Nineteenth-century authority on hysteria Charles Leségue claimed that because its symptoms were too diverse and erratic, “the definition of hysteria has never been given and never will be.” Indeed, for centuries, the history of the condition, as historian Mark S. Micale puts it, was “less linear than it is cyclical”: one of the oldest surviving medical documents, from Egypt around 1900 BC, records bizarre behavioral symptoms in adult women believed to have been caused by movement of the uterus. This ancient Egyptian belief was adopted by classical Greek medical theorists of hysteria, who built connections between hysteria and an unsatisfactory sexual life. Ancient Roman physicians continued to associate hysteria with the female reproductive system, even if they did not believe the womb itself moved around the body. While Greco-Roman medicine viewed hysteria as an organic disease, Christian civilization in the Latin West created a punitive association of hysteria with demonic possession and witchcraft. By the Renaissance—the peak of the witchcraft craze in Europe—scientific and humanitarian efforts were made to renaturalize hysteria as a medical pathology. The seventeenth century marked a major shift: French royal physician Charles Le Pois argued that the pathology of hysteria was not tied to the womb but to the mind—a theory seemingly corroborated by seventeenth-century autopsies on hysterical patients that did not reveal any uterine abnormalities. Gynecological and demonological theories waned in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in favor of a neurological model of the disease, though some physicians situated hysteria in the heart and pulmonary vessels or stomach. British clinician Thomas Sydenham formulated what could be called the first neuropsychological model of the disease in 1681–82, asserting that the condition emerged from an imbalance in animal spirits between body and mind, typically from sudden intense emotional experiences like fury, fear, love, and despair. While Sydenham believed women to be more predisposed to hysteria due to a more delicate nervous system, he also described a similar condition in males. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the disease was re-eroticized: in a reversal of Hippocratic teachings, which associated hysteria with sexual deprivation, it was now blamed on sexual overindulgence. For the first half of the 1800s, French asylum doctors continued to disagree over the anatomical origin of the condition, and after the process of ovulation was discovered in the 1840s, a new “ovarian theory” remained prominent for the remainder of the century. Charcot, who was known as the “father of neurology,” developed a broad model of hysteria as a disorder of the central nervous system during his time at the Salpêtrière from 1878 to 1893. Charcot sought, in some sense, to dignify the diagnosis of hysteria by providing a biological basis for the disease.

In 1885–86, Sigmund Freud studied at the hospital with Charcot after discussing the famous hysteria case of “Anna O.” (1880–82) with the internist who treated her, Josef Breuer. While Anna was in a hypnotized state, Breuer was able to trace her hysterical symptoms (cough, paralysis of extremities on the right side of her body, visual disturbances, neuralgia, hallucinations, and disordered eating, among others) back to past incidents that had caused emotional disturbances. After Breuer helped Anna bring to light the memory causing the psychic conflict, the correlating symptoms disappeared. In essence, Freud’s development of the practice of psychoanalysis began as a theory of hysteria in contrast to Charcot’s search for a biological explanation for the disease. Today, hysteria is primarily of interest to psychoanalytic, literary, and feminist theorists. No medical consensus has been reached on what hysteria is, why it is, where it is, or even if it is in the body. Yet, the condition continues to haunt contemporary diagnostic practice and the patients who must yield to it.

The idea that the body expresses itself in or through illness, or that illness can be caused by the mind, continues to haunt the language available to describe the experience of symptoms. When I fell ill, no one really called ballet girls “anorexic”—though it was obvious that many of us barely ate, for reasons both somatic and psychological, or simply to be seen more. It would have been like pathologizing the atmosphere. To most people around me, I was simply small, dramatic, and usually sick. In some sense, the knowledge was always there—that the thing that was wrong with me might have a name, that it might be wrong with other people, too. What was the point? I was skeptical of tidy diagnostic categorization even as I sought it. The issue is not that diagnostic categories are fake—or that “psychological” as opposed to “somatic” suffering is somehow less real—but that they are means to the end of accessing care, not ends in themselves. I didn’t care what the name for my collection of symptoms might be, but I really, desperately wanted to stop fainting, to keep food down, to maintain a normal body temperature. I would come to think of the diagnostic process as a devil’s bargain the sick must make with the market in order to receive the care necessary to survive.

I had internalized the idea that dance or medicine could say something about the body without words. Yet in silence, my body could be read as anything, optimal or pathological. How was I to come up with a way to interpret bodily semiology when physicians could not? In childhood, my illness was treated as a metaphor. I simply felt too much. I sounded crazy to civilians: a young woman who spoke about her body as though it were her essential stake in the world, an entity capable of moods entirely separate from her own. Hysteric. Unable to control herself. They were correct about that much.

Anecdotes I’ve forgotten about for years return as revelations: when I was no older than four, a cousin recounted to me how nauseated some rides at an amusement park made her feel. Nauseated. I hadn’t heard the word before. I told my mother I learned a word to describe the stomach feeling I was always telling her I had. I can imagine her frustration that her child’s states of distress were gaining articulatory power—my mother dislikes dramatic people—but, at the time, her exasperation confused me. Why wouldn’t we want to know the word to describe what was wrong with us? I didn’t yet understand that, just because something has a name doesn’t mean people believe it’s real—or that even conditions deemed to be real could be even less treatable than those dismissed as being “all in your head.” And another thing: a family member noticed that I was always getting sick before “something important”—after travel, after sessions of particularly strenuous exercise. In hindsight: triggers of inflammation. As an adult, my adolescent overexertion would be granted the kind of explanatory capacity so often attributed to a poor diet or smoking cigarettes. Even a purely physicalist approach to interpreting disease grasps at individual blame; and they were my choices, after all. My parents were the farthest thing from stage parents. My mother encouraged my brother and me to be “well rounded” and chauffeured us to any activities our hearts desired; my father had hobbies; we took family vacations each summer. If I had oriented myself toward growing into a civilian more capable of harnessing the power of positive thinking, as they might have preferred, would my illness or the despondency I feel toward it look any different today?