Musing about Medical Muses

Abstract

‘ Hysteria, an illness that no longer exists… (it is)… an illness of the past’. So states the author of this book, another on hysteria. Do we really need yet another book on the subject, and written by one who is comfortable enough to confess that before writing it she had a ‘preconceived notion’, that hysterics were victims of a ‘misogynist institution lead by a tyrannical Charcot’… ‘an imperious authority figure who treated the hysterics at Salpetriere as medical specimens?’ At the outset, hysteria was viewed by Asti Hustvedt, at least partly, as an illness of ‘being a woman in an era that strictly limited female roles’, and whose symptoms apparently illustrated their actual social conditions. She could not understand the ‘spectacular forms of illness recorded by their doctors’ and she accused Charcot of transforming ‘his’ hysterics into ‘living dolls’. I look around my bookshelves and can see delightful old texts related to the subject, such as the early English monograph by George Cheyne (1671–1743; 1733), who did not use the term ‘hysteria’ adjectively. The concept of ‘hysteria’ as a unitary diagnosis began in the 1800s. Then, there are the great French contributions of Pierre Briquet (1796–1881; 1859), Georges Gilles de la Tourette (1857–1904; 1891), and Charcot (1825–93) himself, whose contributions to the subject dominate many of the collected writings from his published lectures. These and the contributions of other English writers, such as H. Charlton Bastian (1837–1915; 1893), or later texts such as those of Harold Merskey (1995), are written by physicians with first-hand knowledge of the signs and symptoms they see and touch, and which they try to explain in everyday clinical practice on the basis of scientific knowledge. At one time, it was customary for doctors to write about the history of their own subject, but a disarming trend emerged …