We’ve all experienced the torment of an upset stomach and the horror of indigestion. But most people are probably not aware of just what a dastardly threat dyspepsia poses. If certain 19th century physicians are to be believed, tummy-ache has the power to undermine religions. Not only can it place one at the mercy of ghosts and apparitions, it can also cause the body to overwhelm the soul itself, putting one’s very immortality at risk. This may sound bizarre, but such claims were made by a number of people prominent in their respective fields and widely respected in intellectual circles. One man in particular sent some astounding messages from the abyss of indigestion: that arch opium-eater and valetudinarian, Thomas De Quincey.

The story really begins with Dr John Ferriar (1761-1815), a leading Manchester physician probably best known for his work in improving the living and working conditions of the poor and his writings on literature. In 1813, however, he published An Essay towards a Theory of Apparitions. Ghosts, he argues, are due to a “partial affection of the brain” which leaves the witnesses sane but causes their senses to create illusory objects. Most influentially, he maintains that an irritation of the brain may cause recollected images to be conjured up so that they are ‘seen’ again. 1

It was this argument that was taken up by Dr Samuel Hibbert in a bravura variation on the theme. Hibbert (1782-1848) is today an even more obscure figure than Ferriar, known, if at all, for his antiquarian writings. But in Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions (1824; 2nd ed. 1825) he produced a lengthy tour-de-force account of the revivification of past images and feelings. He begins by rejecting the traditional theories explaining spectres – such as hallucinations, misperceptions, products of the imagination or the work of the devil – and goes on to define an apparition as “a past feeling, renovated by the aid of morbific agents with a degree of vividness, equalling, or exceeding, an actual impression.” 2

Hibbert’s theory deliberately undermines, and even reverses, the conventional explanations offered for ghosts. Far from being the manifestations of spirits of the dead, they have, he claims, a purely material origin: they are produced when our bodies override our minds, even while we remain perfectly sane. This occurs, according to Hibbert, when “variously excited states of the circulating system, or... nervous influence” cause “morbid affections” in the organs of the body. 3 So the body’s organs, including the organs of sense, somehow actually reproduce feelings and images derived from past thoughts and emotions. When we witness an apparition, we actually see it: the organic structure of the eye is so stimulated that it reproduces an image from the past.

The implications of Hibbert’s ideas are disturbing. The body, impelled by the excited bloodstream or nerves, so overcomes voluntary mental control that it blocks out, to a greater or lesser extent, objective reality, replacing it with the past. The smooth flow of consciousness is interrupted, and we are forced to watch as our body and our past experiences (including things we have been told or even what we have read) take over. The body asserts its rights over the mind to manufacture reality and identity: all you can do (if it is possible to talk of a ‘you’ at all in this case) is watch.

Hibbert’s book aroused considerable interest. A sign of its impact is that it was even thought necessary to issue a book-length rebuttal to Hibbert’s work of triumphant materialism, the significantly (and lengthily) titled Past Feelings Renovated; or, Ideas Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Hibbert’s Philosophy of Apparitions. Written with the View of Counteracting any Sentiments Approaching Materialism, Which that Work, However Unintentional on the Part of the Author, May Have a Tendency to Produce (1828). The anonymous author of Past Feelings Renovated evidently felt that Hibbert posed a threat to Christianity by asserting the power of the body to create its own reality, a reality in which the soul had no place. He (or she) argues that it is simply not possible for “our ideas or sensations... to produce a conception that we are other than ourselves; a living being, susceptible of the clear perception of identity.” Instead, a version of the traditional view of ghosts is maintained: our nature is both material and spiritual, and the mind is so independent of the body as to allow us at times to perceive “spiritual existences”. 4

Both Ferriar’s and Hibbert’s works were read and discussed avidly, especially in literary and scientific circles. William Wordsworth had a copy of Ferriar’s Essay in his library at Rydal Mount in the Lake District, and Charles Lamb also read it. 5 Judging by the number of articles about it in contemporary journals (not to mention Past Feelings Renovated), Hibbert’s contribution in particular caused quite a stir. 6 But the writer whose work most closely relates to that of the good doctors must surely be Thomas De Quincey (1785 - 1859). De Quincey is, of course, notorious as an opium addict, and is still cited today in works on the visionary aspects of drug-taking. What is not normally appreciated, however, is that De Quincey’s opium use did not actually cause his visions. Rather, he began to take opium in an attempt to palliate exactly the sort of revivification of past feelings and images described by Ferriar and Hibbert.

De Quincey may even have known Ferriar when he was a boy. Ferriar was a leading member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, part of the milieu in which the future Opium-Eater spent his early childhood. Even if he did not know Ferriar personally, De Quincey certainly read widely in books which refer extensively to the doctor’s theories. 7

In the Confessions De Quincey describes how, in 1813, he began to be troubled by the return of past sensations and images, and also by past stomach upsets. His drug intake had been relatively inconsiderable until then, when “a most painful affection of the stomach, which I had first experienced about ten years before, attacked me in great strength.” [Confessions, p6] He is referring to his experiences of 1802-1803 when he was living rough in London after absconding from Manchester Grammar School. The adolescent ailment doesn’t come alone, being “accompanied by a revival of all the old dreams” [C, p52]. The returning images and feelings consist of experiences of which he has no conscious recollection. It is worth quoting him at length:

“The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived: I could not be said to recollect them; for if I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. But placed as they were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognised them instantaneously.” [C, p68]

What he calls ‘dreams’ are not by any means solely sleeping experiences. For De Quincey, the word refers to what we would call visions or hallucinations – or, indeed, apparitions. They clearly consist of the return of past images and feelings, and come to form “visions as ugly... phantoms as ghastly, as ever haunted the couch of Orestes” [Collected Works v3: p376]. It will be remembered that Orestes was pursued by avenging furies tormenting him because of a past act (the murder of his mother). De Quincey may never have murdered anyone, but his past experiences harry him nevertheless, forcing him into “dread contest with phantoms”. [CW v3: p377]

He increases his opium intake to counteract his stomach problems and so lay to rest the apparitions, not to bring them on. His plan, of course, doesn’t work. As his stomach becomes weaker and weaker and its condition worsens, the visions and revenants become more intense. In the Confessions he records how by 1817 not only past experiences but also his past readings in history began to furnish the material for the phantoms he was forced to witness: “at night, when I lay in bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp.”[C, p67]

In fact, the opium is instrumental in the further degeneration of his stomach. In an appendix he added to the Confessions on their first publication in book form in 1822, De Quincey noted that “the unnatural state of [his] stomach” was “vitiated by so long a use of opium”. [CW v3: p469] By 1838 he was complaining of “the ravages in the great central organ, the stomach... wrought by opium.” [CW v3: p73

Hibbert explains why De Quincey should have so firmly associated his apparitions with his stomach problems. For certain constitutions, he writes, the major “morbid affection” connected with the disorders that cause visions is disorder of the digestive organs. 8

Even when opium seems to directly cause De Quincey’s visions, it is operating through his stomach, the state of which is the decisive factor in the renovation of his past feelings and images. Only a sound stomach would free him from the ghosts of the past.

At least one of De Quincey’s contemporaries made the connection between him and Hibbert (although he made the common mistake of finding the sole cause of the apparitions in De Quincey’s opium habit and not in the state of his stomach). In 1832 John Addington Symonds (1807-1871), a physician and father of the more famous poet and scholar of the same name, wrote an article On Apparitions, essentially following Hibbert on the physical causes of the phenomenon. Citing “Mr. de Quincy’s [sic] Confessions of an Opium Eater [sic],” he noted the danger to the individual if memories or imagination should become as vivid as his perception of reality. 9

For Hibbert, although disturbed stomachs often accompany the disorders causing apparitions, they are only a side effect of those disorders. For De Quincey, however, his shot digestion was not merely secondary to nervous or circulatory disorder: it was the primary cause of the involuntary recollections. This was possible, he believed, because: “There is very slight ground for holding the brain to be the organ of thinking, or the heart of moral sensibilities, more than the stomach, or the bowels, or the intestines generally.” [CW v8: pp196-197] Or, as he had written in 1824, “the brain and the stomach-apparatus through their reciprocal action and reaction jointly make up the compound organ of thought.” [CW v10: p446] 10

His comments go far beyond the conventional belief in ‘gut feelings’. For De Quincey, digestion and the operation of our thoughts are one. The action of the stomach, at least in part, produces our thoughts and even our moral feelings.

Bizarre as it may seem now, his view of the importance of the stomach was not particularly anomalous at the time. The problem of indigestion was a national obsession, and countless books were written on the subject. 11 One physician whose writings made a particular impact on De Quincey was Dr Alexander Philip Wilson Philip (1770-1851), whose A Treatise on Indigestion (1821) he mentioned at least three times in print [CW v8: pp354-355; v14: pp270-271]. 12 Stressing the centrality of the stomach, Wilson Philip described the disastrous effects of indigestion, which radiates out from the stomach, influencing every single part of the body. Indigestion, he writes, is “the most varied of all diseases”. It “becomes so complicated, and often, at length, so undermines every power of the system, that it is difficult to give a view of its symptoms, which shall be at once sufficiently full and distinct. It is an affection of the central part of a most complicated structure, capable of influencing even its remotest parts, and each, through many channels, and in various ways.” 13

Digestive disorders, then, can manifest themselves as any conceivable disease. No wonder the stomach was more crucial than the brain.

The problem, however, went even further than this. An upset stomach in the early 19th century presented a serious religious problem, representing the final victory of the material over the spiritual. It was able not only to disorder the whole body and mind of the sufferer, it could also disease the very soul itself.

The theory of ‘sympathy’ explained how this could be so. Sympathy was the name given by medicine at the time to the organic co-operation, interaction and equilibrium of all the organs of the human body, including the brain. Sympathy was believed to ensure that all the organs worked together to create a unified whole. In his work of popular science Curiosities of Medical Experience (1837), for instance, Dr John Gideon Millingen (1782-1862) wrote that “sympathy arises from the relative ties that mysteriously unite our several organs, however distant and unconnected they may appear; thus establishing a beauteous harmony between all the functions of the animal economy.” 14

Sympathy represented an order beyond the material; it was the interface at which matter and spirit, medicine and religion, met. The harmony that sympathy produced in the body was a spiritual one. As Millingen implies, sympathy could not be explained by any physical links between the organs; it did not work through the nerves or the bloodstream.

The classic account of sympathy was probably given by Robert Whytt, professor of the theory of medicine at Edinburgh University, 1747-1766. In the important work Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of those Disorders which are Commonly called Nervous, Hypochondriac, or Hysteric (1764) he initially credited the nervous system with being the medium for sympathy, but then had to admit that the nerves cannot account for the phenomenon, since they do not all seem to join up. In other words, there does not seem to be a material vehicle for the operation of sympathy. Whytt concludes that we do not know enough about “the laws of union between the body and soul, to whose sentient power the sympathy of the nerves... must be at last referred”. “Sympathy,” he continues, “depends upon a principle that is not mechanical.” 15

Sympathy, then, was seen as the manifestation of spiritual order in the body. It created an organic harmony that was beyond the material. By implication, if our physiological sympathy was ordered, our health and our thinking would be more than material: they would partake of the spiritual. For a writer like De Quincey, this ideal health of body and mind would manifest itself as a kind of divine inspiration.

Since the stomach was the central and most important organ of the body, it had the greatest influence over sympathy. When the stomach was disordered, it gradually disordered all other organs too; it was a touchstone for the true working of sympathy. As De Quincey wrote, “the whole process and elaborate machinery of digestion” forms “the essential basis upon which the strength and health of our higher nature repose.” [CW v14:p270]

An inspired writer’s productions, then, were literally the work of his digestive organs – a healthy stomach ensured transcendent thoughts and writings. De Quincey believed, for instance, that his great literary idol William Wordsworth had a superbly healthy digestion. In 1852 he was moved to exclaim in some exasperation “Heavens! Had I but ever had his robust strength, and healthy stomach.” 16 For de Quincey, safeguarding the health of his organs of digestion was a religious duty. He recommended a strict regime of exercise and constant attention to diet [CW v14: pp266-275]. Walking was the best form of exercise, and he claimed to walk up to 23 or 24 miles (37 or 38.6 km) a day [CW v14: p274]. This routine would presumably take up six to eight hours each day. He advised “a religious vigilance” towards “the digestibility of... food.” [CW v14: p266] The best kind of food for the weak of stomach was beef, not too thoroughly cooked, and “a little bread (at least sixty hours old), or game.” [CW v14: p271]

Such a regime was of little use to De Quincey himself. His experiences in London had done for his stomach, and his opium-taking merely exacerbated its condition. And if sympathy could broadcast spiritual harmony throughout a person’s whole being, it could also radiate the misery of indigestion. By its very nature, sympathy easily flipped over into what De Quincey called “morbid sympathy”. [CW v10: p446]

Seen in this context, De Quincey’s uncontrollable visions, his apparitions, his disordered senses, body and mind, were symptoms of a spiritual disorder, a crisis of the soul in which ‘mere’ material nature claimed its right to generate not only his imagination but his very being. His works are sighs from the depths of his digestive tract, artefacts of what he felt to be his radical separation from the divine. His stomach problems were tragic, to an extent we struggle to comprehend today. They were literally hell.