History Of Hysteria Research Articles

Hysteria, Hermeneutical Injustice and Conceptual Engineering

ABSTRACT In this paper, we look at what Miranda Fricker (2007) calls “hermeneutical injustice” as it arises in the medical context. By drawing on the history of hysteria, I argue that the concept of hysteria has been held in place by power structures affected by negative prejudice against women. In this sense, the concept of hysteria fits the central conditions of the concept of hermeneutical injustice as characterized by Fricker. Yet, reflection on the case of hysteria also signals the need for widening the understanding of hermeneutical injustice. I thus propose to ameliorate the concept of hermeneutical injustice and show how, once thus ameliorated, it can be used as a powerful tool to advocate for the amelioration of the concept of woman. I then return to the concept of hysteria and argue that it is still in use in everyday contexts, where it embodies identity prejudice against women and constitutes a particularly pernicious form of put-down that perpetrates various forms of epistemic injustice. I conclude that also in that kind of context the concept of hysteria should be abandoned. Like with other loaded concepts, the only admissible uses of that concept would then be in contexts of reclaiming or re-appropriation.

Preventing the risk of iatrogenic harm when assessing and diagnosing functional neurological disorders and other functional somatic symptoms.

The present commentary raises some concerns about the risk of iatrogenic harm arising out of the diagnosis of functional neurologic and somatic disorders. These concerns are supported by evidence from the history of hysteria and findings from contemporary brain imaging. We discuss their implications for practice.

Amphibious Magical Realism? The Shape of Water as Cinematic Trauma Narrative

Amphibious Magical Realism? <i>The Shape of Water</i> as Cinematic Trauma Narrative

L’hystérie : histoire d’un concept et de sa réalité clinique

Hysteria is one of the oldest and best known clinical terms. Its history reveals the extent to which pathological entities, some more than others, are the fruit of successive conceptions of experts, themselves undoubtedly influenced by the prevailing currents of thought of their time. From its uterine origin to its psychogenic etiology, here is the history of hysteria and its controversies. A history that belongs to that of medicine, neurology, psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis.

3 After freud – the history of hysteria, conversion and functional disorders in neurology in the 20th century

Jon has had a research interest in functional disorders in neurology since 1999 starting with his PhD thesis – a case control study of patients with functional limb weakness. He has published widely in the area including systematic reviews, large cohort studies, imaging studies, exploration of new phenotypes and treatment studies. He has contributed to new diagnostic criteria for DSM-5 and ICD-11 and been involved in promoting functional disorders in training and research. He has made a website for patients at www.neurosymptoms.org which has been translated by other neurologists in to 12 other languages and receives 60 000 hits a month. He runs a weekly functional disorders clinic and as of August 2012 is a National Research Strategy (NHS Scotland) Clinical Fellow. In 2016, he edited a 51-chapter book “Functional Neurologic Disorders” with longstanding colleague Alan Carson and Mark Hallett of NIH as part of the “Handbook of Clinical Neurology” series. In September 2017, he is co-organising an international meeting on functional neurological disorders in Edinburgh – www.fnd2017.org or sign up at www.fnforum.org. Jon also co-leads the ABN special interest group on this topic (http://abnsigfd.moonfruit.com/) The idea of hysteria has been around, overtly anyway, since Hippocrates. Historians of psychiatry and medicine have obsessed over Charcot and Freud and their contributions to hysteria although arguably there were many others in the 19th century such as Briquet and Janet who had even more to offer. This talk however will examine the history of functional neurological disorders in the 20th century after Freud. This flurry of interest between 1880s and early 1920s gave way to disinterest, scepticism and concern about misdiagnosis. This was mirrored by increasing professional and geographical divisions between neurology and psychiatry after the First World War. I will explore the reason why these doldrums may have lasted such a long time. In the 1990s the advent of more detailed imaging and videotelemetry may have brought attention to functional disorders although ultimately the diagnosis has always been a positive one based on clinical signs, not normal tests. These disorders are now once again the subject of academic and clinical interest, although arguably still too much on the fringes of neurology and psychiatry. It remains commonplace for historians of Freud and psychoanalysis for example, to assume, incorrectly, that “hysteria” is a historical entity. Revisiting older material provides a rich source of ideas and data for today’s clinical researcher but also offers cautionary tales of theories and treatments that led to stagnation rather than advancement of the field. Patterns of treatment do have a habit of repeating themselves, for example, the current enthusiasm for transcranial magnetic stimulation mirrors the excitement about electrotherapy in the 19th century. For these reasons, an understanding of the history of functional disorders in neurology is arguably more important than it is for other areas of other neurological practice.

Modern faces of hysteria, or some of the dissociative disorders

Abstract The concept of “hysteria” comes from the Greek word “hystera” (uterus) and dates back to the time of Hippocrates, at least. Modern classifications differ regarding the area encompassed by the concepts of dissociation and conversion differ. Mental health professionals in the United States (DSM-5) use a standard classification of mental disorders codifying dissociative disorders as a distinct class of disorders, but subsumes conversion disorders under “somatoform disorders”. The history of hysteria is as long as the history of mankind. Apparently, both the essence and mechanisms of dissociative disorders remain unchanged despite the fact that many years have passed. According to Owczarek et al., dissociative symptoms are caused by the malfunctioning of defence mechanisms and anxiety. This article provides an overview of the available literature on the etiology and pathogenesis of dissociative disorders as well as disorders such as amnesia, dissociative fugue, trance and possession.

The history of hysteria and what’s next…

Abstract From the ancient times up till now hysteria has been a mysterious and intriguing issue. The authors of this article using mainly the work of Etienne Trillat of the same title, present the most important facts from the history of hysteria. Our work shows how notions of hysteria known initially as uterine dyspnoea, which was the term used by Hippocrates in the seventh tome of his “Collected Works” evolved step by step. At the end of 1st century AD a newcomer to Rome, Soranus of Ephesus, as an experienced anatomist in his “Treatise on midwifery and the diseases of women” moved away from the old ideas of Plato and Hippocrates equating uterus to an animal. How did views on hysteria develop throughout Middle Ages, Renaissance or World Wars period? In this article the authors are trying to determine the nature of hysteria as well as what remained from hysteria in the contemporary times, depicting hysteria’s elusiveness as a disease, many difficulties with its definition and connection with many shocking events in history of mankind. From the ancient sages, through Kramer, Sprenger, Wier, Harvey, Willis, Sydenham, Blackmore up until Mesmer, Freud and many others. From hysteric witches, beings suffering from vapors, through sensitive, fragile and musing women up until mythomaniacs, nymphomaniacs and what we define today as histrionic personality disorder. In the words of French neurologist and a creator of psychiatry – Charcot – hysteria existed forever, everywhere and all-time. Why did it vanish though? Authors of this article will address this problem in the final part, trying to determine the cause.

A neurological bias in the history of hysteria: from the womb to the nervous system and Charcot

Hysteria conceptions, from ancient Egypt until the 19th century Parisian hospital based studies, are presented from gynaecological and demonological theories to neurological ones. The hysteria protean behavioral disorders based on nervous origin was proposed at the beginning, mainly in Great Britain, by the "enlightenment nerve doctors". The following personages are highlighted: Galen, William, Sydenham, Cullen, Briquet, and Charcot with his School. Charcot who had hysteria and hypnotism probably as his most important long term work, developed his conceptions, initially, based on the same methodology he applied to studies of other neurological disorder. Some of his associates followed him in his hysteria theories, mainly Paul Richer and Gilles de La Tourette who produced, with the master's support, expressive books on Salpêtrière School view on hysteria.

Credibility, respectability, suggestibility, and spirit travel: Lurena Brackett and animal magnetism.

In the 1830s, when 20-year-old medical student Charles Poyen (1815-1844) began the demonstration tour that led to the popularization of animal magnetism in New England, he met with considerable resistance from both the medical profession and the general public. Skeptics argued that the phenomena apparently demonstrated during mesmeric sessions were so extraordinary that they had to be the result of intentional deception. The deception argument was bolstered by referencing the then popular prejudices against the working-class women who served as mesmeric subjects. Conveniently, these prejudices included belief in a special talent for deception that was not found in women from more respectable backgrounds. Mesmerists defended themselves against accusations of dishonesty by publicizing the achievements of Lurena Brackett (1816-1857), a young woman who escaped the prejudices associated with the working-class mesmeric subjects but still demonstrated apparently extraordinary mesmeric phenomena. The well-publicized story of Lurena regaining her sight during mesmeric séances is acknowledged as important in establishing the popularity of mesmerism in the United States. Lurena's supporters argued that her respectable background made deception impossible. This article uses Shorter's work on the history of hysteria and Trembinski's analysis of the history of trauma to argue that some of the seemingly extraordinary phenomena observed during a mesmeric séance can be better understood with reference to conversion disorder and the concept of hypnotic suggestion rather than intentional deception. While Lurena's respectability made her audience ready to accept her credibility, a conversion disorder would have produced the physical symptoms that responded so convincingly to mesmerism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Disbelief and Self-Deception in Conversion Disorder

The history of hysteria is powerfully gendered, DeCoster (2010) writes, and the socially oppressive forces that shaped this history continue to exert their effects today; a critical evaluation of t...

The Best Hysterias: Author's Response to Ghaemi

Nassir Ghaemi has helped raise the profile of this truly debilitating disorder [ 1], but he is wrong on the history of bipolar disorder. First, mental disease entities are a recent construct. No disease resembling bipolar disorder was described before 1854 in Paris, and the links between folie circulaire described then and modern bipolar disorder are tenuous. Second, for the Greeks, mania referred to any overactive insanity, and melancholia to any underactive state. The majority of manias were probably delirious states. The melancholias may have been anything from Parkinson disease to hypothyroidism. Third, Emil Kraepelin's manic-depressive insanity (1899) was a very different disorder to bipolar disorder, which only arose in the late 1960s. If bipolar disorder can be clearly traced back to the Greeks, the fact that American physicians so rarely made the diagnosis before 1970—when lithium was introduced in the United States—is hard to explain. Kraepelin's likely response to recent proposals that we recognize and distinguish between bipolar 1, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, 5, and 6 and bipolar spectrum disorders would probably not be printable. Disease mongering is not the creation of diseases de novo, as in the restless legs syndrome Dr Ghaemi cites, descriptions of which go back to antiquity. As so aptly defined by David Menkes at the Conference on Disease Mongering in Newcastle in 2006, disease mongering is where the interests of the seller of a nostrum, who sells by emphasizing the existence of and risks of some condition, in fact outweigh the likely benefits from the proposed remedy to those affected by the putative condition. It shades into hucksterism and it was associated with Harley Street long before modern pharmaceutical companies. But companies now bring an industrial efficiency to this practice, and where physicians were once a bulwark of scepticism against any trading on credulousness, they are now the most cost-effective marketing tool companies have. Mongering applies to conditions from mild elevations of blood pressure or lipids, to bone thinning. No one argues hypertension or hypercholesterolaemia are not real or that in malignant cases these conditions do not constitute valid targets of treatment. But malignant cases are rare. In cases that are not malignant, when the likely intervention is with a toxic compound rather than a proposed alteration of lifestyle, there is or should be a boundary. Psychiatry was once plagued by “boundary violations”, where physicians exploited the dependence of their patients. All the indications are that we are now in a new era of drug-related boundary violations. There is perhaps nowhere in medicine where this is more obvious than in the case of bipolar disorders, with adults treated with bizarre cocktails and children put on some of the most lethal drugs in medicine. Making it clear that the term “mood stabilizer” is itself an advert and that the notion of bipolar disorder can be viewed as an instance of rebranding does not deny the reality of anything. The key concerns are not reality in this sense, but rather when to treat. As the history of hysteria shows, the best pseudo-convulsions come from patients with convulsive disorders, and the most realistic somatization from patients with other real disorders. Patients conform their presentations to the interests of their doctors. Drug companies know this. Patients deserve physicians alert to such possibilities. In the current welter of bipolar presentations, one worry is that patients with severe manic-depressive disorder will lose out. Another is that research on this most difficult of disorders will be invalidated by a dilution by patients with other problems. A final worry is that when the marketing caravan moves on, manic-depressive illness will be left once more under-resourced, and researchers will have one less lever to pull as they have “had their chance”.

'Vent: Woodland Pattern's 25th Anniversary Celebration

Just before Thanksgiving, Anne Kingsbury and Karl Gartung, founders of Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, invited everyone passionate or curious about contemporary innovative writing and art to mark the occasion of their twenty-fifth birthday. Anne and Karl established the non-profit arts center in 1980 with a vision, as Karl then wrote, "to prove the living artist." Since then, their original stock of fewer than one thousand titles has grown to over 27,000 and includes an incredible array of small and fine press poetry books and broadsides. Because Anne and Karl remain dedicated to pursuing their original mission, artists working outside the mainstream continue to find a resource and space to share their work. In its inimitable way, Woodland Pattern called on poets, an essayist, fiction writers, a filmmaker, and musicians to sing them into their twenty-sixth year. Celebrations began Friday night with a reading and film screening, bringing together local talent and nationally known writers. Peggy Hong read work filled with movement and anatomy and was a perfect choice for the opening reader, bringing a tone of intimacy and celebration that endured throughout^ the weekend. Terri Kapsalis then read essays haunted with other voices: the] two main pieces, "Bound" and "Most Beautiful Experiment," were excerptsj from a larger project on the history of hysteria. "Bound," particularly arresting , examines the possession ofnuns in a French convent in the 1630s. Lisa Jarnot was the final reader of the evening, and her frequently funny, sound-based poems were enchanting. The sound repetitions seemed, with their sly shiftings, to extend indefinitely while remaining oddly self-contained. The effect was labyrinth-like. Friday concluded with Jennifer Montgomery's film Notes on the Death of Kodachrome documenting her cross-country trek to collect Super 8 film equipment loaned to various friends years earlier. The highpoint of the film is its final sequence, when, having recovered all ofher equipment, Montgomery uses Super 8 to recreate a dream both hilarious in its portrayal ofherself as a megalomaniacal filmmaker and lovely in its surface lushness. Celebrations reconvened Saturday evening with KikiAnderson and Roberto Harrison as the opening acts for Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop. Anderson's poetry can be terse and edgy, and what seemed to me her most successful works were those that read through other texts. "The Cook," one in a series ofpoems drawn from endnotes to Balzac's Père Goriot (1834), was especially well crafted. • Harrison read from two forthcoming manuscripts, Counter Daemons and "Bicycle," a sequence from Os. Working with computer concepts, Harrison writes incantatory poems rife with anaphora that seem far more rooted in a natural world than in one of drives and gigs. '*While each of the events was lovely in its own right, the Waldrops were for me the highlight ofthe weekend. Both Rosmarie and Keith have enormous presence and graceful delivery. Rosmarie read from her newest ':books, Love, Like Pronouns (2003) and Blindsight (2003). More than anything, these poems convey an earnest mindfulness: how it is to think through language and to make language think. The musings of Jacob Delafon, the character ofKeith's latest book, The Real Subject * ' (2004), had the audience in high spirits by the end of the evening. ,. ' ' When the Waldrops read from one of their collaborative pieces, it was perhaps my favorite part of the entire weekend. Picking up ,^^0/Lthe last line of the other's previous stanza and writing/reading ^TÉ^·fromthatpoint, the work sustainedanevocativerecursiveness. 11^CtAs if that weren't enough, the night ended with turkey and 'memm. · - homemade pudding back at Anne and Karl's. lip : " The final events on Sunday included readings by Martha Bergland and Wanda Coleman, and an evening concert. * * Bergland read a wonderfully humorous and touching account of her childhood memories of farm life. Although Coleman was under the weather, she managed to make the hair on my arms stand up. Her voice, like an instrument, slid - from whispered hisses to full, reverberating chords as she read about her mother and deceased sister. To bring the celebration to a close, a group of twelve musicians, including Hal Rammel and Steve Nelson-Raney, played the twenty-fifth Anniversary Waltz without the waltz—two hours...

Deliberate Unknowing and Strategic Retelling: The Ravages of Cultural Desire in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly

At end of chapter nineteen of Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, eponymous Huntly silently exults hard-won, gruesome victory. After mortally wounding hostile Indian and then bungling coup de grace, he decides to bayonet his suffering enemy, task of cruel lenity which leaves him overpowered by [its] horrors and lamenting fact that are deeds which compels thousands of rational beings to perform and to witness! (1) Moments later, however, savagely merciful Huntly describes how, cheered by dawn, he stuck [the dead Indian's] musquet ground, and left it standing upright middle of road (203). He then continues both his journey and his retrospective narration, seemingly oblivious to psychological implications of this triumphant celebration of deliberate and extended carnage. Huntly's lack of self-scrutiny at this textual moment is both striking and significant: confessional narrative purportedly devoted to an enlightened explication of events of his recent past, his sudden, silent freak of fancy (203) is singular anomaly. His erection of Indian's musquet in middle of road phallically figures both his gruesome conquest and significant gap palliative rhetoric that invokes compulsions of perverse nature order to justify such deeds. Huntly's gesture symbolically establishes psychological and textual crossroads where masculinity, narrativity, and American national identity violently and memorably intersect. In effect, Indian's musquet serves as signpost, silent but evocative marker of repressions and epistemological elisions upon which American literary identity is premised this novel. Such moments of narrative repression, elision, and digression have recently been identified and analyzed as hallmarks of hysterical discourse. (2) In particular, critics have examined how this nervous disorder functions as gendered social and cultural construct--in G. S. Rousseau's words, as both transformative, protean condition par excellence and the barometer responding ... to perpetual stresses of gender and sexuality and to the cultural stresses weighing on sexual relations and gender formations. (3) However, much of this scholarship has focused primarily on role of hysteria within texts and contexts of writing by women. Insofar as they overlook function of encoded ideals of normal and abnormal masculinity construction of experience, (4) many feminist studies of hysteria tell only half of story. As cultural barometer, hysteria registers social and sexual pressures exerted upon both genders; fact that very possibility of male hysteria has been consistently avoided or minimized discussions of etiology of condition represents significantly gendered cultural omission. One particularly notable exception is Mark Micale's Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. Micale traces evolution of substantially independent discursive [cultural] tradition of male hysteria (primarily British and French) literature of late nineteenth century and posits a lineage of cultural figures that extend[s] from degenerate genius of fin de siecle, back to tubercular Romantic poet, thence through melancholic writer of [the] eighteenth-century. (5) He thus claims that male writers were able to use category [of hysteria] to develop new modes of sensibility and thereby to expand scope of emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic resources at their command, and that ultimately, representations and self-representations of male hysteria have been employed by male artists and writers to strike and register Sturm und Drang of artistic creativity (260). As G. S. Rousseau has argued, however, the history of hysteria is as much 'his-story' of male fear as the history of linguistic embodiments, rhetorics, and emplotments (93). …

Nerves & Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in 19th-Century British Prose

Nerves & Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in 19th-Century British Prose

Nerves and narratives: A cultural history of hysteria in nineteenth‐century British prose

Nerves and narratives: A cultural history of hysteria in nineteenth‐century British prose

Nerves and narratives: A cultural history of hysteria in nineteenth-century British prose

Nerves and narratives: A cultural history of hysteria in nineteenth-century British prose

Nerves and narratives: a cultural history of hysteria in nineteenth-century British prose

Nerves and narratives: a cultural history of hysteria in nineteenth-century British prose

Pseudoseizures

The history of hysteria, with special reference to pseudoseizures, is reviewed. The distinguishing features between nonepileptic and epileptic convulsions are then considered, prior to discussion of management and prognosis. The various psychopathologies associated with the diagnosis are noted, as are psychiatric conditions that may be confused with epilepsy. It is concluded that pseudoseizures represent a complex clinical problem, often requiring multidisciplinary evaluation, that can be rewarding to diagnose and treat.

On the deadliness of deadlines

Möbius: A Journal for Continuing Education Professionals in Health SciencesVolume 1, Issue 1 p. 72-75 Article On the deadliness of deadlines Ilza Veith Ph.D., D.Med.Sci., Ilza Veith Ph.D., D.Med.Sci. Ilza Veith, Ph.D., D.Med.Sci.: Dr. Veith was the first recipient of a doctorate in the history of medicine in the United States. She began teaching her subject at the University of Chicago and then moved on to her present position as professor and vice chairman, Department of History of Health Sciences, and professor, Department of Psychiatry, at the University of California, San Francisco. Of the numerous articles and books that she has written, she has concentrated mainly on the history of hysteria and of various aspects of Asian medicine.Search for more papers by this author Ilza Veith Ph.D., D.Med.Sci., Ilza Veith Ph.D., D.Med.Sci. Ilza Veith, Ph.D., D.Med.Sci.: Dr. Veith was the first recipient of a doctorate in the history of medicine in the United States. She began teaching her subject at the University of Chicago and then moved on to her present position as professor and vice chairman, Department of History of Health Sciences, and professor, Department of Psychiatry, at the University of California, San Francisco. Of the numerous articles and books that she has written, she has concentrated mainly on the history of hysteria and of various aspects of Asian medicine.Search for more papers by this author First published: January 1981 https://doi.org/10.1002/chp.4760010111 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume1, Issue1January 1981Pages 72-75 RelatedInformation

Hysteria: A Case Note Study*

In a matched retrospective study, 31 patients with hysterical neurosis were compared with 31 with depressive neurosis. There were no significant differences between the groups for siblings' position, medical work, brain disease, poor marriage, frigidity, or family history of psychiatric disorder. Significantly more of the hysterics had a preceding head injury and 29% had a past history of hysteria. By the time of the study 48% had been treated for depression.