Thoughts Painfully Intense reads Hawthorne's fiction in the context of 19th-century medical and pseudomedical discourse. Many physicians, health reformers and lecturers, such as Chandler Robbins, Sylvester Graham, William Sweetster and Isaac Ray, believed that authors and scholars, particularly male authors and scholars, were vulnerable to nervous irritability, breakdown and paralysis. According to these authorities, men of letters, strained by intense study or lost in imaginative fantasies, became debilitated invalids. And, what was perhaps even more alarming, this debility could be...