HHH Column: Caught in the Toils of Love by Diedelot Denessen
The HHH column is a monthly blog in which History, Health & Healing members share their thoughts on research, current affairs, or anything to do with medical history. Each edition is written by a different member — in due time, we hope to offer everybody a chance to publish a contribution. This month, the floor is for Diedelot Denessen, PhD Candidate at the University of Groningen. In this column she shares a first look into her research about the history of lovesickness.
Caught in the Toils of Love
Lovesickness in the Dutch Enlightenment Culture of Psychosomatic Medicine
By Diedelot Denessen
In the podcast “Let’s go mental” presenter Malou Holshuijsen and neurobiologist Brankele Frank discuss the devastating, emotional turmoil people experience when dealing with unrequited love. These feelings of pain, Frank explains, can be mediated by taking a simple paracetamol. Both physical and mental pain are activated in the same pain centres in the brain, and paracetamol numbs these. She nuances that this does not cure lovesickness, of course, but it can take the edge off.[1]
Despite this discussion of taking medication to treat your lovesickness, most of us today no longer see it as a serious disorder. But for much of history, the often devastating effects of unrequited (romantic) love have been considered as a serious disorder, warranting diagnosis and treatment from medical doctors.
For example, Dutch Enlightenment physician Jerome Gaub writes extensively on lovesickness, and the effects of love and other passions on the body.[2] He recognises a metaphysical separation between mind and body, but holds that in case of disease this separation no longer exists. Diseases that originate from the mind overflow into the body. Likewise, diseases that have their root in the body will disturb the mind. As such, Gaub argues, that minds disturbed by “the violence of love or grief” can, and should, be treated by medications acting directly on the body, and thus simultaneously on the mind.[3] Gaub’s call for the development and use of psychopharmaceuticals to treat “mental aberrations” including those caused by love, illustrates the rise of psychosomatic medicine.
Lovesickness was not only central to medical debates, but also featured prominently in Enlightenment culture. Consider for example the painting at the top of this column, an eighteenth-century depiction of lovesickness. Or the painting below, by Jan Steen, who painted many scenes of women suffering from lovesickness, often with a humorous twist. The women in his paintings seem to feigning lovesickness, mocking the foolish physician. Similar narratives can be found in Dutch theatre, as for example in De liefdesdokter and De gedwongen doctor young women try to get out of arranged marriages. They use the highly gendered idea of lovesickness to trick male authorities, and are able to marry their true love. In this way, lovesickness is a clear example of the intersection of medicine and popular culture, since these different perspectives interacted to shape the disease identity and experience. As such, it will help us understand how psychosomatic ideas arose in the Dutch medical culture of the Enlightenment.
History shows us how lovesickness is shaped and understood by not only the medical writings and theories at the time, but particularly also by cultural discourse. Yet, how cultural ideas influence the experience and medical theories of lovesickness is commonly overlooked. For example, in 2011 the University Medical Centre Groningen (UMCG) started a research project focussing on the neurological basis of lovesickness in young women. The researchers particularly considered how the involved brain areas were similar to those involved in depression.[4] The project gained a lot of popular media attention, and in 2019 follow-up research was started.[5] This is important and very useful research, but it overlooks the cultural context, gendered ideas and long historical roots of these disorders. Instead, it reduces the experience of depression and of lovesickness to the neuronal activity of the brain.
Taking a paracetamol may help to reduce the pain of unrequited love temporarily. Yet, in order to understand how lovesickness – and psychosomatic disorders more generally – shape our lived experiences, today, and in the past, we need to take a different approach. In my PhD research, I will place lovesickness in the Dutch Enlightenment culture of psychosomatic medicine. Looking at both medical and cultural sources, I hope to highlight the importance of considering not only somatic explanations of psychosomatic disorders. The medico-cultural context in which these disorders are defined, experienced and pathologised should not be overlooked.
[1] Brankele Frank and Malou Holshuijsen, “Liefdesverdriet: waarom voelt mijn hart echt gebroken?,” Let’s go mental, 7 Jan. 2025, https://www.brainwash.nl/info/lets-go-mental.
[2] L. J. Rather, Mind and Body in Eighteenth Century Medicine: A Study Based on Jerome Gaub’s De Regimine Mentis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965).
[3] Rather. 109, para. 96.
[4] “Start Onderzoek Naar Liefdesverdriet Bij Jonge Vrouwen,” Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, May 3, 2011, https://www.rug.nl/news/2011/05/liefdesverdrietumcg.
[5] NOS nieuws, “Universiteit Groningen zoekt vrouwen met gebroken hart,” NOS.nl, September 6, 2019, https://nos.nl/artikel/2300563-universiteit-groningen-zoekt-vrouwen-met-gebroken-hart; Anne M. Verhallen et al., “Depressive Symptom Trajectory Following Romantic Relationship Breakup and Effects of Rumination, Neuroticism and Cognitive Control,” Stress and Health 38, no. 4 (October 2022): 653–65, https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.3123.