From paralysis to fatigue : a history of psychosomatic illness in the modern era
This fascinating history of psychosomatic disorders shows how patients throughout the centuries have produced symptoms in tandem with the cultural shifts of the larger society. Newly popularized diseases such as "chronic fatigue syndrome" and "total allergy syndrome" are only the most recent examples of patients complaining of ailments that express the truths about the culture in which they live
Print Book, English, c1992
Free Press ; Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan Canada ; New York : Maxwell Macmillan International, New York, c1992
History
xii, 419 p.
9780029286654, 0029286654
1237243580
1. Doctors and patients at the outset. Psychogenic symptoms
The symptom pool
An eighteenth-century symptom census
The doctor's story begins
Three eighteenth-century views on mind-body relations
Irritation and the reflex arc. 2. Spinal irritation. The diagnosis crystallizes
Spinal irritation appears in the patients' world
Center and periphery. 3. Reflex theory and the history of internal sensation. Applying reflex doctrine to patients
The triumph of reflex theory
Reflexes from the sex organs
The medicalizing of women's internal sensations
The last gasp of reflex theory: the nose. 4. Gynecological surgery and the desire for an operation. The pelvic organs as a supposed cause of insanity
Gynecological surgery to cure nervous and mental illness
Gynecology in the hands of psychiatrists
Clitoridectomy
The desire for surgery as a psychosomatic symptom
Sexual surgery on males. 5. Motor hysteria. Hysterical fits
The rise of hysterical paralysis
A picture of paralysis
Triggering paralysis
Male hysteria
The family psychodrama
The doctors' dislike of hysterical paralysis. 6. Dissociation. Spontaneous somnambulism and catalepsy
The first wave of hypnosis
Hypnotic catalepsy
Induced somnambulism
The second wave of hypnosis
"Permanently benumbed" and the climate of suggestion
Multiple personality disorder. 7. Charcot's Hysteria. Charcot's life
Charcot's Doctrine of Hysteria
The hospital as circus
The diffusion of "la grande hysterie"
A turn toward the psychological?
The disappearance of Charcot's Hysteria. 8. The doctors change paradigms: central nervous disease. The destruction of the reflex paradigm
The rise of central nervous theories of psychosis and neurosis
Nerve doctors for nervous diseases
Neurasthenia. 9. Doctors, patients, and the psychological paradigm. Forerunners of the psychological paradigm
The psychological paradigm becomes a major competitor
Patients' medical therapy is physicians' psychotherapy
The psychoanalysts hijack psychotherapy
Patients reject the psychological paradigm. 10. The patients' paradigm changes. The decline of motor hysteria
The paradigm shift on Harley Street
Chronic fatigue
Psychogenic pain. 11. Somatization at the end of the twentieth century. A new sensitivity to pain
Fatigue
Fixed illness belief
The epidemic of chronic fatigue
The media and the loss of medical authority
Somatization and postmodern life
English