I first published on hysteria in 1993. I started writing about it in my PhD thesis, in the mid-1980s. And still I find I am asked to talk about it – how the diagnosis isn’t really an ancient one, how the disease name doesn’t go back to Hippocrates… Most recently, on the podcast Origin of Speakcies, in an episode which came out today.
My longest discussion is in a book I co-wrote entitled Hysteria Beyond Freud. And this is the story of how I came to write it.
It was 1989. I was a mere 4 years post-PhD and working at what was then Liverpool Institute of Higher Education. I wasn’t remotely secure in academia. I hadn’t published ‘the book of the PhD thesis’ (that didn’t happen until 1998). I was teaching about twice as many hours per week as someone in a university job, and my remit was the whole of the ancient world so I had to work hard to keep on top of the material – I taught Roman Britain (as I’d said at the job interview, I’d never even studied this), Political Theory, Roman Republic, Roman Empire, Classical Greece, and two dissertation modules on women and religion respectively. I was pretty shattered.
When I managed to get any research time, mostly in the vacations, I would hang out at the Wellcome Institute on the Euston Road in London, and attend seminars there. As a result, I got to know the various historians – not only Vivian Nutton, whose expertise I’d been drawing on since the PhD, but also Roy Porter. Roy was known for getting into his office very early indeed, and I was commuting up from my parents’ home in Epsom, Surrey, so there was little chance of us meeting casually in the corridor. But one day Roy met me somewhere in the building and invited me to his office for a chat. In the course of this, he explained that he was working on a project on the history of hysteria. He’d heard (I assumed from Vivian) that I had a section on hysteria in my PhD thesis. Could I tell him about it? Could he read it?
We had a great discussion. He understood what I was trying to do, how I was challenging the orthodoxy by which Hippocrates ‘described and named hysteria’. He asked me to speak at a conference he was organising which happened in April 1990. It was there that I met the other contributors to what became Hysteria Beyond Freud, eventually published in 1993. I was by far the junior member of this group but they were very supportive so I was never over-awed. I remember my first set of copy-editor’s comments, which arrived while I was on holiday, and sitting going through them with the knowledge that this work was going to be published in a very important book.
It felt important at the time. But now, looking back, one of the things that strikes me is that it is really, really difficult to challenge orthodoxy. Porter and Rousseau wrote in their Introduction: ‘After King’s revisionism it may well be that studies of Hippocrates will never again be the same. Certainly no one will ever again be able to reiterate the now discredited notion that Hippocrates is the father, the discoverer, the inventor of a Western hysteria that has endured with constancy over the course of many centuries’ (xi). Yet today, I’m still finding the old version all over the internet, including – wow! – finding myself being quoted to support that old version! I blogged about this on https://mistakinghistories.wordpress.com/2018/08/25/quote-unquote-basic-errors-in-using-the-internet-for-doing-history/
Some other places where I’ve talked about hysteria are:
2014: https://www.wired.com/2014/05/fantastically-wrong-wandering-womb/
2004: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/wandering-wombs-and-animal-spirits-ancient-greeks/3376398 (audio link expired but transcript given)
Mistaking histories 