DOCTORS no longer diagnose people with hysteria. Its symptoms still exist, but now the paralysis and epileptic-like fits that once marked the disease are taken to be signs of modern ailments such as depression or fatigue. So argues Asti Hustvedt in Medical Muses, an engaging book which follows the lives of three hysteric women treated at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, France, between 1870 and 1890.
With infectious curiosity, Hustvedt writes of medicine’s inadequacies at a time when psychological problems were not thought to manifest as physical symptoms. Though doctors could find no physical cause, she makes the…
