"The History of Half the Sex": Fashionable Disease, Capitalism, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century

This essay examines the way in which disease was framed and narrated as fashionable in the long eighteenth century, and argues that the intensifying focus on women's fashionable disorders in the period grew in tandem with the rise of an unstable capitalism in its manifold forms. Using the satirical articles written by Henry Southern in the London Magazine—"On Fashions" (August 1825), "On Fashions in Physic" (October 1825), and "On Dilettante Physic" (January 1826)—and the literature that led to them, I analyze the role that women were now taking in the newly capitalized world of the early nineteenth century. This world was characterized by a burgeoning medical market, a periodical and print market which could adequately reflect and promote fashionable diseases and the medical market that spawned them, and the nexus of actors in the whole drama of the production, maintenance, and dissolution of fashionable diseases.