Experiencing, Exploiting, and Evacuating Bile: Framing Fashionable Biliousness from the Sufferer's Perspective

Abstract:This article examines how sufferers experienced, understood, and expressed themselves as bilious, focusing on the late Georgian era when the disease became one of the most fashionable and oft diagnosed amongst the elites. We show that responses to bile were more complex, varied, and less credulous than contemporary diatribes and subsequent historiography imply. Nonetheless, we foreground the socioculturally negotiated elements of the malady rather than its "reality." Applying Rosenberg's framing diseases model reveals biliousness as one of the most problematic conditions to frame, but one of the most malleable to self-fashion. We demonstrate how Georgian Britons found functionality in their bile and "performed" being bilious. Articulate, literate sufferers deployed a range of strategies to vent or master their bile, or to render it social and serviceable, deriving various compensatory "secondary gains." We illuminate their variable success in reifying and sublimating bile, and differentiating the boundaries of biliousness vis-à-vis other complaints.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Literature and medicine

• Publication date

  2017-12-21

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Psychology, Medicine, History

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1353/lm.2017.0016PMID 29276199
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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