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Edited by Frank R. Shaw, FSA Scot, Greater Atlanta, GA, USA
Email: jurascot@earthlink.net
Introduction by Professor Patrick Scott
University of South Carolina
Moira Hansen, a PhD student in Scottish
Literature at the University of Glasgow, came circuitously to Burns
research, with a pharmacology BSc from Dundee, and experience in data
management for a clinical research company, before doing BA and MA
degrees in English from the Open University, a teaching diploma at
Aberdeen, teaching high school English and working for the Scottish
Qualifications Authority. In May 2014, after moving from Aberdeen to
Glasgow, and wanting to go further with her interest in science and
literature, she attended a symposium at the Royal College of Physicians
and Surgeons, Glasgow on the theme of Burns and Medicine. During the
symposium, she heard that Gerry Carruthers and Danny Smith were looking
for someone interested in exploring the mental health of Robert Burns.
She was initially nominated for the first Shaw Scholarship in Robert
Burns Studies, which she ceded to another new graduate student when
Glasgow awarded her one of the University-wide Lord Kelvin/Adam Smith
scholarships, supporting four years of interdisciplinary PhD research.
She gives updates about the Blue Devilism project on Twitter (@bluedevilism)
and on the project blog (http://bluedevilism.wordpress.com).
Burns and ‘Blue Devilism’
By Moira Hansen
The health of Robert Burns is something
which has always fascinated people. Accounts of the poet as an alcoholic
genius who lived fast and died young have dogged his biography almost
from the moment of his death in 1796. The picture of Burns given by Dr.
James Currie, his first major biographer, was influenced by Currie’s
ideas as a practising physician and as author of Medical Reports on the
Effects of Water (1797). Writers such as Scott (1809), Lockhart (1828)
and Madden (1833) perpetuate Currie’s representation, linking it to the
idea of Burns as the tortured Romantic genius, a victim of his own
inability to control his impulses and urges. It wasn’t until the 20th
century, with the 1926 publication of James Crichton-Browne’s Burns from
a New Point of View, that there was any real medical challenge to these
perceptions. Now, in the 21st century, we have a far better
understanding of Burns’s physical health and the causes of his death. Dr
Thorne Winter and Sir Kenneth Calman have both previously written for
Robert Burns Lives! about the impact of Burns’s health on his life and
his poetry (see RBL! 118 and 114).
There is, however, another side to Burns. He may have been a man who
knew how to have a good time, but he was also intermittently afflicted
by what he called his ‘blue devilism’ – periods of melancholy which
could render him bed-ridden or elicit frighteningly dark contemplations
such as that written to Frances Dunlop: ‘I have a hundred times wished
that one could resign life as an officer resigns a commission…a
miserable soldier…conspicuously wretched’ (Letter 184 in Roy’s 2nd
edition). Although offering a tantalizing alternative view of the Bard,
this melancholy has been little studied, simply accepted as part of his
poetic temperament. In 1993, Kay Redfield Jamison suggested the
melancholy may be a sign of something more significant – recurrent
depression or bipolar disorder – but gave scant detail on how she
reached this conclusion.
And this is where the door opens on my doctoral research, now informally
named the Blue Devilism project. Working at the University of Glasgow,
I’m looking at the mental health of Robert Burns, scouring his letters,
journals and notebooks for evidence of signs and symptoms which supports
the theory that, had he been alive today, he would be diagnosed as
suffering from depression or bipolar disorder. From there, I’ll be
looking at the impact his mental health had on his life and on his
creativity.
Because it is an interdisciplinary project, I am working with two
research supervisors, Prof. Gerard Carruthers from the Centre for Robert
Burns Studies and Prof. Daniel Smith, Professor of Psychiatry in the
Institute of Health and Wellbeing here at the University of Glasgow.
Between them I’m well-covered for both the literary and scientific
aspects of the project.
Over the past 200 years, Robert Burns has
taken a bit of a pounding for his personal life. There has been some
exaggeration and embellishment, but you can’t deny that he did have his
faults. The results of this research might go some way to providing an
explanation for some of his behaviour (not an excuse though!). It will
also provide another piece for a wider research question – there is a
fair amount of research published which makes strong links between
bipolar disorder and creativity, and this research on Burns could add to
that picture.
The first stage of the project has been to
get a good understanding of what has already been written about Burns’s
behaviour and mental health. As well as Currie and Crichton-Browne,
William Findlay’s Robert Burns and the Medical Profession (1898) and
more modern studies such as those by Buchanan and Kean, and Beveridge
have helped paint a picture of the current understanding of the poet’s
mental health. This background has informed the development of my
methodology for more rigorous exploration of his condition.
Developing this method has been a
challenging process. I wanted to ground it, as far as possible, in
modern psychiatric methods, using modern definitions of depression and
bipolar disorder. But we can’t speak to Burns or his friends and family
the way a psychiatrist would today (wouldn’t it be fascinating if we
could?!). Instead, I’ve had to design a way of charting the signs and
symptoms of abnormal mood in the poet’s letters, test it, tweak it and
then apply it across more than 700 letters. This is not without its
problems: some of his letters, especially from his late teens and early
twenties, are lost, so the evidence is intermittent.
Even where there are more letters, there’s
going to be a lot of interpretation, looking for clues in the language
Burns used, in his subject matter, in his sentence structure and flow of
ideas. Sometimes it’s more straightforward, for example, when Burns
directly describes how ‘fatigue, and a load of Care almost too heavy for
my shoulders, have in some degree actually fever’d me’ (Letter 228). At
other times, the signs are more subtle and need careful assessment –
when Burns explains to Sir John Whitefoord ‘It is not easy to imagine a
more helpless state than his, whose poetic fancy unfits him for the
world’ (Letter 61): is this a show being put on for a social superior,
is it the exaggerated grandiose language that might indicate an
abnormally elevated mood, or is it a sign of the introspection that
Burns was prone to during an episode of melancholy?
The whole thing is a bit like trying to
assemble a jigsaw with no box – you’re not sure all the pieces are there
and you have only a rough idea of what the picture might look like when
you’re done!
Nevertheless, this past year developing
methodology and examining the letters has been time well spent. In what
feels like the first really big milestone of the project, I’ve been able
to generate the first solid data relating to evidence of mood disorder
in Burns’s letters.
As an example, this graph shows the
variations in Burns’s mood during the period of November 1786 through
January 1787 – the time of his first visit to Edinburgh. The peaks show
points where there are indications of abnormally elevated mood while the
troughs are indicators of abnormally depressed mood. Of particular note
is the trough between 13th and 20th December – this coincides with an
acknowledged period of melancholy, suggesting this was an episode of
what would now be recognised as clinical depression.
This is only a suggestion! The modern
clinical description of depression requires a minimum duration for
diagnosis, with symptoms continuing for at least two weeks. The current
data can’t document this, because we don’t have letters from Burns
frequently enough, and certainly not every day. Future work will look
for additional evidence, perhaps from Burns, perhaps from his family and
friends, which may add to this picture and give us more confidence in
identifying these, and other such points in Burns’s timeline, as
episodes of abnormal mood.
In talking about the work of the project
recently, I was asked if we were running the risk of medicalising
Burns’s behaviour by exploring it from the perspective of modern
psychiatry. Yet, no-one has ever questioned using modern medical
knowledge to develop a better understanding of the physical causes of
Burns’s premature death. Mental health is often stigmatized because
people don’t see it as a ‘real’ medical concern, something as serious as
cancer or diabetes or a broken leg. Instead it becomes something to be
ashamed of, not to be discussed. However, someone with mental illness
does have a medical condition. Something is not functioning within
medically-accepted normal parameters. The condition will almost
certainly be life-altering in some way; it will become life-threatening
for too many. I’m not making any grand claims about the project solving
the problem of stigmatisation. But I do hope this project adds something
to the on-going dialogue that is improving public understanding of
mental health disorders and how they can affect people’s lives.
Ultimately, it is this unexplored aspect of
Burns’s biography that is the focus of the project. In exploring the
poet’s moods and how these might connect with modern psychiatric
medicine, I hope to add to our collected understanding of Burns as an
individual, the motivations and influences underpinning some of his
behaviours and life choices and creativity. And in doing so, we should
develop a new layer of appreciation which brings us even closer to the
man and his poetry.
References:
Anderson, H.B. (1928) in Annals of Medical History, 10 (March 1928),
47-58; revised as Robert Burns, his medical friends, attendants and
biographer, New York: Paul B. Hoeber
Beveridge, A. (2014) ‘”Groaning under the
miseries of a diseased nervous System”: Robert Burns and Melancholy’, in
Scottish Medicine and Culture, ed. David Shuttleton and Megan Coyer,
Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 145-171
Buchanan, W.; Kean, W. (1982, 1991) ‘Robert
Burns’s illness revisited’, Scottish Medical Journal, 27:1, January
1982, 75-88; revised as ‘Robert Burns final illness revisited’, Burns
Chronicle, 1991, 60-71
Buchanan, W. (1996) ‘Robert Burns’
Rheumatology’, Burns Chronicle, 237-243
Calman, Kenneth (2011) ‘Remember Tam O’Shanter’s Mare, A Study of Burns
and Health’, Robert Burns Lives!, Chapter 114
http://www.electricscotland.com/familytree/frank/burns_lives114.htm
Crichton-Browne, J. (1926) Burns from a New
Point of View, London: Hodder and Stoughton; 2nd ed, London: Hodge, 1937
Findlay, William (1898) Robert Burns and the
Medical Profession, Paisley: Gardner
Jamison, Kay Redfield (1993) Touched with
Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, New York:
Simon & Schuster
Purves-Stewart, J. (1935) The Immortal
Memory of Burns: A Medical Aspect, London: for the Author
Roy, G. Ross; Ferguson, J. DeLancey (1985)
The Letters of Robert Burns, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon
Winter, Thorne (2011) ‘Robert Burns – His
Life, Illness and Death: 18th Century Medicine in Scotland’, Robert
Burns Lives!, Chapter 118
http://www.electricscotland.com/familytree/frank/burns_lives118.htm
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