Over 2000 years before the modern era and amazing as it sounds, the uterus was seen as a small animal inhabiting a woman’s body. His movements would have been at the origin of a particular disorder: hysteria. Hippocrates thus speaks of this animal which in “ throwing itself on the liver, adhering to the hypochondria “Causes” suffocation of the womb “. This seizure akin to the epileptic seizure would be aggravated by the dryness of the womb, itself the consequence of thesexual abstinence.

This improbable theory will be taken up until the XNUMXrd century AD, a time during which specialists begin to divide. Galen, the famous ancient Greek physician, thinks it is the ” retention of female semen which makes bodily fluids toxic And which triggers the crisis of hysteria, observed it seems in many women.

At the dawn of the second millennium, hysteria has become supernatural in Western Europe. It would be the work of the devil. These women with hysteria attacks are possessed or witches which invariably end up at the stake. These are their ” dark moods Which make them fall into a diabolical crisis.

It was not until the XNUMXth century and the Humanist movement to see doctors and scientists oppose the Inquisition head-on and try to defend women suffering from hysteria.

From the XNUMXth century, several theories will emerge. We must believe that hysteria fascinates the scientific world.

Gynecologists and midwives tend to favor the “vaporous” theory which refers to the toxicity of the sexual to explain seizures. Neurologists, for their part, advance a cerebral explanation: it is the emotions that cause hysteria by contraction and expansion of the membranes of the brain, they say. Soon, we’ll even be talking about passions! The woman having a weaker constitution, she is more prone to passions and therefore to hysteria.

This is all a bit confusing, but the discovery of ovulation is not going to help matters. The woman is now an actress in her own right in the conception, she is no longer a simple receptacle! And obviously, that bothers some men. The theory of sexuality is making a big comeback: abstinence or excess is responsible for hysteria. It is precisely this mess that will forge the legend of hysteria. 

Many authors have strongly criticized lack of precision descriptions of hysteria. For Joseph Babinski, a close associate of Charcot, she is not ” a localizable disease, susceptible of anatomo-clinical definition and description by accumulation of signs ».

This is certainly why she has disappeared from the new classifications of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) and of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10). Histrionic personality disorders ou Troubles somatoformes (which also include sensorimotor disorders, epilepsy). The names “multiple personality”, “hysterical dissociative syndrome” and certain forms of “depressive syndrome” can evoke hysteria as it was formerly described.

Indeed, its descriptions have often evolved over time and remain inseparable from the ideologies that have marked them. Its scientific relevance was undermined by the successive discoveries of the XNUMXth century. 

« Hysteria is one and indivisible » Charcot.

This theory is famous because it implies real equality of men and women in the face of disease. Charcot wonders, in fact, from 1886, whether “ is hysterical neurosis really, as has been believed, as has been claimed so far, more frequent in women than in men? “. Later, he will define a male hysteria, “that of a strong man, in no way effeminate, far from the models developed until then” which will both strengthen the neurologization of hysteria and scratch its myth.