Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness [Hardcover]

Mark S. Micale (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674031660 | ISBN-13: 978-0674031661 | Publication Date: November 30, 2008 | Edition: 1

Over the course of several centuries, Western masculinity has successfully established itself as the voice of reason, knowledge, and sanity—the basis for patriarchal rule—in the face of massive testimony to the contrary. Hysterical Men boldly challenges this triumphant vision of the stable and secure male by examining the central role played by modern science and medicine in constructing and sustaining it.

Mark Micale reveals the hidden side of this vision, that is, the innumerable cases of disturbed and deranged men who passed under the eyes of male medical and scientific elites from the seventeenth century onward. Since ancient times, physicians and philosophers had closely observed and extravagantly theorized female weakness, emotionality, and madness. What these male experts failed to see—or saw but did not acknowledge—was masculine nervous and mental illness among all classes and in diverse guises. While cultural and literary intellectuals pioneered new languages of male emotional distress, European science was invested in cultivating and protecting the image of male, middle-class detachment, objectivity, and rationality despite rampant counter-evidence in the clinic, in the laboratory, and on battlefields.

The reasons for suppressing male neurosis from the official discourses of science and medicine as well as from popular view range from the personal and psychological to the professional and the political. They make for a history full of profound silences, omissions, and amnesias. Now, however, under the greatly altered circumstances of today’s gender revolution, Micale’s work allows this story to be heard.

(20080901)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Do not waste much time on hysteria in men. Leave hysteria to women and children, advised a German doctor in 1887 in response to noted French physician Jean-Martin Charcot's notions that men could manifest hysteria. Micale, an associate professor of history and the history of medicine, University of Illinois–Urbana Champaign, has uncovered a wealth of information that rebuts much of the traditional medical and popular thinking about men and emotional distress. Micale charts nervous diseases in men from the 17th century until Freud. It was only in 1859, in a medical text by Pierre Briquet, that detailed attention was paid to male hysteria, and he noted that doctors didn't see the condition because they did not want to see it. Micale's canvas is broad and, while the book has a history of science slant, it is also a work of cultural criticism, charting the changes in acceptable masculine affect, as exhibited in works like Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Micale brings much fascinating information together with élan. 18 b&w photos. (Nov.)
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From Booklist

According to medical historian Micale, for millennia physicians have diagnosed hysteria from a great variety of symptoms, from heart palpitations to fainting to an inability to think clearly and more. Since the etymology of hysteria traces back to the Greek word for uterus, and since men do not have this reproductive item, it may seem safe to assume that men are incapable of presenting this particular nervous disorder. But not so. During some periods of history, the female specificity of hysteria was considered near gospel. During as many others, the term was applied to males, too. For reasons epistemological, political, and psychological, application was contingent upon the status of and attitudes toward female independence. In the great French revolutionary period, for instance, when women sought equal rights, the term was gender nonspecific. In the succeeding reign of Napoléon, distinguished by paternalism, the myth that men were exempt from psychic weakness was preferred. Overall, this is a pretty interesting study, a bit pedantic, perhaps, of how diagnostic specificity waxes and wanes with the tides of politics. --Donna Chavez

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press; 1 edition (November 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674031660
• ISBN-13: 978-0674031661
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,068,581 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eye Opening Commentary on Psychology and Gender, May 16, 2009

By 

Brian in Atlanta - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (Hardcover)

This book is a very enjoyable read, and far beyond what I expected from the editorial reviews. Micale gives a history of "hysteria" starting with the Greeks and ending with Freud. Micale sheds light on the issue of gender issues in psychology's history, and also looks at the interplay between objectivity and subjectivity in psychological science. I highly recommend this book.

2 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ignorance provokes Violence, January 30, 2010

By 

Patricia B. Ross (Wellesley, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (Hardcover)

In choosing to follow the 1880's advice of the psychologist/psychiatrist who advised to leave hysteria to women, society has ignored the most obvious and lethal problem known to human society - the potential for violence as a backlash of dismissing anxiety in men.

Whether it has been studied sufficiently to produce the inevitable outcome of such a study to show that ignored or misplaced anxiety becomes the violence that men produce is doubtful. The preference for force as a substitute for anxiety-repression in men has not worked and will not work because of the inevitable backlash of resentment and consternation of mean recognizing how poorly they are treated in this manner by employers, spouses, and law enforcement.

Expectations of male stoicism is the cause but not the cure, and men unable to reconcile these devisive emotional imprints are destined to fall victim to mental illness, further violence, and social conflicts they are unable to resolve emotionally - causing a disastrous trail of victims and failing effects, compromising their own human potential in the process.

Men have long taken care of men's physical bodies, and have all but ignored their mental and emotional parts.
Excuses are inadequate recognizing the harm to mankind and the cost to society.