title: Exhaustion and the Pathologization of Modernity.
abstract: This essay analyses six case studies of theories of exhaustion-related conditions from the early eighteenth century to the present day. It explores the ways in which George Cheyne, George Beard, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Alain Ehrenberg and Jonathan Crary use medical ideas about exhaustion as a starting point for more wide-ranging cultural critiques related to specific social and technological transformations. In these accounts, physical and psychological symptoms are associated with particular external developments, which are thus not just construed as pathology-generators but also pathologized. The essay challenges some of the persistently repeated claims about exhaustion and its unhappy relationship with modernity.
authors.affiliation: School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent, Canterbury, CT2 7NF, UK. A.K.Schaffner@kent.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Anna Katharina
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Schaffner
mesh_terms: D001007:Anxiety; D003866:Depressive Disorder; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D009440:Neurasthenia / Q000503:physiopathology*; D012922:Social Change / Q000266:history*; D013315:Stress, Psychological
keywords: Burnout; Chronic fatigue syndrome; Depression; Exhaustion; Fatigue; Melancholia; Modernity; Nervous weakness; Nervousness; Neurasthenia
references.citation: Clio Med. 2001;63:1-30
references.pmid: 11763704
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