Sensibility reconsidered. Essay review.

To medical historians, even of the new historical contextual school, sensibility remains a word conjuring associations with things sensory: the senses, sensation, the body, the brain; and then higher developed nervous systems, nervous diseases, nervous ailments, especially in psychiatry and the psychobiological sciences. But sensibility also has another profile extending back to the Greeks, transcending these local medical usages, even if it is in medical theory that the transformations of sensibility are most evident. Down through the seventeenth century, in controversial theoretical leaps taken by Descartes, Thomas Willis, his assumed students Sydenham and John Locke, their students Bernard Mandeville (another doctor) and the Earl of Shaftesbury (Locke's tutee), and Willis's intellectual descendants David Hartley, George Cheyne, Robert Whytt, William Cullen, as well as dozens of prominent Scots, the theory of nervous sensibility was necessarily paramount in any notion of an evolving medical Enlightenment or broader and progressive "pan-European Enlightenment". Now G J Barker-Benfield has written a very long, heavily annotated, ponderous, seemingly exhaustive, and unsurprisingly "feminist" reconsideration of the subject; feminist perhaps on the assumption that feminism is too important an ideology to be left solely to women. The culture of sensibility seems to cover the whole map: religious, philosophical