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Mark S Micale, Hysterical men: the hidden history of male nervous illness, Cambridge, MA, and London, Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. xv, 366, illus., £19.95, euro21.00, $29.95 (hardback 978-0-674-03166-1).
To his previous extensive scholarship on the history of psychiatry, and in particular on the work of the late-nineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot on male hysteria, Mark Micale has now added a new book that traces the "hidden history" of this disorder back to its origins in the early modern period. The term hysteria, as is well known, derives from the Greek work for uterus, and for centuries denoted the illness' s imagined origins in what medical men saw as the unruly properties of that female organ. Hysteria was, as Elaine Showalter long ago noted, the "female malady" par excellence.
But there were always other possibilities within the discourse about hysteria. For readers conditioned to the belief, in part as a result of Micale's earlier work, that it was Charcot who discovered male hysteria, the main virtue of his new study is to uncover the rich literature of male hysteria of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This body of work, which...