Hysteria: The Biography (Biographies of Disease) [Hardcover]

Andrew Scull (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 019956096X | ISBN-13: 978-0199560967 | Publication Date: December 8, 2009 | Edition: 1

The nineteenth century seems to have been full of hysterical women--or so they were diagnosed. Where are they now? The very disease no longer exists. In this fascinating account, Andrew Scull tells the story of hysteria--an illness that disappeared not through medical endeavor, but through growing understanding and cultural change. The lurid history of hysteria makes fascinating reading. Charcot's clinics showed off flamboyantly "hysterical" patients taking on sexualized poses, and among the visiting professionals was one Sigmund Freud. Scull discusses the origins of the idea of hysteria, the development of a neurological approach by John Sydenham and others, hysteria as a fashionable condition, and its growth from the 17th century. Subsequently, the "disease" declined and eventually disappeared.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Neat and well-structured, written in a lively and stimulating style. It is much more than a superior work of historical systhesis. Scull expertly traces the story of hysteria as concept, diagnosis, cultural expression and lived experience, from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, and sheds new light and offers new insights throughout. As an introduction to the turbulent and contested history of this most mutable but strangely enduring of disorders, Scull's book could not be bettered." -- Metapsychology Online Reviews

"Scull's survey provides a welcome addition to the sizable historical literature on hysteria and nervous illness, and this slim volume manages to cover its topic well, placing outbreaks of hysteria in their social, cultural and medical-historical contexts, and highlighting major trends and turning points in the history of psychiatry, all in fewer than 200 pages. It offers an excellent introduction to the subject for a general audience, and its bibliography usefully guides interested readers on to more in-depth exploration of particular subjects. Finally, this work will provide a great service to teachers of undergraduate courses in the history of medicine and psychiatry, and students will appreciate that Scull writes with lucidity, grace and wit." --Medical History

"Lively and readable." -- he British Journal for the History of Science

Listed in Science Book News

"This is dark stuff, but fascinating stuff. These four biographies of diseases go far beyond questions of biology or medical practice; they talk politics, sex and class, faith, how to plan a healthy world and how to be a proper woman or a proper man. Strangest and most fascinating of all is the way you keep glimpsing whole societies reflected in the surgery, from the drinking water to the high philosophy."--Scotsman.com

"Andrew Scull's sharp and witty biography of hysteria, part of Oxford University Press's new "Biographies of diseases" series, explores the history of a condition that was once practically a fashion statement, so strongly linked was it with breeding and social superiority." --New Scientist

"Utterly enthralling... Scull plots the formless character of hysteria as it evolved and shifted to fit cultural expectations across time."--British Medical Journal

About the Author

Andrew Scull is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at UC San Diego.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (December 8, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019956096X
• ISBN-13: 978-0199560967
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #776,347 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Inaccurate, May 28, 2011

By 

Justin Reilly (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hysteria: The Biography (Biographies of Disease) (Hardcover)

Says ME ("CFS") is hysteria (eg p.188). As Anthony Komoroff, professor of infectious disease at Harvard Med School, has said "there are over 5,000 articles" in peer-reviewed medical journals showing frank physical pathology (disease) in ME/"CFS." This inaccuracy is anti-science, anti-disabled and just plain 100% patently scientifically false. Mr. Scull should research his topic next time.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating story, well and concisely told, June 2, 2011

By 

Frontiersman (Minnesota) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hysteria: The Biography (Biographies of Disease) (Hardcover)

This small volume by a professor of sociology at the University of California-San Diego is an entry in the Oxford University Press's recently-inaugurated Biographies of Disease series. Each volume tells the story of a different disease in historical and cultural context.

Hysteria is a strange, protean disorder. The author traces its history from the 17th century to the present, though it existed long before then. Among its many baffling features is the assumption of different guises in different eras. There seems to be a cultural element involved.

Historically the disorder has been associated primarily with women, although men suffer from it, too. Its name is derived from the Greek word for uterus, and it was formerly thought to be a malady primarily of the reproductive organs.

"Hysteria" has a decidedly negative connotation. Most doctors have never been able to understand or competently treat it, and have dismissed it or expressed contempt, anger, and even hatred and sadism toward their troublesome patients, whose dramatic and debilitating symptoms do not fit any medically recognized category. Throughout the centuries physicians have assumed that victims were malingerers, fakers, attention seekers, or actors melodramatically putting on a show.

A towering exception to the rule is famed 19th century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot of Paris, so significant in the history of hysteria that an entire chapter is devoted to him. Charcot was convinced that hysteria was a neurological disorder whose etiology remained unknown. He famously made a connection between hypnosis and hysteria, which is quite fascinating.

Author Scull devotes another chapter to a closely related 19th century disorder, neurasthenia. Its medical Napoleon was American physician George Beard. Like Charcot, Beard believed his patients were truly suffering--that something was genuinely wrong. He wrote, in a passage not quoted by Scull but that applies equally to hysterics:

"If there is a disease more aggravating and humiliating to its victim, I have never encountered it. The symptoms are, as a rule, mostly subjective, and to those whose good opinion and sympathy the neurasthenic most covets, he appears too often a living lie; and in my own experience more than one suicide has resulted, not alone because of the suffering from the disease proper, but because of the utter isolation and hopelessness entailed." Beard maintained that it was necessary to recognize the infirmities as real, and to treat sufferers with "consideration, sympathy and respect."

One gains the impression that hysteria, like hypnosis, is a hugely significant scientific phenomenon somehow cloaked from the radar screen of the healthy, who ignore and deny it. There is a big psychological blind spot.

Hysteria as such no longer exists. That is, there is no classification for hysteria in modern medicine. Instead, the hysterics of yore are parceled out among a variety of disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative disorder: conversion type, histrionic personality type, chronic fatigue syndrome, Epstein-Barr virus, fibroymalgia, factitious illness behavior, undifferentiated somatoform disorder, psychogenic pain disorder, and more.

This book provides a stimulating, readable overview in short compass of a medical disorder, or group of disorders, that everyone should know about.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting medical history., July 20, 2011

By 

Pat Marshall - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hysteria: The Biography (Biographies of Disease) (Hardcover)

Andrew Scull's "biography" of hysteria is a fascinating account of the disease. His short and very readable book traces the history of hysteria from the time when it was thought to be caused by the devil, through vapors, nerves, Freud and such current forms of hysteria as myalgic encephalomyelitis. I found the chapter on the mass hysteria suffered by soldiers during World War I, renamed "shell shock" to be especially interesting. This slim volume is packed with fascinating medical history.