Introduction

Hysteria is as old as the earliest medical texts. Originally it was a concept of the cause of symptoms, found exclusively in women, thought to be due to the wandering womb, which, being frustrated by lack of proper use, leaves its anatomical position and travels around the body causing pressure in anomalous places, and hence symptoms. Although there has been an academic debate about what the Egyptians and subsequently the Greeks were actually referring to when they discussed the wandering womb, early history reflects on two important points. First, symptoms such as are seen today were documented over 2000 years ago, across at least two different cultures, and second, that the postulated mechanism was gender-related.

Examples of the kind of symptoms that are to be described later in this book are noted in these texts, including convulsions and paralyses, and the classical globus hystericus, caused by pressure from the wandering uterus on the throat. Inscriptions from the temple of Aesculapius in Epidaurus record episodes of hysterical aphonia and blindness, and possibly the first recorded case of malingering: