Jette Møllerhøj:
Hysteria Before Freud - on the Construction of Hysteria and Hysterics in "the Century of Nervousness"

This article examins the concept of hysteria in Denmark between 1875 and 1918 from the points of view of both doctors and patients. The notion of hysteria and its origins were extremely complex and detailed bcause the diagnosis embraced somatic and functional disturbance in the nervous system as well as pathological behaviour and conduct, i.e. the moral character of male and female hysterics. The psychiatrists did not agree on whether to percieve hysteria as a nervouse disease, a mental illness or a neurosis, and the significance of somatic versus non-somatic causal relations remained unsettled. Due to this schicm and the efforts to maintain psychiatric as a scientific branch of medicine, Freud only played a minor part in the Danish perception of hysteria. Seen from the patients' point of view, hysteria was a physical reaction to enervating social, financiel and labour conditions. Examples of "doctorshopping" illustrates that the patients were not necessarily passive victims of labelling or social control, but they themselves felt nervous and ill and went to see a doctor in order to obtain a diagnosis.