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Over the course of several centuries, Western masculinity has successfully established itself as the voice of reason, knowledge, and sanity—the basis for patriarchal rule—in the face of massive testimony to the contrary. Hysterical Men boldly challenges this triumphant vision of the stable and secure male by examining the central role played by modern science and medicine in constructing and sustaining it. Mark Micale reveals the hidden side of this vision, that is, the innumerable cases of disturbed and deranged men who passed under the eyes of male medical and scientific elites from the seventeenth century onward. Since ancient times, physicians and philosophers had closely observed and extravagantly theorized female weakness, emotionality, and madness. What these male experts failed to see—or saw but did not acknowledge—was masculine nervous and mental illness among all classes and in diverse guises. While cultural and literary intellectuals pioneered new languages of male emotional distress, European science was invested in cultivating and protecting the image of male, middle-class detachment, objectivity, and rationality despite rampant counter-evidence in the clinic, in the laboratory, and on battlefields. The reasons for suppressing male neurosis from the official discourses of science and medicine as well as from popular view range from the personal and psychological to the professional and the political. They make for a history full of profound silences, omissions, and amnesias. Now, however, under the greatly altered circumstances of today’s gender revolution, Micale’s work allows this story to be heard. (20080901)
E-Book Content
Hysterical Men
Hysterical Men The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness
Mark S. Micale
H a r va rd U nive r si t y P re s s Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2008
Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Micale, Mark S., 1957– Hysterical men : the hidden history of male nervous illness / Mark S. Micale. p. ; cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-03166-1 (alk. paper) 1. Hysteria—History. 2. Men—Mental health—History. I. Title. [DNLM: 1. Hysteria—history. 2. Gender Identity. 3. History, Modern 1601–. 4. Men—psychology. WM 11.1 M6192h 2008] RC532.M533 2008 616.85′240081—dc22 2008026043
In memory of Janet Oppenheim and Roy Porter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Usage
xi
xiv
Prologue. Hysteria: The Male Malady
1
1. Hysterick Women and Hypochondriack Men
8
2. The Great Victorian Eclipse
3. Charcot and La Grande Hystérie Masculine
117
4. Male Hysteria at the Fin de Siècle
162
5. Freud and the Origins of Psychoanalysis
228
49
Conclusion. Men and the Fictions of Medicine 276 Notes
287
Index
349
Illustrations
A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (1886) by André Brouillet.
2
Film still from Freud:The Secret Passion (1962), directed by John Huston.
4
Frontispiece of the first edition of George Cheyne’s The English Malady (1733). Reproduced by permission of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
42
Photograph of Jean-Martin Charcot. From Hysteria, Hypnosis and Healing in the Work of J.-M. Charcot by A. R. G. Owen (New York: Garrett, 1971). 119 The Salpêtrière hospital in Paris.
122
A hysterical female patient as photographed in the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (1877). C