Customer Reviews

Hysteria: The Biography (Biographies of Disease)

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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.

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.

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.