Worried Sick: Emotion and the Socially Situated Experience of Illness in Seventeenth-Century Sweden

Abstract This article examines the various ways in which emotions were thought to influence cases of illness, thus demonstrating the complex role of emotions in experiences of illness in early modern Sweden. It argues that the early modern medical precept whereby emotions were active agents in causing illness must be understood in relation to the social context in which illness occurred in individual cases. This aspect of illness causation has been underexplored in previous research on early modern experiences of illness. The present article uses an extensive collection of Swedish letters spanning over 45 years in order to trace how experiences of illness were formed through one particular individual’s social relationships, advancing age and their increasing numbers of encounters with ill health. In so doing, the article lays bare the complex understanding of emotional illness causation gained over the course of a lifetime.