Hysteria Extracts

Before the beginning of Herman Melville’s epic novel, Moby-Dick, he includes what he calls “Extracts” as quotes from other sources about the “Whale” supplied “by a sub-sub-librarian.” The “Sub-Sub" appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane.” And so, we attempt to extract from history the word of the month. 

HYSTERIA

“Various remedies were tried without producing any apparent benefit. Warm baths invariably aggravated the symptoms. Every species of narcotic failed to procure rest. Leeches were repeatedly applied to the abdomen, behind the ears, and to the temples with only temporary relief. Once, at the suggestion of Dr. Wake, four ounces of blood were drawn from the arm with the effect of inducing syncope during the operation, and active delirium and sleeplessness at night.” From: An Essay on Hysteria: Being an Analysis of its Irregular and Aggravated Forms, Thomas Laycock, 1840

By 1883, doctors were willing to try anything to alleviate the symptoms of hysteria in women … including a massage, that seemed to result in orgasm and instant curing of the disease. “I AM tempted to reprint in a collected form the articles contained in this pamphlet, in consequence of the numerous inquiries I am constantly receiving on the subject they treat of from practitioners in all parts of the country. The possibility of curing a class of case we all have been too much in the habit of abandoning in despair has evidently interested a large number of the profession; and I am not without hope that these papers may enable many to succeed, as I know that some have already done, in restoring to health —I might almost without exaggeration say to life -some of the miserable and helpless neurasthenic invalids who are so widely scattered over the country. No doubt the systematic treatment of such cases involves an immense amount of trouble, and requires the training of a specially instructed staff of assistants. This latter difficulty, however, is not insuperable, and the striking results to be obtained fully repay the trouble required. In order to facilitate this, I have added in an appendix a description of the method of performing the massage, which constitutes an important part of the treatment, written for me by one of my rubbers.” From: The Systematic Treatment of Nerve Prostration and Hysteria, W.S. Playfair, M.D., F.R.C.P. 1883

 By 1894, The Medical News Journal from Harvard Medical School admitted that men, too, could become hysterical, usually with the addition of alcohol: “The proposition is that among the causes of hysteria must be included various toxic substances, among which the most prominent are alcohol, lead, mercury, carbon disulphid, tobacco, and morphin. Alcohol has long been recognized as an hysterogenous poison. In this country, in fact, it is probably the only one of the group named that would be recognized generally as possessing this quality. The toper is such a common sight in hospitals that all his defects are recognized. Among males it is now thoroughly established that two causes especially, alcohol and trauma, are active in the production of hysteria.”

Harvard University continued to work on the problem. Pierre Janet, Ph.D, M.D. outlined the Major Symptoms of Hysteria in lectures in 1924. He remarks that “the first authors who described hysterical were always struck with the diversity and complexity of their symptoms. It is not a disease said one of them, it is a host of ailments.” But,

The symptoms were enumerated as: 

1. Monoideic Somnabulisms - a person who thinks and acts while asleep, like Lady Macbeth.
2. Fuges and Polyideic Somnambulisms - running away or talking of running away or even just saying once that you wish you could run away.
3. Double Personalities - which seems to be amnesia by his description.
4. Convulsive Attacks, Fits of Sleep - which seems to be epilepsy, by his description.
5. Motor Agitations, Contractures - which seems to be Multiple Sclerosis, by his description.
6. Paralyses - brought on by an accident which, while very slight in itself, is accompanied by a violent moral emotion and by disturbances of the imagination. Like a girl who fell during a fight with her mother and then she experienced a feeling of shame such that the next day she had a complete paralysis of both legs. You know… typical hysteria.
7. Troubles of Vision - like when a man uses a cleaning rag full of grease to wipe his face and then a mist grows to make his vision blurry for a few days and then he goes blind. 
8. Troubles of Speech - in which he describes various traumas that caused people to stop speaking for a period of time. And also aphasia as if from a stroke.
9. Disturbances of Alimentation - or Hysterial Anorexy which “consists chiefly in the systematic refusal of food and in certain digestive disturbances, weakness and depression.
10. Tics of Respiration & Alimentation - like coughs, sneezes, sighs and sobs.
11. “The Hysterical Sigmata–Suggestibility” - including a hysterical bawl of nervous women, unceasing lying, sending love letters and thinking about things after the conversation has shifted to another topic.
12. “The Hysterical Stigmata–The Retraction of the Field of Consciousness”- aggerated absent-mindedness. 

He then explains that it is both a physiological and psychological malady, of which he hopes someday to find one treatment or cure, other than the current one–gaslighting the patient until she admits she is faking her symptoms out of will or desire for attention. “Hysteria is a form of mental depression characterized by the retraction of the field of personal consciousness and a tendency to the dissociation and emancipation of the systems of ideas and functions that constitute personality.”