![]() ![]() Janet wrote that hysteria was “a nervous disease” where “a dissociation of consciousness” took place, often characterized by symptoms such as somnambulism, the emergence of “double personalities,” and involuntary convulsions. ![]() In France, neuropsychiatrist Pierre Janet, who was most active between the 1880s and the early 1900s, argued that hysteria resulted from a person’s own warped perception of physical illness. Mitchell famously prescribed the rest cure to the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who found the experience so harrowing that she wrote “ The Yellow Wallpaper,” a psychological horror story that maps the slow psychological deterioration of a woman who is forced by her doctor, her husband, and her brother to follow this “treatment.” Mitchell prescribed this treatment preferentially to women who he deemed as having hysteria.īy contrast, he would advise men with hysteria to engage in lots of outdoor exercise. ![]() Rest cure involved lots of bed rest and strict avoidance of all physical and intellectual activity. Throughout the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, there was perhaps even more talk of female hysteria and its potential causes.Īround the 1850s, American physician Silas Weir Mitchell, who had a special interest in hysteria, started promoting the “ rest cure” as a “treatment” for this condition. Mesmer alleged that he could act on this magnetic undercurrent and cure humans of various maladies, including hysteria. Mesmer believed that living beings were influenced by magnetism, an invisible current that ran through animals and humans, and whose imbalances or fluctuations could lead to health disruptions. To illustrate this, he presented the case study of a nun affected by hysteria, who became cured only when a well-wishing barber took it upon himself to pleasure her.Īnother means of “treating” instances of hysteria was through mesmerism, an alleged psychosomatic therapy popularized by Franz Anton Mesmer, a German doctor who was active in 18th-century Europe. Some of the hysteria symptoms that he named included: “a swollen abdomen, suffocating angina or dyspnea, dysphagia, cold extremities, tears and laughter, oscitation, pandiculation, delirium, a close and driving pulse, and abundant and clear urine.”ĭe Sauvages agreed with his predecessors that this condition primarily affected women, and that “men are only rarely hysterical.”Īccording to him, sexual deprivation was often the cause of female hysteria. In a treatise published in 1770–1773, another French physician, François Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix, describes hysteria as something akin to emotional instability, “subject to sudden changes with great sensibility of the soul.” While Raulin noted that both men and women could contract hysteria, women were, according to him, more predisposed to this ailment because of their lazy and irritable nature. In 1748, French physician Joseph Raulin described hysteria as a “vaporous ailment” - affection vaporeuse in French - an illness spread through air pollution in large urban areas. While the original notions of female hysteria extend far into the history of medicine and philosophy, this diagnostic became popular in the 18th century. ![]()
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