Desk Diseases

In a capitalist epoch of separation, disintegration, analysis, and individualizing the social order had to be reconstituted. That order needed to base itself on the same fluid, individualistic values that drove the market. This essay argues that a group of new nervous disorders in the nineteenth century served that purpose. These 'desk diseases' principally afflicted sedentary men - merchants and their clerks, together with lawyers, industrialists, and students - who were furthest removed from American traditions of household mutuality and 'hard work out of doors' and most identified with the money economy. On one hand, the new diagnoses were directly attributed to the enervating effects of post-agrarian habits. On the other hand, they were not a reactionary protest against capital's promotion of ambition and self-making. Indeed, personal infirmities became the backdrop to equally adamant performances of personal recovery. These underscored the efficacy of individual sovereignty. Men of property proved to be chronically ill, their bodies far less immaculate - and far more hysterical - than has been presumed. Personal health consequently emerged as a political philosophy for the capitalist age, catapulting a new, self-ruling class to power. That class governed through a novel technique called physical education which strove to re-organize eating, sleeping, bathing, and exercising in order to arrest the dramatic deterioration of commercial lives.