Hysteria: The disturbing history PDF

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Download for free medical books PRETITLE Hysteria: The disturbing history [Kindle Edition] POSTTITLE from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror linkThe nineteenth century seems to have been full of hysterical women - or so they were diagnosed. Where are they now? The very disease no longer exists. In this fascinating account, Andrew Scull tells the story of Hysteria - an illness that disappeared not through medical endeavour, but through growing understanding and cultural change. More generally, it raises the question of how diseases are framed, and how conceptions of a disease change through history.

The lurid history of hysteria makes fascinating reading. Charcot's clinics showed off flamboyantly 'hysterical' patients taking on sexualized poses, and among the visiting professionals was one Sigmund Freud. Scull discusses the origins of the idea of hysteria, the development of a neurological approach by John Sydenham and others, hysteria as a fashionable condition, and its growth from the 17th century. Some regarded it as a peculiarly English malady, 'the natural concomitant of England's
greater civilization and refinement'. Women were the majority of patients, and the illness became associated with female biology, resulting in some gruesome 'treatments'. Charcot and Freud were key practitioners defining the nature of the illness. But curiously, the illness seemed to swap gender during
the First World War when male hysterics frequently suffering from shell shock were also subjected to brutal 'treatments'. Subsequently, the 'disease' declined and eventually disappeared, at least in professional circles, though attenuated elements remain, reclassified for instance as post-traumatic stress disorder.Direct download links available for PRETITLE Hysteria: The disturbing history [Kindle Edition] POSTTITLE

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• File Size: 2280 KB
• Print Length: 227 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 019956096X
• Publisher: OUP Oxford; Reprint edition (October 13, 2011)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B006H07PYQ
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #484,565 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Hysteria: The disturbing history PDF

This small volume by a professor of sociology at the University of California-San Diego is an entry in the Oxford University Press's recently-inaugurated Biographies of Disease series. Each volume tells the story of a different disease in historical and cultural context.

Hysteria is a strange, protean disorder. The author traces its history from the 17th century to the present, though it existed long before then. Among its many baffling features is the assumption of different guises in different eras. There seems to be a cultural element involved.

Historically the disorder has been associated primarily with women, although men suffer from it, too. Its name is derived from the Greek word for uterus, and it was formerly thought to be a malady primarily of the reproductive organs.

"Hysteria" has a decidedly negative connotation. Most doctors have never been able to understand or competently treat it, and have dismissed it or expressed contempt, anger, and even hatred and sadism toward their troublesome patients, whose dramatic and debilitating symptoms do not fit any medically recognized category. Throughout the centuries physicians have assumed that victims were malingerers, fakers, attention seekers, or actors melodramatically putting on a show.

A towering exception to the rule is famed 19th century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot of Paris, so significant in the history of hysteria that an entire chapter is devoted to him. Charcot was convinced that hysteria was a neurological disorder whose etiology remained unknown. He famously made a connection between hypnosis and hysteria, which is quite fascinating.

Author Scull devotes another chapter to a closely related 19th century disorder, neurasthenia.