For centuries, anxiety, fainting, insomnia, fluid retention, and even a tendency to cause trouble could all be diagnosed as hysteria, a word taken from the Greek for uterus. This episode traces the diagnosis from Egypt’s Kahun Papyri around 1900 BC, which linked many complaints to the uterus, to the Hippocratic texts and Plato’s Timaeus, which described a wandering womb seeking moisture. Aretaeus of Cappadocia called it an animal within an animal, and doctors tried to herd it back with foul smells at the nose, sweet scents at the pelvis, and forced sneezing. Galen rejected the wandering womb but blamed retained female seed that turned venomous, calling it the widow’s disease.

Medieval writers recast symptoms as demonic possession, and Renaissance physicians such as Abraham Zacuto returned to Galen and prescribed marriage. Philippe Pinel freed patients at the Salpêtrière, Franz Mesmer used charged metal rods, Jean-Martin Charcot photographed patients, George Beard listed 75 pages of symptoms, and Edward Hammond Clarke warned in 1875 that education drained women’s reproductive organs. In the 1910s L. E. Emerson at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital found many patients were survivors of sexual violence. Hysteria left the DSM in 1980.

• A brief 18th century period when hysteria was seen as a nervous collapse and diagnosed in men too
• Rachel Maines’s vibrator hypothesis and the challenge to it from Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg
• How police dismissed women reporting assault by labeling them hysterics
• The EEG separating epilepsy from cases once filed as hysteria
• Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous recasting hysteria as rebellion, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper