For almost four thousand years doctors blamed a wandering womb
An Egyptian papyrus from 1900 BCE attributed women's odd behaviour to a uterus roaming the body, and physicians tried to coax it home with smells. The idea gave us the word hysteria, from the Greek for womb, and survived in psychiatry's official manual until 1980, when the diagnosis was finally dropped.
The Kahun Papyrus prescribed pungent substances and foul-tasting herbs to lure the organ back into place. Greek thinkers adopted the theory and widened it to include childlessness and reluctance to marry; in Plato's Timaeus a barren womb grows distressed and wanders, choking the body. Hippocrates coined the term in the 5th century BCE. Roman doctors kept the womb as the culprit but abandoned the wandering, blaming disease or reproductive disruptions such as miscarriage instead.
As Christianity spread through the Latin West, suffering came to be read as the fruit of sin, and hysteria as demonic possession treated with prayers, amulets and exorcism. Two medieval women doctors offered alternatives. Trota de Ruggiero, often called Christian Europe's first gynaecologist, prescribed remedies such as mint, and Hildegard of Bingen argued that men and women could both suffer from it. During the Renaissance, though, many so-called hysterics were prosecuted as witches.
Medicine slowly reclaimed the condition. Charles Le Pois called it a brain disorder, and in 1697 Thomas Sydenham framed it as emotional rather than physical. In 1859 Paul Briquet described a chronic syndrome of unexplained symptoms across many organs, drawing on 430 cases. Jean-Martin Charcot then staged famous public demonstrations at a Paris asylum, hypnotising patients such as Marie Wittman, the 'Queen of Hysterics'; critics suspect the shows helped create the very behaviour they displayed. His pupil Pierre Janet and, above all, Sigmund Freud built on this work, and several of them recognised hysteria in men.
The 20th century dismantled the label. Anxiety and depression diagnoses rose as hysteria admissions in England and Wales fell by about two-thirds between 1949 and 1978, and medicine found other explanations for conditions like epilepsy. The American Psychiatric Association removed it from its manual in 1980, having listed it since 1968. Its old territory is now divided among conversion, dissociative and histrionic disorders, and in everyday speech the word just means an extravagant emotional outburst.
Source: Hysteria
