Doing It Right with Pandora Sykes cover image

The myth of gendered emotion, with Praga Agarwal

Doing It Right with Pandora Sykes

CHAPTER

The History of Hysteria

The hysterical woman was used as a medical diagnosis right up until the 1980s. In 1681, an English physician called Thomas Sidonum wrote that women are rarely quite free from hysteria. The term hysteria comes from the Greek word hystericos, meaning from the womb. And if you go back as far back as the myth of the Jason and the Argonauts, there was a renowned mystic who first linked women's madness to a lack of sex life.

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