280:(1863–1864), the main female character Phillis Holman suffers from a sudden attack of brain fever upon hearing that her lover has married someone else. According to Clare Pettitt, the scene where Holman has her illness serves two purposes. First, it indicates to which extent the men in her life have let her down and failed to diagnose her condition properly, and how they have denied her a subjectivity. Second, it shows that becoming a subject in that environment requires a pathology; there are no other ways for a woman to express selfhood: "Gaskell uses her representation of Phillis to illustrate the pathologization of women by a mid-nineteenth-century society that, literally, makes them il." Jeni Curtis argues that her wordlessness during her bout of fever is a breakdown of language: her "moans and wordless noises" are an attempt to hold on to
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the attack was described as coming on abruptly, a feature which is especially significant for the writers of fiction". Absent knowledge of bacterial causes of disease, medical scientists did recognize epidemic occurrences of brain fever, but considered them caused by "matters floating in the atmosphere". As with all fevers of the time, emotional and psychological causes were frequently cited as well, including fear, lack of sleep, mental exertion, and disappointment. People leading sedentary lifestyles (like those who study) are particularly vulnerable.
314:'s, who was distraught after losing important diplomatic papers. He becomes so upset that, while travelling home after leaving the case with the police, he reports becoming "practically a raving maniac". Phelps "lay for over nine weeks, unconscious, and raving mad with brain fever", before recovering enough to send for the aid of Dr Watson's friend Sherlock Holmes. Similarly, characters with brain fever are also mentioned in the Holmes stories "
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197:; they are "disorders ...characterized by physical complaints that appear to be medical in origin but that can not be explained in terms of a physical disease, the results of substance abuse, or by an other mental disorder." These "physical symptoms must be serious enough to interfere with the patient's employment or relationships, and must be symptoms that are not under the patient's voluntary control."
351:, which manifests itself into Ivan's nightmare of the devil: "Anticipating events I can say at least one thing: he was at that moment on the very eve of an attack of brain fever. Though his health had long been affected, it had offered a stubborn resistance to the fever which in the end gained complete mastery over it."
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denied the existence of such a differentiation on the basis of "observation and dissection". Phrenitis was classified by the end of the 18th century as a disease, "brain fever" had become a common synonym by the mid-19th century. However, at the same time as it became popular in literature, phrenitis
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was being noted as anacronistic or obsolete. Medical literature saw that pathological cases were reduced to a version of meningitis. By the early 20th century it was absent from medical literature, with symptoms and cases linked to different pathologies and psychologies, mostly meningo-encephalitis.
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Symptoms described in the literature included headache, red eyes and face, impatience and irritability, a quickened pulse, moaning and screaming, convulsions followed by relaxation, and delirium. Peterson notes that while sometimes an instance of brain fever was said to come gradually, "more often
152:. Other cases were likely the result of emotional trauma, a diagnoses particularly common if the patient was a woman. Audrey C. Peterson explains that 18th-century medicine often used "fever" to mean "disease", not necessarily a raised body temperature. For
132:, beginning in early 19th century medical literature. Supposedly the brain becomes inflamed and causes a variety of symptoms, most notably mental confusion, and can lead to death. The terminology is romanticized in
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Rena, the main character of House Behind the Cedars (Charles W Chesnutt, published 1900) is afflicted with brain fever in her final moments, with symptoms including delirium and hallucinations.
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classified it as "the most dangerous kind of inflammation," which could lead to delirium. Later scholars distinguished between a fever that affected parts of the brain or the whole, but
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It is a diagnosis that became obsolete as knowledge of microbiology and contagion increased. Many symptoms and post-mortem evidence is consistent with some forms of
136:, where it typically describes a potentially life-threatening illness brought about by a severe emotional upset, and much less often fatal than in medicine.
193:
Ioana
Boghian used the term as a synonym for hysteria in a semiotic analysis of Victorian conceptions of illness, which were viewed, she argues, as
364:, and Captain Crewe, Sarah's father, both experience brain fever when they think their investments in the diamond mines have become worthless.
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describes her own case of brain fever in 1860, in a letter to her sister, the same illness that is suffered by the
Periwinkle character in her
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300:", the term is used to describe a woman in a state of shock when her husband has been murdered. The term is also used in "
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The
Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostyoyevsky (eBook) on Project Gutenberg
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A Little
Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett (eBook) on Project Gutenberg
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The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler (eBook) on
Project Gutenberg
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455:"Brain Fever in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Fact and Fiction"
592:"A Wound of One's Own: Louisa May Alcott's Civil War Fiction"
128:) is an outdated medical term that was used as a synonym for
310:; here it refers to Percy Phelps, an old schoolmate of
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Dracula by Bram Stoker (eBook) on
Project Gutenberg
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573:"Letters of 1864, letter VI, dated March 15, 1861"
538:"A Semiotic Approach to Illness in Emily Brontë's
16:Former name of medical conditions producing fever
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257:describes a young man who died of brain fever.
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546:Limbaj Si Context
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404:References
312:Dr. Watson
150:meningitis
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274:'s novel
154:phrenitis
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382:See also
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190:(1847).
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