Hysteria used to be the favorite disease of the Victorian era, but the diagnosis was already born several decades earlier. It was originally thought to be caused by the wandering of the uterus, a theory originating from as far back as ancient Greece, but even when this theory was later dismissed, the uterus - or the ovaries - were thought to play a part. Women were seen as fragile and delicate, thus easily succumbing to nervous ailments.
Oxford University Press has an entire series of pocket-sized biographies of illnesses, which includes such conditions as cholera, diabetes, thalassemia, asthma and diabetes, all by different authors. Hysteria: The Biography (2009, ISBN 978-0199560967) is written by Andrew Scull, a professor of sociology and the author of several medical history books, most focusing on psychiatry.
Contents
The 232-page book has many black-and-white illustrations, mostly old paintings and drawings. It includes a glossary, lengthy notes and further reading sections and an index, which only seems to be fully conclusive as far as people go.
The book starts off with a vignette from 1602, about the 14-year old Mary Glover who started to display shocking symptoms after being "cursed" by a neighbour. Was she physically ill or just making up the symptoms in revenge?
From there we are taken through decades of different explanations for similar symptoms exhibited by women - and occasionally men, too. From the late 1600s they are known as "vapours" in women and "the Spleen" in men. The name "English malady" also becomes popular. Hysteria is associated with wealthiness; some sufferers even take pride in having it.
Various treatments are devised, from bathing, bloodletting and mercury to torturous "rest cures" (more akin to sensual deprivation). Later they are followed by brutal surgical mutilation, including removal of ovaries (which in the 1800s obviously had a high mortality rate) and clitorotomies, described in graphic detail.
One chapter is dedicated to Jean-Martin Charcot, a famous neurologist who concluded that hysteria was in fact a neurological illness and displayed hysterical women in macabre demonstrations like circus animals. Sigmund Freud also gets his own chapter, and neither of them escapes from the authors critique.
In the late 1800s male hysteria also becomes more common. A separate diagnostic category is designed for it, called neurasthenia, but men are also diagnosed with hysteria and women as being neurasthenics. During the world wars myriads of men are diagnosed as having shell shock, first intepreted as neurological microtrauma, then as psychiatric (it would now be viewed as PTSD).
Criticism
Hysteria: The Biography is interesting and eye-opening, though the reviewer found something poorly definable amiss with the style. It is not that itis too dry or academic, it is quite readable, but somehow feels bland and often seems to focus too much on irrelevant detail and ramblings.
The book ends on a puzzling note, with the author explaining chronic fatigue syndrome as a modern version of hysteria - even though he cannot even decide whether he is talking about chronic fatigue (a common symptom of neurological, psychiatric and other types of illnesses) or chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis, an infectious neurological illness.
The rant at the end of the book shows the author doesn't know what he is talking about any more and has managed to miss a few thousand biomedical studies. One can't help but wonder, had he written the book a few decades earlier, would he have gone off at the people with hysterical paralysis (multiple sclerosis, which is very similar to CFS/ME).
It is a shame that an otherwise well-researched tome ends in this kind of unscientific and irrational diatribe.
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