A Case of Hysteria Main Menu The Altogether Shocking History of Women’s Mental Health The Wandering Womb Theater Of The Hysterics Father Freud Knows Best This Place Will Make You Crazy The Water Cure Hysterical Paroxysm This Lobotomy Won't Hurt A Bit She Must Be Mad Shock The Pain Away Just A Touch Of Electricity A Home For Inebriates And The Insane The Inmates Aren't Running The Asylum Stories From The Sanatorium Agnes Richards The Ladies of Rockhaven Baby Blues Maybe She's Born With It Stay Subservient! The Cost of Going Crazy in California Till Commitment Do We Part Additional Artifacts from Patton State Hospital, ca. 1930-1950 Anne-Marie Maxwell

The Anatomy of Insanity

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Hospital records, archives, memoirs, and letters all help flesh out the controversial history of the treatment of women for the phantom ailment of “hysteria.” The Anatomy of Melancholy, written by Robert Burton and first published in 1621, is part medical text, part philosophical inquiry. Before diagnoses of hysteria came into vogue, “female melancholy” (i.e., depression) was believed to be connected to sexual frustration. Henry Monro’s 1851 Remarks on Insanity: Its Nature and Treatment posits that insanity is a hereditary disease caused by “loss of nervous tone.” He considers the “proneness of the female sex towards insanity” as arising from “an exhaustion of vital power” and that their insanity comes from a “physical exciting cause,” connected to their “uterine condition.” In the late nineteenth century, the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, under the guidance of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, became the epicenter of the study of mental illness. The 2011 publication Medical Muses, along with the 1891 volume Traité clinique et thérapeutique de l’hysterie detail how females institutionalized at the hospital were professionally treated with hypnosis, piercing, and demonic exorcism.

This page has paths:

  1. A Case of Hysteria? Curtis Fletcher

Contents of this path:

  1. William Letchworth, The Insane in Foreign Countries (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889)
  2. “A New Way to Prevent Insanity,” The Sunday Call, vol. 87, no. 99 (March 9, 1902)
  3. Democritus Junior, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London: Thomas Tegg, 1840)
  4. Byrom Bramwell, Atlas of Clinical Medicine (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1892)
  5. Gilles de la Tourette, Traité clinique et thérapeutique de l’hysterie d’après l’enseignement de la Salpêtrière (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit, 1891)
  6. W. R. Gowers, A Manual of Diseases of the Nervous System (Philadelphia: P. Blakiston, 1893)
  7. Henry Monro, Remarks on Insanity: Its Nature and Treatment (London: John Churchill, 1851)
  8. Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011)