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Introduction
The second half of the Nineteenth Century brought a new wave of opportunities for women to leave the domestic sphere and become "New Women." At the same time came a wave of medical diagnoses and cures that were designed to keep women in their domestic roles. Hypotheses of hysteria date back to Greece and Hippocrates' description of the "wandering womb," but during this period took on a new shape and even morphed into something beyond a women's only illness. -
(Victorian Age): Women and Smelling Salts
From the early hypothesis from Hippocrates of a “wandering womb” being the cause of hysteria, he also theorized that certain scents would bring the womb back to where it belonged. He believed that the “wandering womb” needed to be forced back into place by pungent or acrid odors, which it theoretically disliked. During the Victorian era, women often carried around smelling salts in order to achieve this when they experienced the excessive emotions associated with hysteria. -
Elizabeth Packard is admitted to the Illinois Hospital for the Insane, Fights for the Right of Women and Mentally-Ill Patients
A mother of six and wife of a Calvistist minister, Elizabeth Packard became an advocate for the rights of women and patients with mental illness. Packard rejected norms of domesticity: she conducted missionary work that challenged her husband’s religious teachings and traveled independently. Viewed as ‘sick,’ Packard was admitted to the Illinois Hospital for the Insane by her husband in 1860 and remained there until 1863. Following this, Packard began lobbying and advocacy work into the 1880s. -
John Eric Erichsen’s first diagnosis of “Railway Spine”
Erichsen believed that hysteria-like symptoms observed in men were caused by exposure to increasingly frequent railway accidents in the ever-growing rail systems of Europe and America. Hysteria-like symptoms in men, Erichsen believed, did not have an emotional or sexual cause, as in women. Instead they were most frequently caused by “concussions of the spine” from the “violent shock of a railway collision,” though these injuries “not unfrequently occur in the ordinary accidents of civil life.” -
S. Weir Mitchell's Rest Cure
Neurologist S. Weir Mitchell popularized the rest cure in the 1870s, which was a widely prescribed treatment for hysteria that called for up to eight weeks in bed and complete isolation. Amid industrialization, the female nervous system was believed to come under strain and damage, and the rest cure was seen as a remedy. In addition, the treatment reflected a major medical bias of the time, which was to suppress female agency and retain traditional gender ideals amid the rising ‘New Woman.’ -
Jean-Martin Charcot on “Traumatic Hysteria”
Charcot diagnosed over twenty male “hysterics” at Salpetriere in Paris the 1880’s, emphasizing the disease’s origins as a combination of hereditary predilection and “psychical shock.” During this period, Charcot began accepting and treating male hysteria patients at La Salpetriere, a previously all-female institution. Together with studies performed by other French and German psychologists, the diagnosis of “traumatic hysteria” subsumed British and American understandings of “Railway Spine.” -
Charcot, Freud, and Earlier Conceptions of Hysteria as a Sex-Specific Disorder
In 1880, French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot began early research into hysteria, attributing the disease to improper function of the female nervous system. In 1885-1886, Sigmund Freud (a medical student of Charcot) further sexualized the diagnosis, proposing among other things that hysterics was linked to his Oedipus Complex where women were driven into hysteria due to unsuccessful grappling with the loss of their metaphorical penis. To cure hysteria, women could marry a husband. -
Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”
In 1887, S. Weir Mitchell diagnosed Charlotte Perkins Gilman with hysteria and underwent the rest cure. In The Yellow Wallpaper, published in 1892, Gilman conveys the horrors of her experience by illustrating the worsening psychiatric state of a character enclosed in a room with yellow wallpaper. Gilman’s work portrays the rest cure’s potential to disempower and worsen mental health issues in women; the issue of disempowerment is notable as the narrator ‘creeps’ over her husband at the closing. -
The Case of Anna O and the “Talking Cure”
A woman named Bertha Pappenheim was diagnosed with hysteria. She was first treated by Josef Breuer who, after some experimentation, asked her to “talk out” events early in her father’s illness (which was believed to be related to her hysteria) while in a state of hypnosis. Breuer and Sigmund Freud detailed her treatment in their book “Studien uber Hysterie” in 1895 using the pseudonym of “Anna O” for her. The “talking cure” eventually became the modern talk therapy we use today. -
Emergence of Richard Cabot’s ‘Work Cure’
In the early 1900s, the work cure was developed by Richard Cabot. The treatment encouraged mentally unwell patients to pursue a host of productive activities such as college courses. Cultural historians including Jackson Lears perceive the emergence of the work cure as a product of the growing sentiment of economic abundance in the U.S. at the turn of the century. Dr. Herbert Hall embraced the work cure, opening a pottery and weaving workshop in the early 1900s to treat women with hysteria. -
Gynaecological Massage falls into the category of alternative medicine
While hysteria was not removed from literature of psychiatric authority until as late as 1980, gynecological massage treatment became a category of alternative medicine in 1910. This marks an increasing realization that the uterus stands far from the center of all women’s health issues. The method of pelvic massage was developed primarily by Thure Brandt under the theory that the uterus was at the center of the nervous system, and displacement of the uterus would lead to hysteria and illness. -
Charles Myers on Shell-Shock
English physician Charles Myers coined the term “Shell-shock” only six months after the start of WWI. He wrote that “the close relation of these cases to those of ‘hysteria’ appears fairly certain.” The condition was first thought to be caused by physical concussion, like Erichsen’s Railway Spine. However, by 1916, doctors realized that many shell-shock patients had been nowhere near exploding shells, categorizing shell-shock as a type of “neurasthenia” or weakness of the nerves. -
Joseph Babinski Publishes “Hysteria or Pithiatism”
Babinski, born in Paris to a Polish father, studied medicine under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpetriere Hospital. After Charcot’s death, Babinski began to develop his own theories on hysteria, coining the term “pithiatism,” which gained very little popularity. One of the key features of this new version of hysteria was Babinski’s belief that it could be caused and cured by suggestion. He also created a system of symptoms that separated hysteria from other neurological illnesses. -
Conclusion
As we've shown, throughout the 19th century diagnoses of hysteria shifted and changed. It was often used to keep women in line and within the domestic sphere, subjecting them to degrading treatments under the guise of legitimate medical and scientifically-sound practices. Eventually prevalence of the disease fell away and instead gave rise to other medical diagnoses and treatments, such as PTSD and the "talk cure" that we still use today. -