Hysteria was a diagnosis for two thousand years

The word comes from the Greek for uterus. The theory, taken seriously from Hippocrates until the twentieth century, was that the womb wandered around the body causing symptoms wherever it went. In practice the diagnosis absorbed anxiety, insomnia, irritability, sexual desire, lack of sexual desire, and disagreeing with one’s husband.

It stayed in the American Psychiatric Association’s manual until 1952. The popular story that Victorian doctors routinely treated it by inducing orgasm, and invented the vibrator to save their wrists, is itself a modern myth — historians who went back to the primary sources in 2018 found the evidence for it did not hold up.