The word “hysteria” comes from the Greek word “hystera”, which means womb. Since Ancient Egypt and Greece, many female ailments have been blamed on being female.
In fact, until 1980, hysteria was an official medical diagnosis defined as a mental disorder in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Let’s take a look at the history of hysteria and how gender has affected the way doctors throughout the ages have approached women’s health.
Ancient Greeks & Egyptians: Wandering Wombs
The earliest known documentation of hysteria is found in a kahun papyrus dating back to around 1900 BC, where women’s ailments were attributed to a displaced or starved uterus.
These dysfunctional uteruses were believed by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks to be the source of a host of health problems. The ancient Greeks believed that a womb had the ability to float throughout the female body, putting pressure on other organs and causing negative symptoms.
The works of the physician Aetaeus and the philosopher Plato called this phenomenon “hysterical suffocation” and treated the condition by trying to coax the uterus back to its original position by inducing sneezing by placing bad odors near the mouth and good odors near the vagina.
Almost all symptoms, from infections to fevers, were attributed to the female genitalia. the ancient Greek physician Galen suggested that its preservation “female seed” within the womb was the root of insomnia, depression, anxiety, fainting and irritability.
Mass hysteria in the Middle Ages
In the Middle Ages, the symptoms of hysteria were often confused with witchcraft. When witchcraft became a statutory crime punishable by death in 1541, they erupted mass hysteria were documented.
These waves of “mass hysteria” referred to random outbursts of movement disorders in groups. Groups of people, from half a dozen to hundreds, broke into tarantism, the St. Vitus dance, and convulsed until they collapsed from exhaustion.
During this period, retention of menstrual blood was attributed to female issues, which required purification of the offensive fluid, making marriage (and sanctified intercourse) the solution. Since male semen was believed to have healing properties, sex served the dual purpose of “healing” as well as reproduction.
According to a 1637 text, women with high sex drives “inclined to veil” had an unhealthy accumulation of these fluids. Thus, midwives occasionally manually stimulate women who could not orgasm through heterosexual sex (single women, nuns, widows, women who could not orgasm from penetrative heterosexual sex) in order to release the fluids.
1600s to 1900s: Moving from the womb to the brain
Gradually, doctors began to shift their attention from the womb to the brain as the source of hysteria, although theories about matrix affecting the brain through various processes involving nerves or blood vessels.
People in the 17th century also began to realize that males could suffer from hysteria, and it began to be associated with mental distress such as melancholia and hypochondria, which is where the modern terms come from.
As doctors began to study the mind and its influence on the body in the 18th and 19th centuries, hysteria began to be classified as a disorder of the nervous system.
Modern Hysteria: The Legacy of Freud
The first doctor to study hysteria in a modern scientific context was the French doctor Jean-Martin Charcot. In the late 1880s, he lectured medical students on the symptoms of hysteria which he believed were the result of internal injury interfering with the functioning of the nervous system.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, happened to be one of his students. Together with his partner Breuer, Freud further developed Charcot’s theories, formulating the belief that hysteria was not the result of physical injury but psychological trauma or repression.
He tied all this to his famepenis envytheory, where a young woman first realizes that she has been symbolically castrated because she has no penis. Freud believed that female psychological damage was a direct result of a lack of male sexuality and described hysteria as “characteristically feminine”, advocating marriage and heterosexual sex as remedies.
The cure for hysteria leads to the invention of vibrators
As seen throughout history, orgasm seems to be a common tool used to treat female hysteria.
In cases where marriage was not a possible treatment, or where the woman complained that she could not reach orgasm through penetrative sex with her husband, uterine massage was used as a treatment method during the 20th century.
In fact, a Swedish Army Major named Thure Brandte opened several very successful clinics specializing in uterine massage. His team of 5 medical students, 10 female physiotherapists and various interns treated up to 117 patients per day by manually stimulating the patient to orgasm.
Since these sessions were so “long and physically exhausting” for doctors, they created stimulation devices, also known as vibrators.
