Words

Hysteria

from Greek hystera, "womb"
Uncontrollable emotion or panic, often collective.
Documented

The wandering womb

Greek and Roman physicians believed the womb could move around the female body causing illness. Hystera gave us hysteria, a diagnosis applied almost exclusively to women into the 19th century.

Assessment: Documented in Hippocratic texts and centuries of medical writing.
Stories

The animal the Greeks hunted inside women

Plato, in the Timaeus, describes the womb as a living creature that longs to bear children; denied, it roams the body in anger, blocking the breath and causing every kind of distress. And the Greeks inherited the hunt: the Kahun papyrus, a thousand years before Hippocrates, already prescribes fumigations to drive the wandering womb back to its seat, sweet smoke below to lure it, foul smoke above to chase it. For two thousand years, medicine's answer to distressed women was to smoke out an animal that did not exist.

Assessment: The Timaeus passage and the Kahun papyrus are documented texts. The better-known tale people now repeat, Victorian doctors and the vibrator, is a 20th-century embellishment on this older, stranger history.
Interesting claims

A demonology in medical dress

The claim that hysteria was never medicine at all: the wandering womb was a demon theory with Greek vocabulary, and the treatments, from fumigations to restraint, were exorcisms with better branding. On this reading, the word encodes the oldest technology for pathologizing women.

Assessment: The stronger half of this claim is mainstream scholarship now: the diagnosis policed women's behavior for centuries. The demonology framing is the interesting exaggeration. The word's history is damning enough without it.
Sources and further reading
  1. Hippocratic corpus, Diseases of Women, the wandering womb
  2. Plato, Timaeus 91b-c, the womb as a restless animal
  3. Kahun gynaecological papyrus, c. 1850 BCE
Worth asking

Which of today's medical terms will future centuries read as evidence of our blind spots?

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GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+