The medical background to Currie's Account of the life of Burns

• Published in: European romantic review Vol. 20; no. 4; pp. 513 - 527
• Main Author: Darcy, Jane
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 01-10-2009
• ISSN: 1050-9585; 1740-4657
• DOI: 10.1080/10509580903220628

This article puts forward a new account of Currie's thinking about Burns. Recent scholarship has emphasized Currie's Scottish enlightenment links. I seek to bring new detail to this agenda by analysing the medical components of Currie's thought about which little has been said. I suggest the importance of two neglected early essays by Currie on hypochondria and melancholy. These essays reveal the influence on Currie of his mentor William Cullen. I argue that Currie's views on melancholy in these essays have an important bearing on his later presentation of Burns's melancholy. Burns becomes a test-case for Currie. In his preface on the Scottish peasantry, Currie demonstrates his agreement with Cullen's assumption that a peasant could possess refined nerves. Currie goes beyond Cullen, however, in his remarks on how Burns might have preserved his nervous power. Developing Cullen's ideas on medical therapeutics, Currie argues that it was Burns's very sensibility (evident in his melancholy) that made him peculiarly susceptible to the toxic influence of alcohol. By substituting a medical explanation of cause and effect for the traditional theological trajectory of literary biography, Currie shows himself both to be in the vanguard of radical medicine of the 1790s, and an innovative biographer.