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M I N D


The wandering womb


The word ‘hysteria’ comes from the Greek hysterikos, meaning ‘of the womb’, an organ the ancient Greeks believed travelled around the body. The wandering womb was blamed for a multitude of symptoms. For instance, if it moved upwards, the uterus might cause shortness of breath, chest pains or choking.


Not just for women


A hysterical woman yawning Photograph Albert Londe, c.1890 L0034940 Wellcome Images


Driven mad by rest


American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s (1860– 1935) short story The Yellow Wallpaper tells the chilling first-person tale of a young woman whose physician husband considers her to have ‘a slight hysterical tendency’. Prescribed ‘phosphates or phosphites – whichever it is, and tonics and journeys, and air and exercise’ and ‘absolutely forbidden to “work”’, when confined to a room for three months she gradually becomes insane. Gilman herself suffered from depression. After


consulting Silas Weir Mitchell, she was prescribed a rest cure but gave it up when her depression worsened.


Personally, I believe that


congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?


I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me


a good deal – having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.


From Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, 1892


— 153 —


‘Shell Shock’ From The Fourth magazine, 1917 J P D Hewatt L0046100 Wellcome Images


In the twentieth century, hysteria – previously thought to be a physical illness – was commonly accepted as an affliction of the mind expressed through physical symptoms. The shell shock suffered by World War I soldiers was initially categorised as a neurological disorder, but later described as male hysteria.


Read


Morus IW. Shocking Bodies: Life, death & electricity in Victorian England. Stroud: The History Press; 2011.


Scull A. Hysteria: The disturbing history. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2012.


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