title: Hypochondria as withdrawal and comedy as cure in Dr. Willibald's Der Hypochondrist (1824).
abstract: Balthasar von Ammann's comedy Der Hypochondrist, published in 1824 under the pseudonym Dr. Willibald, foregrounds the social, sexual, and political implications of hypochondria. The play engages with early nineteenth-century medical and popular conceptions of hypochondria to co-opt potentially subversive elements and to promote a specific social, sexual, and political agenda. The text promotes literature — specifically comedic drama — as a cure for hypochondria. Hypochondria functions as a code for withdrawal. The hypochondriac withdraws medically from healthy society, gaining exceptional status. He withdraws sexually from society by remaining a bachelor, possibly engaged in non-normative sexual behaviour. Furthermore, the politically disenfranchised protagonist voices his political frustrations via a coded medical metaphor. The hypochondriac poses a threefold challenge to the social, sexual, and political order, and the play engages with contemporary conceptions of the disease to provide the solution: comedy. The text, presented as a cure for hypochondria, replaces the coded questioning of the social order via hypochondria with the less threatening code of heraldry. A comedy-within-the-comedy uses the hypochondriac's love of heraldry to cure him, resulting in the elimination of his medical problems and exceptional status, in the purification of his bachelorhood from non-normative elements, and in the pre-emption of political frustrations.
authors.affiliation: Mississippi State University.
authors.forename: Edward T
authors.initials: ET
authors.lastname: Potter
mesh_terms: D049672:History, 19th Century; D006998:Hypochondriasis / Q000208:ethnology / Q000266:history; D007845:Laughter / Q000502:physiology / Q000523:psychology; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D019365:Metaphor; D012725:Sexual Behavior / Q000208:ethnology / Q000266:history / Q000502:physiology / Q000523:psychology; D012918:Social Alienation / Q000523:psychology; D012919:Social Behavior / Q000266:history; D013812:Therapeutics / Q000266:history