On the disappearance of hysteria : a study in the clinical deconstruction of a diagnosis / Mark S. Micale.
Abstract:
'I argue that from 1895 to 1910 the hysteria diagnosis in its various 19th-century formulations underwent a process of radical nosological and nosographical refashioning--that is, a rapid change in what physicians interpreted as the clinical content of the diagnosis and where they placed the disorder in the overall scheme of medical classification--and that this drastic redefinition of the concept is what has created the illusion that the pathological entity itself has disappeared. ... By examining closely the evolution of European medical systems during these years, and in particular French and German psychiatric and neurological nosologies in the immediate post-Charcotian period, it is possible to reconstruct this process in detail.'
Isis Vol. 84 (1993), p. 496-526