2. See H. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1962); Ellenberger was, not ironically, one of the principal reviewers of Veith's book (see n. 3). [BACK]

3. These are the two mentioned, and there have been no histories of hysteria since 1900. The last one in French before Trillat's was G. Abricossoff's L'hysterie aux 17 et 18 siècles (Paris: G. Steinhill, 1897). Of interest here is Trillat's brief but valuable discussion of the methodological issues involved in writing the traditional history of hysteria; see E. Trillat, "Trois itinéraires a travers I'histoire de l'hysterie," Historie des Sciences Médicales 21 (1987): 27-31.

4. An idea of the disciplinary milieu among medical historians in which Veith wrote is gained by consulting Edwin Clarke, ed., Modern Methods in the History of Medicine (London: Athlone, 1971), who wrote before the ideologies of class, race, and gender held any sway in the history of medicine—his plea was for a balance between medical training and knowledge of history, but it was a nominalistic, realistic history of persons, places, and things in which gender and sex, class and race, language and representation, played a small role. Another contemporary approach not very different from Veith's is found in I. Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad Business (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), which sheds further light on the discipline of the history of medicine at the time and the epistemological problems involved in the perception of writing the history of madness during the 1960s. For the historiography of medicine, itself a scant discourse in the last half century, and as it would have appeared in the mindset of scholars like Veith and others of her generation, see R. H. Shyrock, "The Historian Looks at Medicine," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 5 (1937): 887-894; G. Rosen, "A Theory of Medical Historiography," ibid., 8 (1940):655-665; idem, "Levels of Integration in Medical Historiography," Journal of the History of Medicine 4 (1949): 460-467; George Mora, Psychiatry and Its History: Methodological Problems in Research (Springfield, Mass.: C. C. Thomas, 1970), works that represent a portion of the methodological atmosphere in which Veith wrote. [BACK]

3. These are the two mentioned, and there have been no histories of hysteria since 1900. The last one in French before Trillat's was G. Abricossoff's L'hysterie aux 17 et 18 siècles (Paris: G. Steinhill, 1897). Of interest here is Trillat's brief but valuable discussion of the methodological issues involved in writing the traditional history of hysteria; see E. Trillat, "Trois itinéraires a travers I'histoire de l'hysterie," Historie des Sciences Médicales 21 (1987): 27-31.

4. An idea of the disciplinary milieu among medical historians in which Veith wrote is gained by consulting Edwin Clarke, ed., Modern Methods in the History of Medicine (London: Athlone, 1971), who wrote before the ideologies of class, race, and gender held any sway in the history of medicine—his plea was for a balance between medical training and knowledge of history, but it was a nominalistic, realistic history of persons, places, and things in which gender and sex, class and race, language and representation, played a small role. Another contemporary approach not very different from Veith's is found in I. Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad Business (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), which sheds further light on the discipline of the history of medicine at the time and the epistemological problems involved in the perception of writing the history of madness during the 1960s. For the historiography of medicine, itself a scant discourse in the last half century, and as it would have appeared in the mindset of scholars like Veith and others of her generation, see R. H. Shyrock, "The Historian Looks at Medicine," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 5 (1937): 887-894; G. Rosen, "A Theory of Medical Historiography," ibid., 8 (1940):655-665; idem, "Levels of Integration in Medical Historiography," Journal of the History of Medicine 4 (1949): 460-467; George Mora, Psychiatry and Its History: Methodological Problems in Research (Springfield, Mass.: C. C. Thomas, 1970), works that represent a portion of the methodological atmosphere in which Veith wrote. [BACK]

5. For medicine and metaphor see Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Random House, 1979); C. M. Anderson, Richard Selzer and the Rhetoric of Surgery (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989); P. Radestsky, The Invisible Invaders: The Story of the Emerging Age of Viruses (New York: Little, Brown [BACK]

6. The newer approaches had been anticipated in the 1960s by E. L. Entralgo in Doctor and Patient (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1969); but see also C. Webster, "Medicine as Social History: Changing Ideas on Doctors and Patients in the Age of Shakespeare," in A Celebration of Medical History , ed. L. Stevenson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Roy and Dorothy Porter, Patient's Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth Century England (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989); Roy and Dorothy Porter, In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience, 1650-1850 (London: Fourth Estate, 1988); Roy Porter, Health for Sale: Quackery in England, 166o-1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). [BACK]

7. For the broad historical approach, see G. S. Rousseau, ed., The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1990). [BACK]

8. The most thorough historical background remains Goldstein's Console and Classify , but another good place to start, within the realm of theory, is the diverse discourse of post-Lacanian feminist theory as found in E. Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1990); E. Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); C. J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990), themselves immensely diverse and astute and linked only by their concern for the female plight in the world of poststructuralism and postmodernism. An important statement of the epistemological problems involved is found in In Dora's Case: Freud — Hysteria — Feminism , ed. C. K. Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). For iconography and hysteria, see H. Speert, Iconographia Gyniatrica: A Pictorial History of Gynecology and Obstetrics (New York: Macmillan, 1973); for feminism and Freud, D. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1989). An approach to some of these problems grounded in Romantic literature is found in D. L. Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny: The Woman Within (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1990). [BACK]

9. For language and social history as they impinge on the discourses of hysteria and on various theories of medicine, see G. S. Rousseau, "Towards a Semiotics of the Nerve: The Social History of Language in a New Key," in Language, Self, and Society: A Social History of Language , ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), 213-275; Rousseau, "Literature and Medicine: The State of the Field," Isis 52 (1981): 406-424. [BACK]

10. Illuminating for bringing together many of the ideas of these theorists is E. Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney, Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1989). [BACK]

11. As evidenced in the wide attention given to this juncture in contemporary psychoanalytic literature and in the contemporary journal Literature and Medicine as well as in such books (chronologically arranged and a mere sampling) as J. B. Lyons, James Joyce and Medicine (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1973); R. Antonioli, Rabelais et la medecine (Geneva: Dros, 1976); E. Peschel, Medicine and Literature (New York: Neale Watson Academic Publications, 1980); S. S. Lanser, "Feminist Criticism, 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' and the Politics of Color in America," Feminist Studies 15 (1989): 415-441; T. Caramagno, Virginia Woolf (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), a study of her depression and mental maladies; R. Lutz, Neurasthenia (New York: 1991). For more popular statements about the real and representational affinities of the two realms, see I. McGilchrist, "Disease and the Novel, 1880-1960," TLS , January 17, 1986: 61, and Leon Edel, "Disease and the Novel," TLS , May 30, 1986:591, contributions to a debate on the subject. [BACK]

12. However significant the Darwinian metaphors of rise and fall, evolution and flow, are in this context, they are less vital than the social construction of hysteria. Indeed, the debate between social constructionists and realists or essentialists has reached epic proportions, as group after group decodes the strengths of each method, some coming down on the side of the one, some on the other, and some (such as John Boswell, the Yale historian of homosexuality in early modern civilization) for a blending of the two. But the politics of representation also pose crucial questions: do we choose our representations because they are power-influenced and thereby capable of enhancing our own positions (as Michel Foucault argued) or because they are in some abstract ontological sense true (as in the ongoing current debates in the newly developing field of literature and science)? The antagonisms of realism and social constructionism have emerged as a field in itself, posing new problems for the decade of multiculturalism, and not without genuine implications for the construction of the category hysteria. For anticipations of the debate in both medicine and philosophy, see P. Wright and A. Treacher, eds., The Problem of Medical Knowledge: Examining the Social Construction of Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982); O. Moscucci, The Science of Woman: Gynecology and Gender in England 1800-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); C. E. Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); I. Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989); J. Leplin, ed., Scientific Realism (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984); D. F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). [BACK]

13. An essential task of this book, for example, is the charting of these gains and losses in some detail during the centuries that form the basis of modern European culture from the Renaissance to the end of the Enlightenment, vital epochs whose medicine, and certainly whose hysteria, have been discussed much less than they deserve. [BACK]

14. One corrective to this historically false view is found in the important work of Jan Goldstein; see especially her Console and Classify . [BACK]

15. The "mechanical revolution" has profited from three decades of superior scholarship, but the study of the "nervous revolution" continues to lie in a more primitive state within the history of science and medicine. It has been the subject of recent scholarship among neurochemists, neurophysiologists, medical historians, and historians of science; for a comprehensive statement of the problem see G. S. Rousseau, "Cultural History in a New Key: Towards a Semiotics of the Nerve," in Interpretation in Cultural History , ed. Joan Pittock and Andrew Wear (London: Macmillan, 1991), 25-81; J. Mullan, ''Hypochondria and Hysteria: Sensibility and the Physicians," 25 (1984): 141-177; within the history of ideas, M. Kallich, The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory in Eighteenth Century England (The Hague: Mouton, 1970); M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1953); for the Victorians, J. Oppenheim, " Shattered Nerves": Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). [BACK]

16. These consistencies and contradictions, and their particular cultural and historical appearances, form one of the central themes of this book. They constitute a further reason that we do not claim to write here primarily as "historians of medicine" but as students of the intersection of discourse and culture. For aspects of this intersection see S. Benstock, Textualizing the Feminine: On the Limits of Genre (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); and Timothy Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982). [BACK]

17. For an example of what the abstract point means for the practicing historian, see Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). [BACK]

18. Another example proceeding in this careful philological manner for the Middle Ages is the work of Caroline Bynum in Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1987); idem, Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986). [BACK]

19. For these later inventions see Simon Bennett, M.D., Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978); L. F. Calmeil, De la folie considerée sous le point de vue pathologique, philosophique, historique et judiciare (Paris: Bailliére, 1845); an anonymous work attributed to "a society of physicians in London" and published as "Medical Observations and Inquiries," Critical Review , June 1757: 540-541, 544-545; L. M. Danforth, Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). [BACK]

20. For the two-body model see Laqueur, Making Sex ; for Newtonianism and medicine, see three books by L. King: The Medical Worm of the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); The Road to Medical Enlightenment , 1660-1695 (London: Macdonald, 1970); The Philosophy of Medicine: The Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), esp. pp. 152-181. For the philosophical issues involved in sexuality in general and their relation to historicism and social construction, see A. I. Davidson, "Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality," Critical Inquiry 11 (1987): 17-48. [BACK]

21. For the eighteenth-century debate on female gender in relation to functioning society see: P. Hoffmann, La femme dans la pensée des Lumières (Paris: Ophrys, 1977); D. Spender, ed., Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Key Women Thinkers (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983); B. Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics in 18th-Century England 1990); L. Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Moscucci, Science of Woman ; B. S. Anderson et al., A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). [BACK]

22. Valid as the reinvigoration was, there is no mention of hysteria in some of the classic interpretations of the period, for example in P. Gay's The Enlightenment: An Interpretation , 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966-69), which devotes much space to medicine. The canvas painted by Gay and other synthetic historians of the Enlightenment provides a further reason for our revisionist treatment. [BACK]

23. Although there is no such subgenre as the historiography of Sydenham studies, it is clear that over a century ago Sydenham's significance for hysteria was intuited but not demonstrated; see J. Brown, M.D., Horae Subsecivae: Locke and Sydenham and Other Papers (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1890). [BACK]

24. An early anticipation of this approach within the British tradition is found in Alexander Thomson, An Enquiry into the Nature, Causes, and Method of Cure, of Nervous Disorders (London, 1781); an example of the commonly found physiological dissertation in France is H. Girard, Considerations physiologiques et pathologiques sur les affections nerveuses, dites hysteriques (Paris, 1841). [BACK]

25. See G. Didi-Huberman, Invention de l'Hysterie: Charcot et l'Iconographie Photographique (Paris: Macula, 1982); useful as this work is, it lacks the sweep and erudition of Sander Gilman's chapter concluding this book. [BACK]

26. Paris: Hachette, 1970; trans. in 1968 as The Fear of Women (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1968). [BACK]

27. See White's influential essay "The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea—Noble Savage as Fetish," in The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism , ed. E. Dudley and M. E. Novak (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 3-38. [BACK]

28. An important exception is Jan Goldstein's work, especially as found in "The Hysteria Diagnosis and the Politics of Anticlericalism in Late Nineteenth-Century France," Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 209-239, and her Console and Classify ; T. Laqueur's "Orgasm, Generation and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," Representations 14 (1986): 1-14. The matter is further substantiated bibliographically in the thorough researches of M. Micale, referred to in many of the chapters of this book. [BACK]

29. Others who helped retrieve these lost voices include: Patricia Fedikew, "Marguerite Duras: Feminine Field of Hysteria," Enclitic 6 (1982): 78-86; Bernheimer and Kahane, eds., In Dora's Case ; Terry Castle, "Learned Ladies," TLS , December 14-20, 1990: 1345-1346. [BACK]

30. These traditions of learning are brought together in Rousseau, ed., Languages of Psyche . [BACK]

31. Porter's discussion should be complemented with the important writings on nineteenth-century hysteria of Mark Micale. [BACK]

32. Some of the theoretical cruxes have been addressed in the controversies surrounding Richard Rorty and his influential book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), and others such as G. Levine, ed., One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); the problem of metaphor in both the realist and representative domains by M. B. Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science (Notre Dame: University of Indiana Press, 1966); The Structure of Scientific Inference (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1974); idem, "Habermas, Foucault, and Metaphor in Science," Proceedings of the Von Leer Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1992, Jerusalem). But see also an important statement by Hayden White, "Historical Emplotments and the Problem of Truth," presented to the Conference on the Holocaust, University of California, Los Angeles, 1990; and for the role of representation as a presiding category in contemporary sensibility, J. F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). [BACK]

33. See S. Gilman, Seeing the Insane (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1982); Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to Aids (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), as well as many articles and reviews. [BACK]

34. One can imagine Hans Mayer listening to the list of these pariahs and reconsidering his omission of hysterics from his brilliant study of the representation of the outsider; see his Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984). [BACK]

35. If William McGrath's evidence is correct about the politics of hysteria, we may have enhanced the validity of our work by this exclusion rather than harmed it; see W. J. McGrath, Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986). [BACK]

36. For another form of deconstruction, see McGrath, Freud's Discovery . [BACK]

37. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. [BACK]

38. See Mark S. Micale, "Hysteria and Its Historiography: A Review of Past and Present Writings," History of Science 27 (September, December, 1989): 223-262; 319-351; idem, "Hysteria and Its Historiography: The Future Perspective," History of Psychiatry 1 (March, 1990): 33-124; idem, "Charcot and the Idea of Hysteria in the Male: Gender, Mental Science, and Medical Diagnosis in Late Nineteenth-Century France,'' Medical History 34 (1990): 363-411; and idem, "Hysteria Male/Hysteria Female: Reflections on Comparative Gender Construction in Nineteenth-Century France and Britain" in Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Enquiry, 1780-1945 , ed. Marina Benjamin, (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1991), 200-239. [BACK]

39. As evidence we again suggest that the reader consult Goldstein's Console and Classify for evidence of what the post-Foucaldian methodology does in practice. [BACK]