Female hysteria

Female hysteria
Women with hysteria under the effects of hypnosis
Classification and external resources
Specialty	Psychiatry
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Female hysteria was once a common medical diagnosis, reserved exclusively for women, that is no longer recognized by medical authorities as a medical disorder. Its diagnosis and treatment were routine for hundreds of years in Western Europe. Hysteria of both genders was widely discussed in the medical literature of the nineteenth century. Women considered to have had it exhibited a wide array of symptoms, including faintness, nervousness, sexual desire, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and a "tendency to cause trouble".

In extreme cases, the woman may have been forced to enter an insane asylum or to have undergone surgical hysterectomy.

The history of hysteria can be traced to ancient times. In ancient Greece, it was described in the gynecological treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus, which dates back to the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Plato's dialogue Timaeus compares a woman's uterus to a living creature that wanders throughout a woman's body, "blocking passages, obstructing breathing, and causing disease". The concept of a pathological wandering womb was later viewed as the source of the term hysteria, which stems from the Greek cognate of uterus, ὑστέρα (hystera).

Another cause was thought to be the retention of a supposed female semen, thought to have mingled with male semen during intercourse. The female semen was believed to have been stored in the womb. Hysteria was referred to as "the widow's disease", because the female semen was believed to turn venomous if not released through regular climax or intercourse.

In 1859, a physician named George Taylor claimed that a quarter of all women suffered from hysteria. George Beard, a physician who catalogued seventy-five pages of possible symptoms of hysteria and yet called his list incomplete, claimed that almost any ailment could fit the diagnosis. Physicians thought that the stress associated with the typical female life at the time caused civilized women to be both more susceptible to nervous disorders and to develop faulty reproductive tracts. In the United States, such diagnosed disorders in women provided a step forward for the US to be medically on the same advancement level as Europe. One American physician expressed pleasure in the fact that the country was "catching up" to Europe in the prevalence of hysteria.

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