Synopses & Reviews
These days, hysteria is known as a discredited diagnosis that was used to group and pathologize a wide range of conditions and behaviors in women. But for a long time, it was seen as a legitimate category of medical problemandmdash;and one that, originally, was applied to men as often as to women.
In On Hysteria, Sabine Arnaud traces the creation and rise of hysteria, from its invention in the eighteenth century through nineteenth-century therapeutic practice. Hysteria took shape, she shows, as a predominantly aristocratic malady, only beginning to cross class boundaries (and be limited to women) during the French Revolution. Unlike most studies of the role and status of medicine and its categories in this period, On Hysteria focuses not on institutions but on narrative strategies and writingandmdash;the ways that texts in a wide range of genres helped to build knowledge through misinterpretation and recontextualized citation.
Powerfully interdisciplinary, and offering access to rare historical material for the first time in English, On Hysteria will speak to scholars in a wide range of fields, including the history of science, French studies, and comparative literature.
Review
andquot;In this profoundly original and interdisciplinary work, Arnaud provides us with a major study on the dynamics on science, medicine, and culture in the eighteenth century. Her analysisand#160;complements the recent pioneering works by Anne Vila, Elizabeth A. Williams, and Jan Goldstein, among others, while all along offering the most extensive treatment of the early hysteria phenomena since the classic work by Ilza Veith. Her study is essential reading for anyone interested in this quintessential but enigmatic maladyandmdash;one that so defines long-standing perceptions of gender, bourgeois culture, and modernity itself.andquot;
Review
andquot;Arnaud has given us a rich slice of eighteenth-century cultural history and a bold methodological intervention into the history of science and medicine. Against the now-familiar background of late nineteenth-century and early Freudian hysteria as a mode of covert feminine protest, she presents for the era of the Enlightenment an unstable discursive field where medical writing overlaps with other literary genres and the hysteric is as often a man as a woman and is usually an aristocrat. An original and fascinating piece of scholarship.andquot;
Synopsis
Blanche, Augustine, and Genevieve found themselves in the hysteria ward of the Salpetriere Hospital in 1870s Paris, where their care was directed by the prominent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. They became medical celebrities: every week, eager crowds arrived at the hospital to observe their symptoms; they were photographed, sculpted, painted, and transformed into characters in novels. The remarkable story of their lives as patients in the clinic is a strange amalgam of intimate details and public exposure, science and religion, medicine and the occult, hypnotism, love, and theater. But who were Blanche, Augustine, and Genevieve? What role did they play in their own peculiar form of stardom? And what exactly were they suffering from? Hysteria--with its dramatic seizures, hallucinations, and reenactments of past traumas--may be an illness of the past, but the notions of femininity that lie behind it offer insights into disorders of the present.
Synopsis
In the 1870s, three women--Blanch, Augustine, and Genevieve--found themselves in the hysteria ward of the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris under the direction of the prominent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Their illness came to define the era, and in turn they became medical celebrities: every week, eager crowds arrived at the hospital to observe their symptoms; they were photographed, sculpted, painted, and transformed into characters in novels. The remarkable story of their lives as patients in the clinic is a strange amalgam of intimate details and public exposure, science and religion, medicine and the occult, hypnotism, love, and theater.
But who were Blanche, Augustine, and Genevieve? What role did they play in their own peculiar form of stardom? And what exactly were they suffering from? Hysteria--with its dramatic seizures, hallucinations, and reenactments of past traumas--may be an illness of the past, but the notions of femininity that lie behind it offer insights into disorders of the present.
Synopsis
A fascinating study of three young female hysterics who shaped our early notions of psychology.
Synopsis
Hysteria formed a medical category during the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. By tracing its transformations, Sabine Arnaud reveals what was at stake in writing the diagnosis and adds to our understanding of how the role and status of medicine became established in society. In the process she uncovers new insights in the history of medicine. Focusing on a period largely ignored by scholarship, she shows that hysteria was not, in fact, first seen as female malady and that discussions of convulsions in a religious context made up only a very small part of writings on hysteria. Widely treated in medical contexts, hysteria was also a common reference in literature, public political debates, and even philosophy. With careful attention to genres and writing strategies, webs of citation, and circulation, Arnaud provides a history of medicine as a history of knowledge in the making, knowledge that did not build linearly but through misinterpretation, creative citation, and strategic deployment.
About the Author
Asti Hustvedt received her PhD in French literature from New York University. She has worked as an editor and translator, and lives in New York City with her family.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1 Names and Uses of a Diagnosis
The Establishment of Hysteria as a Medical Category
An Intermingling of Terms
First Occurrences of the Term andldquo;Hysteriaandrdquo;
Vaporous Affection and Social Class
Encounters between Medical and Religious Spheres
2 In Search of Metaphors: Figuring What Cannot Be Defined
A Catalog of Images: Proteus, the Chameleon, and the Hydra
Repeated Quotations, Divergent Readings
3 The Writing of a Pathology and Practices of Dissemination
Dialogue
Autobiography
Fictional Correspondence
The Epistolary Consultation
Anecdotes
4 Code, Truth, or Ruse? The Vapors in the Republic of Letters
Well-Timed Fits
The Practice of Vapors
The Force of the Imagination
5 Relating Fits and Creating Enigmas: The Role of Narrative
Bodies Awaiting Exegesis
The Rise of Medical Narrative
In the Shadow of a Gothic Tale
Traps and Countertraps
The Construction of Secrets
6 Adopting Roles and Redefining Medicine
To Mystify or to Demystify? Establishing the Role of the Therapist
Magnetism, Parodies, and Mystification: The Art of Framing a Therapeutic Practice
Strategies of Legitimation and Definitions of the Patient to Come
Investing in Women
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index