Fluxes: the Early Modern Body and the Emotions

Where did this mixture of urine and blood come from? The rattling of the coach over stones and ruts in the road had jostled and shaken the ambassador, and his bodily fluids along with him. He believed that an outflow was generally purifying, and one did well to give it time. Early modern perceptions of the body were marked by this attentiveness to bodily fluids and juices, to their motions, interruptions, consistency and purity in interaction with heat, cold, emotions, nourishment and movement, such as coach travelling.2 In 1767, Tissot, the Swiss popularizer of the medical Enlightenment, still defined health as a state in which none of the bodily fluids had too much or too little movement.3 Thus many symptoms that early modern sources describe as matter-of-fact and normal are quite alien to our own systems of meaning. The 1689 funeral sermon for the wife of the Wurttemberg publisher and bookseller Philibert Brunn, for example, describes how in January of that year she was plagued by Seitenstechen, sharp pains in her sides. They did not, however, prevent her from attending the burial of her mother-in-law, the late Frau Cotta, in May. There, she was so overcome 'by a complete attack of hectic' (eine Hectic) that despite all efforts, and 'the physician's and her husband's indefatigable loyalty, attentions and care', the consuming heat could not be reduced so that 'her strength and vital juices' dried up and did not flow.4 Was fever the cause of death? What were these sharp pains in the side? Contemporary definitions make it difficult to say with any certainty that she was suffering from