On Hysteria
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€59.99
18th century
19th
A01=Sabine Arnaud
aristocracy
Author_Sabine Arnaud
bourgeois culture
Category=MBX
Category=MKL
Category=PDX
chameleon
class
comparative literature
diagnosis
emotion
enlightenment
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
feminism
fits
france
french revolution
freud
gender
gothic
health
healthcare
history
hydra
hysteria
medicine
mental illness
metaphor
modernity
narrative
neuropsychology
nonfiction
pathology
protest
proteus
psychology
religion
resistance
science
sexual difference
sexuality
technology
therapy
vaporous affection
vapors
women
writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780226275543
- Weight: 652g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 14 Oct 2015
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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These days, hysteria is known as a discredited diagnosis that was used to group and pathologize a wide range of conditions and behaviors in women. But for a long time, it was seen as a legitimate category of medical problem-and one that, originally, was applied to men as often as to women. In On Hysteria, Sabine Arnaud traces the creation and rise of hysteria, from its invention in the eighteenth century through nineteenth-century therapeutic practice. Hysteria took shape, she shows, as a predominantly aristocratic malady, only beginning to cross class boundaries (and be limited to women) during the French Revolution. Unlike most studies of the role and status of medicine and its categories in this period, On Hysteria focuses not on institutions but on narrative strategies and writing-the ways that texts in a wide range of genres helped to build knowledge through misinterpretation and recontextualized citation. Powerfully interdisciplinary, and offering access to rare historical material for the first time in English, On Hysteria will speak to scholars in a wide range of fields, including the history of science, French studies, and comparative literature.
Sabine Arnaud is a Max Planck Research Group Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
