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

Misha Kavka contests the accepted view that male hysteria has always been an illness that feminizes men or befalls only feminine men. Nonetheless, hysteria is always a gendered construct. Focusing on Anglo-European medical literature of 1880-1900, led by the great French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, Kavka argues that male hysteria as a discursive construct reinforced and even validated masculinity by inventing a new image of the homo hystericus. This new male hysteric was a stalwart working-class man who suffered hysterical symptoms as the result of traumatic impact with the mechanical or industrial world. Homo hystericus was born out of the discovery of traumatic hysteria, based in neurological theories of "railway spine," which provided male hysteria with a clear, verifiable etiology, or cause: an external shock to the body with delayed physiological effects. While male hysteria was caused by a traumatic event, however, female hysteria had no coherent etiology, bur was seen as a latent disturbance manifested in incoherent stories about an (implicitly sexual) past. When Freud brought psychoanalysis into being by listening to such stories, he grounded his new science on the demise of the masculine male hysteric. If hysterical symptoms denoted a repressed memory of early seduction, as Freud argued, then only women (and feminine men) could properly be hysterics, since only women (and feminine men) could be sexually inadequate. This rise and fall of male hysteria in the fin de siecle thus indicates that hysteria finds its cause as much in contemporary gender assumptions as in medical categories. **********