Nordau establishes the cultural phenomenon of fin de siĂ¨cle in the opening pages, but he quickly moves to the viewpoint of a physician and identifies what he sees as an illness:
In the fin-de-siĂ¨cle disposition, in the tendencies of contemporary art and poetry, in the life and conduct of men who write mystic, symbolic and 'decadent' works and the attitude taken by their admirers in the tastes and aesthetic instincts of fashionable society, the confluence of two well-defined conditions of disease, with which he [the physician] is quite familiar, viz. degeneration and hysteria, of which the minor stages are designated as neurasthenia.