hysterics

Hystera is the Greek word for womb. Ancient physicians, among them Galen of Pergamon in the 2nd century AD, believed that the uterus could become displaced and travel through the body, causing convulsions, emotional extremity, and loss of consciousness. The treatment was marriage, or smelling salts, or fragrant fumigations to lure the wandering organ back. The condition was called hysterikos, of the womb.

Roman medicine took the diagnosis intact. Latin hystericus carried the same freight: a condition unique to women, caused by the uterus, and characterized by outbursts that the male physician found disproportionate. When the term passed into medieval Arabic medicine, Avicenna discussed it in the Canon of Medicine around 1025, largely accepting the Greek model. The word crossed back into European medicine through 12th-century translations at Salerno.

In 17th-century England, Thomas Willis and Thomas Sydenham both wrote about hysteria, though Sydenham notably observed that men could suffer it too. Sydenham, in 1682, went so far as to call hysteria the most common of all diseases. By then the word had shifted from the anatomical to the behavioral: from womb to uncontrolled emotion. The plural hysterics appeared in English by the 1690s, meaning a fit of uncontrolled feeling.

The 19th century gave hysteria its largest stage. Jean-Martin Charcot staged displays of hysterical patients at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, and Sigmund Freud made it central to his early theory of neurosis. By 1900, the condition was losing its medical standing even as the word tightened its grip on the language. We say someone is in hysterics today without any thought of medicine.