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Hysteria

Hysteria is a wrongly diagnosed Western medical condition attributed primarily to women. Diagnosed most frequently during the Victorian era (1830s-1900), symptoms of female hysteria, which varied greatly for each individual, included fainting, shortness of breath, anxiety, loss of appetite, insomnia, irritability, and disinterest in sex with one's spouse. Hysteria was often believed to be caused by insufficient sexual intercourse or lack of sexual satisfaction. Many female patients diagnosed with hysteria were treated with a “pelvic massage” (sometimes from midwives or physicians and later with “therapeutic” vibrators) that would induce what doctors deemed “hysterical paroxysm” or orgasm. Until 1952, when the American Psychiatric Association officially dropped the term hysteria from its list of ailments, hysteria was one of the most commonly diagnosed diseases in Western medical history. This entry describes hysteria in Western society and Victorian society, as well as Sigmund Freud's views on hysteria.

Origins of Hysteria in Western Society

Notions of female hysteria can be traced back to early Western societies. Ancient Greek myths, which influenced Western medicine for hundreds of years, tell of a uterus moving through a woman's body, eventually strangling her and inducing disease. Thus, the term hysteria comes from a Greek word that means “that which proceeds from the uterus.” The myth of the wandering uterus harming the female patient infiltrated medical writings in ancient societies as well as the classical, medieval, and eventually the Renaissance period. Descriptions of genital massage as a common treatment for hysteria appear as far back as the Hippocratic corpus and in the works of Celsus, a lst-century CE Greek philosopher.

Women in ancient Western societies were commonly viewed as “incomplete” males or as having inverted male sexual organs, and the uterus was believed to be in rebellion against its own sexual deprivation. The cure for this, popularized by the prominent Greek physician Galen, was to lure the uterus back to where it usually presided in the pelvis and to expel its excess fluids. If a patient was a widow, nun, single, or in a sexless marriage, the proscribed “cure” was moving the pelvis in a swing or a rocking chair, riding horses vigorously, or massaging the vulva (usually performed by a midwife or physician). Single women who had symptoms of hysteria were normally told by their doctors to marry and have frequent sexual encounters with their new husbands.

Hysteria in Victorian Societies

Popularity concerning notions of female hysteria peaked during the Victorian era. This was largely because of the societal preoccupation with the conflict between sex as an act of pleasure and sex as an act of reproduction. As fecundity rates declined during the Victorian era, the reproductive aspects of sexuality became less important. In response to this debate, medical and marital advice literature edified the “passionless” woman as the ideal of femininity. Physicians and pop culture idealized anorgasmia in women as the model feminine societal norm. In 1844, French physician Adam Raciborski contended, “Three-fourths of women merely endure the approaches of men.” Charles Taylor asserted in 1882, “Women have less sexual feelings than men” and have “nothing of what is understood as sexual passion.”

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