This article argues that the ‘fashionable’ diseases of consumption and melancholy were both linked by eighteenth-century medical theory about nervous diseases and sensibility, and that these diseases ‘worked’ for the novelist Laurence Sterne to promote his fiction and fame as a man of sensibility and sentiment. Through his own life and those of his literary and artistic characters Sterne exploited the long literary and medical tradition of melancholy and consumption as diseases of genius, but also used the newer rationales of the mid-eighteenth century to link the two conditions in a contemporary way.

中文翻译：

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劳伦斯·斯特恩（Laurence Sterne），成名与流行病

本文认为，“时尚”的消费和忧郁疾病都与十八世纪有关神经疾病和感性的医学理论联系在一起，这些疾病为小说家劳伦斯·斯特恩“劳作”，以促进他作为小说家的小说和成名。感性和情感。斯特恩通过自己的生活以及他的文学和艺术人物的生活，利用忧郁和消费作为天才疾病的悠久文学和医学传统，还运用了18世纪中叶的较新理论以当代方式将这两种情况联系起来。