Pathological Tears

Abstract This chapter shows how tears were cast into doubt on the physiological level in the first decades of the nineteenth century, with lachrymal secretions increasingly considered to represent a pathological degeneration of sensibility that had to be ‘cured’ by both physicians and philosophers. The epistemological conviction underlying the idea of a link between tears and pathology was fairly simple: disease, by virtue of the fact that it modifies the element of physique, makes it possible to grasp with greater clarity the repercussions that emotions have on morals, thus allowing scientists to analyse both of sensibility’s twofold facets. This investigative method can be seen particularly vividly in descriptions of the pathology of ‘vapours’ (vapeurs), one of the most curious and fascinating expressions of the synergy between medicine, literature, and philosophy in French culture. While ‘vapours’ involved an excess of tears, early nineteenth-century physicians were more concerned with the absence of lachrymal secretions. Particularly, the emerging field of psychiatry—which found fertile ground for its development in the philosophical environment of the Idéologues—took as one of its great challenges the task of providing a medical and scientific explanation for the inability to cry. This issue was central to the ‘moral therapy’ theorized by Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, one of the founding fathers of modern psychiatry.