![]() Women may be reading from a different script than men because they are socially conditioned to be less confrontational and aggressive. The medical historian John Waller likens it to actors reading a script, except in this case, the actor is sick and the script is not a written document, but an “internalized script” of behaviors the victim subconsciously learned from society. ![]() If hysteria is an example of a kind of language, then it could be that women are simply conditioned to speak it differently. “The way … to get out of is to show symptoms of disease and to be allowed not to have to endure the situation any longer,” says Christian Hempelmann, an assistant professor of computational linguistics at Texas A&M University-Commerce, and an expert on the laughing epidemic. Robert Woolsey, a medical historian, considers hysteria to be a “protolanguage” whose symptoms are “a code used by a patient to communicate a message which, for various reasons, cannot be verbalized.” After all, the women in these convents or factories couldn’t very well ask to be let go. Stress has long been understood to manifest itself through physiological symptoms, but it can also come out through behavior-and language. In other words, these women were under extreme stress. Similarly, the women involved in the factory hysteria worked long hours in dangerous conditions, made very little money, were malnourished, and were forced to work overtime and during holidays. Isolated from the life they once knew, these girls entered a world of extreme discipline that often included vows of chastity, small living quarters, near-starvation diets, repetitive prayer, and strict discipline involving corporeal punishment. ![]() Bartholomew has also found that, for example, many of the nuns who succumbed to mass hysteria were young girls whose families forced them to join convents against their will. If hysteria is a kind of language, then it could be that women are simply conditioned to speak it differently.īut does that mean that there is something particular to the female physiology that predisposes them to hysteria? Not necessarily. Robert Bartholomew, a sociologist in New Zealand who has collected data on 800 outbreaks dating back to 1566, says that in 99 percent of mass hysteria events, the majority of its sufferers are female. While the ancients clearly got this wrong, modern science has confirmed that most sufferers of mass hysteria are female. Nineteenth-century doctors concluded that the most stubborn cases required removal of the ovaries. In the 17th and 18th centuries, doctors blamed a weak female brain that made women susceptible to hysterical breakdowns. In the middle ages, hysterical women were taken to be possessed. Most Greeks acknowledged one solution: marriage. Plato didn’t let hysteria escape his theoretical grasp either, writing that it was the result of a barren womb. It could even migrate so high that it pushed against the throat, causing hyperventilation. Hippocrates, the Greek physician who gave us the Hippocratic Oath, described the uterus as an autonomous creature prone to straying from its proper spot, low in the female abdomen. suggests that a woman suffering from hysteria should stop her uterus (from the Greek hystera, meaning uterus) from wandering. An ancient Egyptian papyrus from 1900 B.C. Hysteria is one of the first recorded neuroses, and it was associated with women right from the start. In each of these episodes, no organic or toxic cause for the strange behavior could be found (both the 20 incidents prompted extensive medical and environmental tests). In 1560 in a convent in Xante, Spain, a group of nuns fell to the ground, tore off their veils and began to bleat like sheep. In 1962, laughing fits took over half the population of an all-girls school in a village in East Africa. In 2011, nearly 2,000 female factory workers fainted on the job in factories throughout Cambodia. In 2012, in Le Roy, New York, four cheerleaders developed Tourette’s-like symptoms, which eventually spread to 13 others. Stage actress Sarah Bernhardt in a scene from an unnamed theatre production.
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