Toward the middle of the eighteenth century, hypochondria was so prevalent in people's minds and mouths that it soon assumed the abbreviated name "the hyp." Entire poems like William Somervile's _The Hyp: a Burlesque Poem in Five Canto's_ (1731) and Tim Scrubb's _A Rod for the Hyp-Doctor_ (1731) were devoted to this strain; others, like Malcom Flemyng's epic poem, _Neuropathia: sive de morbis hypochondriacis et hystericis, libri tres, poema medicum_ (1740), were more technical and scientific. Professor Donald Davie has written that he has often "heard old fashioned and provincial persons [in England and Scotland] even in [my] own lifetime say, 'Oh, you give me the hyp,' where we should say 'You give me a pain in the neck'"[7]; and I myself have heard the expression, "You give me the pip," where "pip" may be a corruption of "hyp." As used in the early eighteenth century, the term "hyp" was perhaps not far from what our century has learned to call _Angst_. It was also used as a synonym for "lunacy," as the anonymous author of _Anti-Siris_ (1744), one of the tracts in the tar-water controversy, informs us that "Berkeley tells his Countrymen, they are all mad, or _Hypochondriac_, which is but a fashionable name for Madness." Bernard Mandeville, the Dutch physician and author of _The Fable of the Bees_, seems to have understood perfectly well that hypochondriasis is a condition encompassing any number of diseases and not a specific and readily definable ailment; a condition, moreover, that hovers precariously and bafflingly in limbo between mind and body, and he stressed this as the theme of his _Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysteric Passions, Vulgarly Call'd the Hypo in Men and Vapours in Women_ (1711). The mental causes are noted as well in an anonymous pamphlet in the British Museum, _A Treatise on the Dismal Effects of Low-Spiritedness_ (1750) and are echoed in many similar early and mid-eighteenth century works. Some medical writers of the age, like Nicholas Robinson, had reservations about the external mental bases of the hyp and preferred to discuss the condition in terms of internal physiological causes: ...of that Disorder we call the Vapours, or _Hypochondria_; for they have no material distinctive Characters, but what arise from the same Disease affecting different Sexes, and the Vapours in Women are term'd the _Hypochondria_ in Men, and they proceed from the Contraction of the Vessels being depress'd a little beneath the Balance of Nature, and the Relaxation of the Nerves at the same Time, which creates that Uneasiness and Melancholy that naturally attends Vapours, and which generally is an Intemperature of the whole Body, proceeding from a Depression of the Solids beneath the Balance of Nature; but the Intemperature of the Parts is that Peculiar Disposition whereby they favour any Disease.[8]