LAUSR

Feminist studies of medicine in history, rhetoric, and other humanities disciplines have noted that male medical professionals disproportionately focused their gaze on women’s bodies yet argued that the array of symptoms women described were mysterious, if not impossible for them to understand. The diagnosis of “hysteria” was used by medicine for centuries to explain almost every condition that ailed women. While the diagnosis largely disappeared in the beginning of the twentieth century, the obsession over women’s “mysterious bodies” continues. This centuries-long history is the focus of Amy Koerber’s From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History. Her central contention is that hormones replaced hysteria as an explanation for women’s bodies and medical conditions: