Hysterical Men

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.

ISBN 0674031660   Pages 384 ISBN13 9780674031661 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Harvard University Press   Weight (grammes) 576 Imprint Harvard University Press   Published in Cambridge, Mass Format Hardback   Height (mm) 210 Publication date 11 Nov 2008   Width (mm) 140 Library of Congress 2008026043   Spine width (mm) 31 DEWEY 616.85240081   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

Prologue		Hysteria: The Male Malady		1
1		Hysterick Women and Hypochondriack Men		8
2		The Great Victorian Eclipse		49
3		Charcot and La Grande Hysterie Masculine		117
4		Male Hysteria at the Fin de Siecle		162
5		Freud and the Origins of Psychoanalysis		228
		Conclusion. Men and the Fictions of Medicine		276
		Notes		287
		Index		349

"Do not waste much time on hysteria in men. Leave hysteria to women and children," advised a German doctor in 1887 in response to noted French physician Jean-Martin Charcot's notions that men could manifest hysteria. Micale has uncovered a wealth of information that rebuts much of the traditional medical and popular thinking about men and emotional distress. Micale charts nervous diseases in men from the 17th century until Freud. It was only in 1859, in a medical text by Pierre Briquet, that detailed attention was paid to male hysteria, and he noted that doctors didn't see the condition because "they did not want to see it." Micale's canvas is broad and, while the book has a history of science slant, it is also a work of cultural criticism, charting the changes in acceptable masculine affect, as exhibited in works like Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Micale brings much fascinating information together with elan. Publishers Weekly 20080901 Micale writes here about what he calls the "hidden history" of male nervous illness, or hysteria, exploring its denial and theories in males from the early modern period through the early 20th century. The author of many other books and articles on hysteria, Micale ranges from incidents in England, France, and other parts of Europe to Frenchman Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud, drawing on mostly primary sources, such as letters, diaries, essays, and novels, because the topic was excluded from mainstream historical resources. He concludes that "hysteria" was mostly thought to be a woman's disease and that the research period is one of missed opportunities, as male psychologists were incapable of seeing mental conditions in themselves. Micale acknowledges modern progress in "masculine self-understanding," though he admits that the process is still in development. An excellent book overall. -- Leigh Mihlrad Library Journal 20081015 [A] fascinating book by historian Mark Micale, whose research is enriched by his extensive knowledge of European intellectual debates and his particular interest in France...If you are interested in the links between medicine and literature, if you are a student of gender or of mental health...you simply must buy this book. -- Pauline M. Prior Times Higher Education 20081211 Micale has done more than tell a good story... What Micale has accomplished is a tour de force of medical, cultural, and psychological detective work. In his hands, the three-thousand-year refusal of the medical world to acknowledge the existence of hysteria in any but females is proven to have a perfectly understandable psychoanalytic basis, but it has taken a scholar of wide-ranging intellectual background and enormous perspicacity to build, era by era, to its discovery and the construction of his impressively supported thesis. He has provided a model for other scholars to follow, not least in demonstrating by example that a historian of medicine must be also a historian of culture. -- Sherwin B. Nuland New Republic 20090415

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