GENDER AND HYSTERIA

Gender and Hysteria

Gender and Hysteria

Shell-shock & gender and hysteria

Histories of shell-shock have argued that the diagnosis was subdivided into the categories hysteria and neurasthenia, and that the differential distribution and treatment of these diagnoses was shaped by class and gender expectations (Fabre, 2003). These arguments depend on the presentation of hysteria and neurasthenia as opposed constructs in British medical discourse before 1914. An analysis of the framing of these diagnoses in British medical discourse c.1910—1914 demonstrates that hysteria and neurasthenia, although undergoing redefinition in these years, were closely connected through the designation of both as functional diseases, and the role attributed to heredity in each. Before the war these diagnoses were perceived as indicators of national decline. Continuity, as well as change, is evident in medical responses to shell-shock.

One of the striking aspects of shell shock was the class difference in symptoms; "shell-shocked officers tended to suffer from chronic anxiety states while men in the ranks generally suffered from acute hysterical disorders." In the ranks, symptoms tended to be physical: paralyses, limps, blindness, deafness, mutism (Micale, 2009). In officers, symptoms tended toward the emotional: nightmares, insomnia, depression, anxiety attacks. Sexual impotence was widespread in all ranks. Explanations for the differences were class-based. Myers explained that "the force of education, tradition, and example make for greater self-control in the case of the Officer. He, moreover, is busy throughout a bombardment, issuing orders and subject to worry over his responsibilities, whereas the men can do nothing during the shelling but watch and wait until the order is received for an advance." Some British doctors saw a one-to-one cause-and-effect relationship between the hysterical conversion symptom and the trauma that had caused it. According to Thomas Salmon, "A soldier who bayonets an enemy in the face develops a hysterical tic of his facial muscles; abdominal contractions occur in men who have bayoneted enemies in the abdomen; hysterical blindness follows particularly horrible sights; hysterical deafness appears in men who find the cries of the wounded unbearable, and the men detached to burial parties develop amnesia."

There were two major ways of treating shell shock during the war, both designed to get men functioning and back to the trenches as fast as possible, and these treatments were differentiated according to rank (Reynolds, 2009). Shell-shocked soldiers were treated with the hostility and contempt that had been accorded hysterical women before the war. As in the nineteenth century, working-class men were linked with hysterical women as the antagonists of doctors. "The case of a psycho-neuropath," wrote Frederick Mott, "really consists of a mental contest, resulting in the victory of the physician." Not only in England but in all European countries, shell-shocked ordinary soldiers were subjected to forms of disciplinary treatment, such as isolation, restricted diet, public shaming, and painful electric faradization, or shocks to the afflicted parts of their bodies (Cixous, 2007). The treatments known as "quick cure," "queen square" (for the London hospital where it was practiced), "torpedoing," "torpillage," "manière forte," "terrorism," or "Uberrümplung" (hustling) were in ...