'He Described My Condition Well Enough'

Thanks to Theodore Dalrymple I’ve read a poem by the Scottish physician John Ferriar (1761-1815) that succinctly diagnoses my condition: “The Bibliomania: An Epistle to Richard Heber, Esq.” (1809). In 2010, Dalrymple published an essay, “The Draw of Dusty Tomes,” a tongue-in-cheek look at the malady, in the British Medical Journal.  Ferrier addresses his poem to Heber who was “a book collector of such voracity that he needed eight houses and said that ‘no gentleman can be without three copies of a book, one for show, one for use and one for borrowers.’” A confession: I own three copies each of The Anatomy of Melancholy and Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Here’s how Ferriar’s poem begins: 

“What wild desires, what restless torments seize

The hapless man, who feels the book-disease . . .”

 

I’m not that bad. I can quit whenever I want. The OED sounds less medical when it defines bibliomania rather quaintly as “a rage for collecting and possessing books.” Dalrymple tells us Ferriar’s book inspired others devoted to  the same subject. The Rev. Thomas Frognall Dibdin published The Bibliomania, or Book Madness: History, Symptoms and Cure of This Fatal Disease, described by Dalrymple as “89 pages long when first published in 1811 and 618 pages long in its final edition of 1842.” The OED cites Dibdin’s title in its entry for bibliomania. And here’s another:

 

“The French doctor [Jean-Baptiste Félix] Descuret (1754-1825) took up the gauntlet and ranked bibliomania among the perverted passions such as drunkenness, gluttony, anger, sloth, fear, and libertinism that led to madness.”

 

Dalrymple, a physician, praises Ferriar medical gifts: “A graduate of Edinburgh, he practised as a physician in Manchester and was among the pioneers of public health in that city, establishing an isolation ward for fever cases. He was among the first to adopt the use of digitalis, publishing an Essay on the Medical Effects of the Digitalis Purpurea in 1799. Among his many essays was Of Popular Illusion and Particularly Medical Demonology, and  in 1813 he published a treatise entitled An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions, maintaining that reports of ghosts were the result of hallucinations caused by temporary or permanent, endogenous or exogenous derangement of the brain.”

 

The line between science and pseudo-science is forever blurred. I’ve seen accused of bibliomania since I was a boy. Such accusations suggest the accusers are worried about contagion. When my old friend Bill Healy opened his bookstore in Schenectady, N.Y., in 1981, he called in Bibliomania.

 

Dalrymple quotes these line from Ferriar’s poem, “English books, neglected and forgot, / Excite his wish in many a dusty lot,” and adds, “But his reward is great: ‘How pure the joy, when first his hands unfold / The small, rare volume, black with tarnish’s gold!’” The essay concludes:

 

“I know not whether Ferriar himself suffered from the bibliomania (not, as yet, recognised in the International Classification of Diseases), but he described my  condition well enough. Of course, with the new technology, the bibliomania may become as extinct as chlorosis, ‘the disease of maids occasioned by celibacy.’”