Treatises on hypochondriasis--the seventeenth-century medical term for a wide range of nervous diseases--were old when "Sir" John Hill, the eccentric English scientist, physician, apothecary, and hack writer, published his _Hypochondriasis_ in 1766.[1] For at least a century and a half medical writers as well as lay authors had been writing literature of all types (treatises, pamphlets, poems, sermons, epigrams) on this most fashionable of English maladies under the variant names of "melancholy," "the spleen," "black melancholy," "hysteria," "nervous debility," "the hyp." Despite the plethora of _materia scripta_ on the subject it makes sense to reprint Hill's _Hypochondriasis_, because it is indeed a "practical treatise" and because it offers the modern student of neoclassical literature a clear summary of the best thoughts that had been put forth on the subject, as well as an explanation of the causes, symptoms, and cures of this commonplace malady. No reader of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature needs to be reminded of the interest of writers of the period in the condition--"disease" is too confining a term--hypochondriasis.[2] Their concern is apparent in both the poetry and prose of two centuries. From Robert Burton's Brobdingnagian exposition in _The Anatomy of Melancholy_ (1621) to Tobias Smollett's depiction of the misanthropic and ailing Matthew Bramble in _Humphry Clinker_ (1771), and, of course, well into the nineteenth century, afflicted heroes and weeping heroines populate the pages of England's literature. There is scarcely a decade in the period 1600-1800 that does not contribute to the literature of melancholy; so considerable in number are the works that could be placed under this heading that it actually makes sense to speak of the "literature of melancholy." A kaleidoscopic survey of this literature (exclusive of treatises written on the subject) would include mention of Milton's "Il Penseroso" and "L'Allegro," the meditative Puritan and nervous Anglican thinkers of the Restoration (many of whose narrators, such as Richard Baxter, author of the _Reliquiae Baxterianae_,[3] are afflicted), Swift's "School of Spleen" in _A Tale of a Tub_, Pope's hysterical Belinda in the "Cave of Spleen," the melancholic "I" of Samuel Richardson's correspondence, Gray's leucocholy, the psychosomatically ailing characters of _The Vicar of Wakefield_ and _Tristram Shandy_, Boswell's _Hypochondriack Papers_ (1777-1783) contributed to the _London Magazine_, and such "sensible" and "sensitive" women as Mrs. Bennett and Miss Bates in the novels of Jane Austen. So great in bulk is this literature in the mid eighteenth century, that C. A. Moore has written, "statistically, this deserves to be called the Age of Melancholy."[4] The vastness of this literature is sufficient to justify the reprinting of an unavailable practical handbook on the subject by a prolific author all too little known.[5]