Reading 19th century literature, you might start to think that every woman was a swooning, mad hysteric.  Women seemed forever prone to fainting or madness–few were ever fully in their right minds. Most acted somewhat bizarre and with high theatricality, not unlike the clothes that fashion dictated women should wear.

Hysteria was a purely female problem. Men suffered from their own version of nervous disease known as neurasthenia. The supposed problem? Women’s small size and supposed governance by their reproductive systems. That’s right. Women acted crazy because their womb overrode the power of their brains. The word even comes from the Greek word hystera  for womb.


So little was known about physical illnesses, such as epilepsy and neurological diseases, that the ”nervous” illnesses were generally lumped in together with them. The idea of neuroses as distinctly and purely in the mind was a minority view. More popular were a whole series of medical models for nervous illness and the psychological and physical options for treating them. Nerves were commonly ascribed a “force” that gave vitality to organs. Hysteria and neurasthenia were said to be caused by a weakness in this force, though the psychological evidence for this “force” and its loss were never evident. Anecdotes provided more powerful proof… at least for a time.  


Hysteria helped to reinforce existing gender and class attitudes. Women couldn’t hold positions of power or be trusted to vote if they were not rational beings! Hysteria worked very well at keeping women in the home and out of the public space, just what many men wanted. 


Hysteria could also work in a woman’s favor, though. Being classed as “sick” or “infirm” was one way to get out of performing your expected duties as a woman. In the book The Peabody Sisters by Megan Marshall, an amazing biography of three women in the 19th century, one of the sisters, Sophia, is often ill and seems to use her illness to forge an art career for herself. 


Female hysteria had mostly run its course by the 20th century. Doctors stopped recognizing it as a legitimate medical diagnosis and catch-all disease for any number of symptoms. 

Did you know that we used to think electricity was a fluid? That’s why we use words like “current” and “flow” to describe what is clearly not a liquid. But in the 19th century, electricity was a force that many believed had the power to heal and recharge humans.

In the early years of scientific medicine, many doctors came to believe that nervous diseases had physical causes and could only be cured by physical means. Some compared humans to batteries, saying that we sometimes suffered from a low charge that needed a jolt of energy to recharge. This idea seemed to offer a legitimate explanation for the worn out businessman, the languishing youth, and the excitable, swooning woman of the 19th century. This “disease” came to be called “neurasthenia,” a name popularized by physician George M. Beard who combined all of the so-called symptoms of the disease under one named cause.

The solution? Electricity (it also probably didn’t hurt that Beard happened to be friends with Thomas Edison, the electric wizard of Menlo Park).  Many doctors came to believe that we could recharge our “neural batteries” with electricity. And so various devices purporting to soothe weary brains began to appear with increasing frequency. My favorite is Dr. Scott’s Electric Hair-Brush, which claimed to both make hair more glossy and calm worn-out brains.

The era of electric medicine began to come to an end by the turn-of-the-20th century. Because neither neurasthenia nor electricity actually exhibited physical changes–only proclamations of change (suggestion is powerful)–skepticism about its power began to emerge in the medical community. We also had new theories about mental illness and the mind as scientific research advanced. Electricity remained a magical force, though, its enigmatic nature and invisible power provoking the imagination to ever more fantastical heights.