HYSTERIA

"Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions; ..."
"King Henry IV."

Hysteria, recorded in legend and law, in manuscript and marble, in
folk-lore and chronicle, right from history's dawn, is still a puzzle of
personality, and only equalled by syphilis in the protean nature of its
manifestations.

The sacred books of the East said delayed menstruation due to a devil was
its cause; the thrashing-out of the devil its cure. Chinese legends
describe it, and its symptoms were ascribed by the Inquisition to
witchcraft and sorcery.

Old Egyptian papyri tell how to dislodge the devil from the stomach, and
there were hysteria specialists in 450 B.C. All old theories fix on the
womb as the seat of the disease. The name hysteria is the Greek word for
womb, and 97 per cent of patients are women.

A few of the very numerous modern theories may be noticed.

The unconscious (or the subconscious) and the conscious are only parts of
one whole. Our "conscious" activities are those which have developed late
in the history of the race, and which develop comparatively late in the
history of the individual. The "conscious" is the product of the racial
education of the "unconscious"; the first is the man, the modern, the
civilized; the last is the child, the primitive, the savage. Between the