20 e outside of histera3/24/2023 ![]() From this data, they hypothesized that hysteria must be a “symptom of ‘overcivilization,’” a condition disproportionately affecting women whose torpid lives of luxury had made their nervous and reproductive systems go haywire, which, in turn, threatened whiteness itself. American medical professionals in the 1800s who treated hysteria diagnosed the disorder almost exclusively among white, upper-class women-especially those who had sought higher education or had chosen to abstain from having children. More than just a woman’s disease, it was a white woman’s disease. Hysteria emerged in the late nineteenth century as a tool of patriarchal power and white supremacy.īut as feminist historian Laura Briggs demonstrates in “The Race of Hysteria: ‘Overcivilization’ and the ‘Savage’ Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology,” hysteria was also a racialized condition. Micale, nineteenth-century physicians “considered hysteria the most common of the functional nervous disorders among females.” It was, wrote the prominent nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, the “great neurosis.” Although diagnoses of hysteria date back to ancient Greece (hence its name, which derives from hystera, the Greek word for “womb”), it was in the nineteenth century that it emerged as a linchpin of modern psychiatry, gynecology, and obstetrics. Hysteria was a woman’s disease, a catchall malady for women who exhibited any of a multitude of symptoms, including paralysis, convulsions, and suffocation. What is new, however, is this use of the charged word “hysterical.” Whether Lilla knows it or not, hysteria and race have a long and unseemly shared history in American life. In a recent interview with Slate, political scientist Mark Lilla remarked that Democrats have struck “a slightly hysterical tone about race.” Lilla’s breezy dismissal of America’s original sin is nothing new.
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