Hysteria has been an available diagnosis of female mental and physical health since the fifth century. Hippocrates is known to have fathered the phrase in reference to “the wandering womb. ” An innately feminine issue, translated from the Greek “hysterika” meaning “uterus. ” (Gilman 3, 4) History provides nominal modifications to the array of symptoms, yet culture has frequently rebranded this convoluted condition. The Victorian era was categorically repressive for women. Societal roles were negligible and ideals exploited a perceived benefit of the intrinsically subordinate female.
A selection from “Victorian Women Expected to be Idle and Ignorant. ” by British Diplomat, Charles Petrie outlines this attitude. Innocence was what he demanded from the girls of his class, and they must not only be innocent but also give the outward impression of being innocent. White muslin, typical of virginal purity, clothes many a heroine, with delicate shades of blue and pink next in popularity. The stamp of masculine approval was placed upon ignorance of the world, meekness, lack of opinions, general helplessness and weakness; in short, recognition of female inferiority to the male.
(Swisher 8, 178) Bender 2 On the other side of this rigidly subjectifying mindset stood a well-known Philosopher of this time, John Stuart Mill. He argued in his publication “The Subjection of Women”: “Thus far, the benefits which it has appeared that the world would gain by ceasing to make sex a disqualification for privileges and a badge of subjection, are social rather than individual; consisting in an increase of the general fund of thinking and acting power, and an improvement in the general conditions of the association of men with women.
But it would be a grievous understatement of the case to omit the most direct benefit of all, the unspeakable gain in private happiness to the liberated half of the species; the difference to them between a life of subjection to the will of others, and a life of rational freedom. ” (Mill 178) In this he concedes that no gain could come from enslaving women to the will of men. In this publication Mill wholeheartedly disproves the under privilege and misrepresentation of women in Victorian societies. He saw the spirit and happiness of women as suffering by the total lack of power they maintained in every aspect in their life.
Jean-Martin Charcot, a well-known pioneer of hysteria studies, diagnoses and treatments, became the chief physician of medical services at the renowned Parisian women’s institution “Salpetriere” in the mid to late 1800’s. Patients with symptoms including a partiality for drama and deception, extreme emotionality, paralyses of the limbs, temporary deafness and muteness, sensitivity of the skin, self-imposed starving, hallucinations, and fits of contortions and seizures. (Hustvedt 20) The women that were most commonly admitted to his hospital were society’s castoffs and women that were too poor to have many options.
(Hustvedt 38) These women Bender 3 wouldn’t have family checking in or a credibility based on social standing. Weekly, Charcot would hold lectures in the hospitals amphitheater. Attending these became wildly popular within the medical community as well as the local community. He would guide a hysteric onstage, she would flawlessly display episodes or fits of hysteria etc. (Hustvedt 23, 26) How much of this behavior was actual symptoms of some sort of psychosis or the grooming of a doctor obsessed with the limelight is unknown. (Hustvedt 3) Hysteria has been up the sleeve of misogyny for a very long time.
Useful as a diagnosis for a less than innocent woman of the 19th century. Phantom yet ubiquitous indicators and dubious remedies. Numerous incarnations have plagued the lesser sex. Hysteria has been recalibrated as womb-based illness and/or psycho-somatic. The most recent identity of hysteria could arguably be fibromyalgia. Sharing many warning signs with the elemental female illness such as uterus-related ailments, fatigue, tension and depression. This contemporary analysis is equally refuted as other materializations of hysteria as the tests are subjective.
( Goldenberg 93) The obscure fundamentals of this fifteen-hundred year old disease sometimes leaves the medical world with a black hole for particular symptoms. Lupus, postpartum depression, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis can been known to be overlooked and assessed as fibromyalgia. The onset of symptoms that can have no root in a medical diagnosis, but rather could be analyzed in a psychosocial context can, with the help of medicalization of an excepted diagnosis, once again be labeled a medical disorder.
It could be argued that the onset of Fibromyalgia has less to due to hereditary weakness or abnormalities in the physical functioning of the body, rather it serve as yet another warning. The warning of another example of women’s problems being brushed to the side by a medical diagnosis with little to no scientific roots. Dr. John Sarno, published author of Bender 4 a book on chronic back pain describes this sentiment well stating “Contemporary psychiatry prefers to use drugs and behavioral techniques to treat patients rather than get involved in the messy business of exploring a person’s unconscious.
” (Goldenberg 94) Sarno concluded that the eradication of the symptoms can be achieved through free will, considering that the symptoms are formed or guided through emotions. All these previous mentioned diagnosis seem to have a common thread in women seemingly succumbing to their natural state of emotional and weak creatures. These medical diagnosis continue to thrive as a scapegoat with no real trapdoor or treatment of what would seem to be the mental entanglements of women struggling to navigate the impending suffocation of the underlying impediments triggering the unsavory “symptoms.
” The empowerment of women has faced many obstacles and gender bias has taken many forms. The destinies of women are still majorly subdued by men via government, media and education. Although, females have proven to be a formidable force in the eradication of gender stratification, the imposition of hysteria loom. Like other aspects of one’s physical alignment, this ostensible ‘nervous temperament’ is hereditary, and is transferred to sons as well as daughters. But it could be, and apparently is inherited by more women than men.
Assuming that this is so, let us ask: Are men with the nervous temperament found to be unsuitable for the duties and tasks usually followed by men? If this could in fact be refuted, why should women of the same disposition be unfit for them? Idiosyncrasies of temperament are, within certain parameters, obstacles to success in some employments though assistances to success in certain others. Labeling a women as a “Hysteric” may be lost to antiquity, a source of humor in relation to a modern liberated version of a female, but have the lessons it could have taught really saturated societies view of women?
Works cited Gilman, Sander L. , Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter Hysteria. Goldenberg, Don L M. D. Fibromyalgia: a Leading Experts Guide to Understanding and Getting Relief to the Pain that won’t go away. New York. Berkley Publishing group. 2002. Print Hustvedt, Asti. Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Ney York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011. Print. Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of women. London. Savill Edwards and Company, 1869. Print Swisher, Clarice. Victorian England. San Diego, Calif. Greenhaven Press, 2000.