The story of hysteria is a curious one, for it persists as an illness for centuries before disappearing. Andrew Scull gives a fascinating account of this socially constructed disease that came to be strongly associated with women, showing the shifts in social, cultural, and medical perceptions through history.

HYSTERIA follows a hypersexual, self-destructive young woman who becomes convinced, over the course of 48 feverish hours, that her Brooklyn bartender is Sigmund Freud.

Originally published in 1895, this early work of psychology is both expensive and hard to find in its first edition. It contains Freud and Breuer's case studies of hysteria and their methods of psychoanalytic treatment. This is a fascinating work and is thoroughly recommended for anyone with an interest in the history of psychology. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

New York Times bestselling author Megan Miranda's masterful storytelling brings readers along for a ride to the edge of sanity and back again. Mallory killed her boyfriend, Brian. She can't remember the details of that night but everyone knows it was self-defense, so she isn't charged. But Mallory still feels Brian's presence in her life. Is it all in her head? Or is it something more? In desperate need of a fresh start, Mallory is sent to Monroe, a fancy prep school where no one knows her . . . or anything about her past. But the feeling follows her, as do her secrets. Then, one of her new classmates turns up dead. As suspicion falls on Mallory, she must find a way to remember the details of both deadly nights so she can prove her innocence-to herself and others.

In 1862 the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris became the epicenter of the study of hysteria, the mysterious illness then thought to affect half of all women. There, prominent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot's contentious methods caused furore within the church and divided the medical community. Treatments included hypnosis, piercing and the evocation of demons and, despite the controversy they caused, the experiments became a fascinating and fashionable public spectacle. Medical Muses tells the stories of the women institutionalised in the Salpêtrière. Theirs is a tale of science and ideology, medicine and the occult, of hypnotism, sadism, love and theatre. Combining hospital records, municipal archives, memoirs and letters, Medical Muses sheds new light on a crucial moment in psychiatric history.

Hysteria is probably the condition which best illustrates the tight connection between neurology and psychiatry. While it has been known since antiquity, its renewed studies during the 19th century were mainly due to the work of Jean-Martin Charcot and his school in Paris. This publication focuses on these early developments, in which immediate followers of Charcot, including Babinski, Freud, Janet, Richer, and Gilles de la Tourette were involved. Hysteria is commonly considered as a condition that often leads to spectacular manifestations (e.g. convulsions, palsies), although both structural and functional imaging data confirm the absence of consistent and reproducible structural lesions. While numerous hypotheses have tried to explain the occurrence of this striking phenomenon, the precise nosology and pathophysiology of hysteria remain elusive. This volume offers an enthralling and informative read for neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists, as well as for general physicians, historians, and everyone interested in the developments of one of the most intriguing conditions in medicine.

These days, hysteria is known as a discredited diagnosis that was used to group and pathologize a wide range of conditions and behaviors in women. But for a long time, it was seen as a legitimate category of medical problem—and one that, originally, was applied to men as often as to women. In On Hysteria, Sabine Arnaud traces the creation and rise of hysteria, from its invention in the eighteenth century through nineteenth-century therapeutic practice. Hysteria took shape, she shows, as a predominantly aristocratic malady, only beginning to cross class boundaries (and be limited to women) during the French Revolution. Unlike most studies of the role and status of medicine and its categories in this period, On Hysteria focuses not on institutions but on narrative strategies and writing—the ways that texts in a wide range of genres helped to build knowledge through misinterpretation and recontextualized citation. Powerfully interdisciplinary, and offering access to rare historical material for the first time in English, On Hysteria will speak to scholars in a wide range of fields, including the history of science, French studies, and comparative literature.

Asked to search within themselves for hidden personalities, they came up with entire squadrons: children, harlots, angels, devils."--BOOK JACKET. "This book describes how a group of reckless therapists used hypnosis, drugs, and sheer persuasion to mold their patients' symptoms into multiple personality disorder."--BOOK JACKET.

Few diseases have exercised the Western imagination as chronically as hysteria--from the wandering womb of ancient Greek medicine, to the demonically possessed witch of the Renaissance; from the "vaporous" salong women of Enlightenment Paris, through to the celebrated patients of Sigmund Freud, with their extravagant, erotically charged symptoms. In this fascnating and authoritative book, Mark Micale surveys the range of past and present readings of hysteria by intellectual historians; historians of science and medicine; scholars in gender studies, art history, and literature; and psychoanalysts, psychiatriasts, clinical psychologists, and neurologists. In so doing, he explores numerous questions raised by this evergrowing body of literature: Why, in recent years, has the history of hysterical disorders carried such resonance for commentators in the sciences and humanities? What can we learn form the textual traditions of hysteria about writing the history of disease in general? What is the broader cultural meaning of the new hysteria studies? In the second half of the book, Micale discusses the many historical "cultures of hysteria." He reconstructs in detail the past usages of the hysteria concept as a powerful, descriptive trope in various nonmedical domains, including poetry, fiction, theater, social thought, political criticism, and the arts His book is a pioneering attempt to write the historical phenomenology of disease in an age preoccupied with health, and a prescriptive remedy for writing histories of disease in the future. Mark S. Micale is Assistant Professor of History at Yale. He is the editor of Beyond the Unconscious: Essays of Henri F. Ellenberger (Princeton). Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In Mass Hysteria, Rebecca Kukla examines the present-day medical and cultural practices surrounding pregnancy, new motherhood, and infant feeding. In the late-eighteenth century, the configuration of the maternal body underwent a radical transformation and the two maternal bodies that emerged out of this transformation still govern our imagination and rituals surrounding pregnancy and lactation. Exploring the history and the current life of these two maternal bodies within medical institutions, popular culture, and politics, Kukla offers a critical assessment of the lived repercussions of these ideological figures and practices for contemporary women's and infants' health and well-being.