Hysteria: The Biography, by Andrew Scull (small HC, 2009, $3)
Scull discusses an earlier view of illness. Any symptoms an ill person described were not important. The only important issue was the imbalance that caused the symptoms, and the only treatment was to treat the imbalance. This doctors did without even touching their patients. At this time only lowly surgeons actually touched their patients!
Hysteria's cause changed over time. Plato blamed a woman's "wandering womb". (Wow!) The Puritans believed the devil caused it. Freud blamed fantasies of childhood seduction. Everybody agreed it was a disease of women, or at least they did before it hit WWI soldiers in epidemic numbers. This kind of hysteria, caused by "a flight into illness to escape hellish dangers", was treated by returning the patients to the battlefield.
So now "where are the hysterical invalids... All apparently vanished into the ether."
The American Psychiatric Association's DSM, even with its 900 pages, doesn't list hysteria. But where did it go?
Has it merely changed over time? When certain symptoms are seen as fraudulent, do people stop exhibiting them and start exhibiting others? Are chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and myalgic encephalomyelitis the modern day hysterias? I wonder what conclusions researchers will have reached 100 years from now.
Look for this book on the new non-fiction table. (L-psych)
