Ill But Manly: Male Hysteria in Late Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse

Abstract

Contests the accepted view that male hysteria has always been an illness that feminizes men or befalls only feminine men; claims it is always a gendered construct. Focusing on Anglo-European medical literature of 1880-1900, argues that male hysteria as a discursive construct reinforced and even validated masculinity by inventing a new image of the homo hystericus, a stalwart working-class man who suffered hysterical symptoms as the result of traumatic impact with the mechanical or industrial world. Posits that male hysteria was attributable to a distinct cause, while female hysteria was seen as a latent disturbance manifested in incoherent stories about an implicitly sexual past. Notes how Freudian psychoanalysis led to the demise of diagnoses of male hysteria because hysteria was linked to sexuality and only women could be sexually inadequate. Concludes the rise and fall of male hysteria in the fin de siècle indicates that hysteria finds its cause as much in contemporary gender assumptions as in medical categories.