The word hysteria derives from the Greek word for uterus, hystera. Although it’s a modern myth that ancient Greek medicine described a single distinct disease called hysteria, early Western medical texts did attribute an array of physical and mental symptoms—from menstrual pain to dizziness to paralysis to a sense of suffocation—to the effects of a restless uterus roving about the body; treatments were aimed at either enticing or driving the organ back into its proper place in the pelvis. Since a womb that “remains barren too long after puberty” was especially prone to wandering, the
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