HYSTERIA
"Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions; ..."
"King Henry IV."
Hysteria, recorded in legend and law, in manuscript and marble, in folk-lore and chronicle, right from history's dawn, is still a puzzle of personality, and only equalled by syphilis in the protean nature of its manifestations.
The sacred books of the East said delayed menstruation due to a devil was its cause; the thrashing-out of the devil its cure. Chinese legends describe it, and its symptoms were ascribed by the Inquisition to witchcraft and sorcery.
Old Egyptian papyri tell how to dislodge the devil from the stomach, and there were hysteria specialists in 450 B.C. All old theories fix on the womb as the seat of the disease. The name hysteria is the Greek word for womb, and 97 per cent of patients are women.
A few of the very numerous modern theories may be noticed.
The unconscious (or the subconscious) and the conscious are only parts of one whole. Our "conscious" activities are those which have developed late in the history of the race, and which develop comparatively late in the history of the individual. The "conscious" is the product of the racial education of the "unconscious"; the first is the man, the
modern, the civilized; the last is the child, the primitive, the savage. Between the two there is no gulf fixed, and the Oxford metaphysician need not go to Timbuctoo to seek a superstitious savage; he may find one within himself.