No Victorian portrait of nervous breakdown is more celebrated than John Stuart Mill's description of his own crisis recounted in his Autobiography. But Mill was only the most notable British Victorian to suffer from "shattered nerves," for depression appears again and again in nineteenth-century history and literature, among men and women of all classes. It was a problem that doctors struggled to understand and treat--largely unsuccessfully. Their debates over the nature of depression, Janet Oppenheim writes, offer us a unique window on the Victorian mind.
In "Shattered...