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Hysteria

Hysteria is a term used to mean ungovernable emotional excess and can refer to a temporary state of mind or emotion. In the nineteenth century, female hysteria was considered a diagnosable physical illness in women. It is assumed that the basis for diagnosis operated under the belief that women are predisposed to mental and behavioral conditions; an interpretation of sex-related differences in stress responses. In the twentieth century, it shifted to being considered a mental illness. Influential physicians the likes of Sigmund Freud and Jean-Martin Charcot had dedicated research to hysteria patients.

History
The word hysteria originates from the Greek word for uterus, hystera. The oldest record of hysteria dates back to 1900 BCE when Egyptians recorded behavioral abnormalities in adult women on the Kahun Papyrus. Plato and Aristotle expressed ideas that can retroactively be classified as hysteria. In Plato’s Timaeus, Timaeus tells a likely story about the universe (a myth) which includes an account of something akin to hysteria as a condition in which the womb, remaining barren beyond its natural time, becomes distressed and wanders throughout the body, obstructing passages and causing suffocation and various diseases. During this time the common point of view was that women were inferior beings, connected to Aristotle's ideas of male superiority. Saint Thomas Aquinas supported this idea and stated in Summa Theologica that "'some old women' are evil-minded; they gaze on children in a poisonous and evil way, and demons, with whom the witches enter into agreements, interacting through their eyes". This type of fear of witches and sorcery is part of the rules of celibacy and chastity imposed on the clergy. Joseph Raulin published a work in 1748 which associated hysteria with the air quality in cities. He suggested that men and women could both have hysteria, but women were more likely to have it due to laziness. In 1859 Paul Briquet defined hysteria as a chronic syndrome manifesting in many unexplained symptoms throughout the body's organ systems. What Briquet described became known as Briquet's syndrome, or Somatization disorders, in 1971. Over a ten-year period, Briquet conducted 430 case studies of patients with hysteria. Both Charcot and Janet inspired Freud's work.