. 53.
67 ‘Contraction’ in Rees’s Cyclopaedia.
68 Eagleton, p. 62.
69 Ibid.
70 Michel Foucault, ‘The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century’ in The
Essential Works of Michel Foucault: Power, edited by James D. Faubion (London:
Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2000), pp. 90–105.

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