All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today

by Elizabeth Comen

Here, a pattern begins to emerge. Women who were diagnosed with hysteria in fact suffered from a variety of illness, physiological and mental alike (except on the numerous occasions when there was nothing wrong with them at all). What they had in common was not a medical condition but something far more intractable: they were all frustrating to men. Hysterical women didn’t listen, didn’t cooperate, didn’t behave. Their symptoms often seemed rooted in defiance—of convention, of etiquette, of a husband’s or doctor’s demands, and of the inferior role that physicians had been so reliably assured was their evolutionary birthright. As such, it’s not a coincidence that the preferred treatments for hysteria often involved restricting women’s freedom, whether it was to pursue an education or even to get out of bed. But when these measures proved insufficient to curtail hysterical symptoms—which by this point had expanded to include anything from tonic-clonic seizures to being tired to reading too many novels—the medical establishment was all too happy to restrict these patients’ lives even further . . . all the way into a squalid cell with bars on the windows, guards at the door, and the wails of fellow imprisoned women echoing down the halls all night long.