Hysteria

During the last half the century in Europe, a peculiar trend emerged in Europe. Mass madness was manifested in the occurrence of widespread group behavioral disorders that were apparently due to hysteria. Hysteria became a common term used for a physical ailment experienced by women which manifested itself into deafness, paralysis, blindness, and numbness. Hysteria was taught to be related to an ungratified woman's uterus searching for fulfillment. Hysteria was most commonly known to be experienced by women. Hysteria is most commonly seen as some type of conversion disorder in which common feelings experienced (voluntary motor and sensory functioning) are converted into physical illnesses or symptoms that are unexplainable possibly due to a psychosocial struggle. Dancing manias, known as tarantism, epidemics of raving, jumping, dancing, and convulsive people, were commonly observed during this time (around 10th century). The behavior observed during these rites was similar to the religious rites of the Greek worshipers of the Greek God Dionysus. The most commonly recommended treatment for hysteria was marriage.

"[It] occurred at the height of the summer heat...People, asleep or awake, would suddenly jump, feeling an acute pain like the sting of a bee. Some saw the spider, others did not, but they knew that it must be the tarantula. They ran out of the house into the street, to the market place, dancing in great excitement. Soon they were joined by others who like them had been bitten, or by the people who had stung in previous years...Thus groups of patients would gather, dancing wildly in the queerest attire...Others would tear their clothes and show their nakedness, losing all sense of modesty... Some called for swords and acted like fencers, others for whips and beat each other...Some of them had still stranger fancies, liked to be tossed in the air, dug holes in the ground, and rolled themselves into the dirt like swine. They all drank wine plentifully and sang and talked like drunken people..."

The ailments or symptoms commonly termed hysterics are now defined in DSM-IV are split into somatoform disorders, and dissociative disorders which relate to a disruption in the sense of a coherent and stable personality and in the condition of physical complaints occurring in the "abscence" of any physical pathology.