On Male Hysteria

An interesting article on male hysteria:

This opening was, according to Micale, eclipsed as “a great wave of amnesia regarding the nervous disorders descended on European medicine around 1800” (p. 49). During this period, “medical science and practice were aggressively pressed into the service of . . . maintaining a regime of difference between the sexes,” thus excluding behaviors such as hysteria from being ascribed to men (p. 49). Of course, there were a few dissenting voices, like that of the French physician Étienne-Jean Georget in the 1820s, but these were drowned out by a much wider consensus that insisted on strict gender boundaries between the sexes. It was left to the great French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in the 1870s to establish male hysteria as a legitimate diagnosis. Unlike his predecessors, “Charcot had genuinely come to believe that men and children were susceptible to the same nervous disorders as women” (p. 124). In “propounding a theory of hysteria in the male,” writes Micale, “Charcot was also attempting to undermine a theoretical model of the disorder that had led to some of the most deplorable therapeutic practices of his day” (p. 128). Nevertheless, as Micale shows, despite his eagerness to identify male hysteria, Charcot continued to ascribe traditional gendered attributes to the distressed, including assumptions about the “otherness” of male hysterics as inheritors of degenerative constitutions.