Sabine Arnaud. On Hysteria

Sabine Arnaud’s On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820 is about writing. The author explains how physicians, surgeons, philosophers, and laypeople wrote about such terms as vapors, fits of the mother, uterine affections, suffocation of the womb, and hysteric passion, among others, in a range of texts including medical treatises, journal articles, consultation letters, case studies, anecdotes, Louis XIV’s medical diaries, religious texts, novels, dialogs, and autobiographies. Arnaud contends that the diverse terms and symptoms widely used throughout the early modern period and into the eighteenth century were ultimately identified with a single category—hysteria—and source of origin—the female uterus—by the early nineteenth century. The author’s conclusions are based on intensive and seemingly exhaustive efforts to collect and analyze every text referring to hysterical symptoms, uterine vapors, and related fits in France (and to a lesser degree England, Scotland, and Germany) from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, with an emphasis on the eighteenth century. Such thorough research does not result, however, in a masterful narrative that explains how hysteria was gradually invented over time; nor does the author provide a structured overview of how one mode of thinking transformed into or was replaced by another. Instead, Arnaud deliberately crafts a more accurate encounter with historical texts, one that is punctuated by winding paths, loose ends, confusion, and unanswered questions. The author frames hysteria as a literary construction that was reworked and rewritten for political and social purposes to address historically specific problems. According to her: “the use of different hysteric and vaporous diagnoses was the result of different political and epistemological stakes that effected different modes of understanding” (49). Arnaud focuses on how particular literary forms, invocations of metaphor, and citations helped early modern writers reproduce “hysteria” to shore up medical authority while shaping the identities of those associated with a range of vaporous or hysteric symptoms. Such “hysterics” included the Jansenist women known as Convulsionaries, nervously sensitive aristocrats or intellectuals, and post-Revolutionary nobles requiring a diagnosis that would label them ill and thus in need of protective care.

Aesthetics · Art · Hysteria · Psychoanalysis · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology