The Hypochondriack

James Boswell

4 ideas

1. A melancholic writes seventy monthly essays anonymously

   From 1777 to 1783 James Boswell, an Edinburgh advocate prone to severe depressive episodes, produced a monthly essay for The London Magazine under the pseudonym 'The Hypochondriack', seventy in all. He presented himself as a sufferer writing from inside the condition, and told readers he wrote in his better intervals, so that the essays themselves were evidence the dark state passes. The fixed monthly deadline and the mask of anonymity let him describe his own low spirits candidly while forcing regular productive work on a mind that tended toward torpor.

2. Low spirits falsify the value of everything

   In a hypochondriac fit, every pursuit, including study, ambition, friendship and pleasure, appears trivial and vain, and the sufferer takes this for clear sight rather than symptom. Because the same objects regain their worth when the mood lifts, the verdicts reached in melancholy should be treated as readings from a distorted instrument and not acted upon. Recognising the distortion as mood rather than truth is the first defence against it.

3. Occupation and company against the black mood

   The Hypochondriack's practical regimen is to refuse to indulge the mood. That means avoiding solitude and idleness, keeping the mind engaged with regular business or study, and seeking cheerful company even when disinclined. Melancholy feeds on unoccupied attention, so the remedy works by filling that attention rather than by arguing with the gloom directly.

4. Live no more than you can record

   In his essay on diaries Boswell endorses the maxim that a man should not live more than he can record, just as a farmer should not grow more corn than he can harvest. On this view, experience that goes unrecorded is partly wasted. Keeping a journal is how a life is gathered in, preserved and made available for later reflection, though it also risks turning living into a mere supply for the page.

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