The Medical Adviser- "On Diseases Peculiar to Women- Hysteria"

The Medical Adviser- "On Diseases Peculiar to Women- Hysteria"

A satirical account of the "condition" of hysteria as it pertains to women.

This article provides a scathing view of the diagnosis of hysteria, which prominently "affected" women in the Victorian era. As this article is from a satire publication, the object here is to ridicule the diagnosis of hysteria, as it was essentially used to devalue the woman's experiences when she wasn't one hundred percent satisfied with her "duty" to be a wife and a mother, especially if she had an actual mental illness. This was likely what the characters within "The LIbrary Window" believed was the cause of the main character/narrator's hallucinations, most prominently that of the library window. Now the reader never knows if the window is real or not, but the fact of the matter is how easy it was for adults in "The Library Window" to brush off the claims of the narrator as simply "hysteria." Luckily, this was not the case for everyone, as this article essentially implies anyone can be "diagnosed" with it: "If one could describe all the symptoms of this disorder, he might as well attempt to describe the different shapes and figures of a kaleidoscope." The article also mentions hypochondria as the "male" counterpart to hysteria, though of course we now know hypochondria (and symptoms related to hysteria as it is no longer a medical diagnosis for that matter) is not a gender-specific diagnosis.

Anonymous

New York Public Library

The Penny Satirist

Saturday, February 17, 1838

Anonymous

PDF

English

Satire