Approaching hysteria

by Mark S. Micale

Few diseases have exercised the Western imagination as chronically as hysteria - from the wandering womb of ancient Greek medicine, to the demonically possessed witch of the Renaissance; from the "vaporous" salon women of Enlightenment Paris, through to the celebrated patients of Sigmund Freud, with their extravagant, erotically charged symptoms. In this fascinating and authoritative book, Mark Micale surveys encyclopedically the range of past and present readings of hysteria. Intellectual historians, historians of science and medicine, scholars in gender studies, art history, and literature, as well as psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and neurologists have all converged in the last decade on "the new hysteria studies.". What does this burgeoning corpus of writing tell us? Why, in recent years, has the history of hysterical disorders carried such resonance for commentators in the sciences and humanities? What can we learn from the textual traditions of hysteria ab