It was in the seventeenth century (1618) that a French physician, Charles
Lepois (Carolus Piso), physician to Henry II, trusting, as he said, to
experience and reason, overthrew at one stroke the doctrine of hysteria
that had ruled almost unquestioned for two thousand years, and showed that
the malady occurred at all ages and in both sexes, that its seat was not
in the womb, but in the brain, and that it must be considered a nervous
disease.[258] So revolutionary a doctrine could not fail to meet with
violent opposition, but it was confirmed by Willis, and in 1681, we owe to
the genius of Sydenham a picture of hysteria which for lucidity,
precision, and comprehensiveness has only been excelled in our own times.
It was not possible any longer to maintain the womb theory of Hippocrates
in its crude form, but in modified forms, and especially with the object
of preserving the connection which many observers continued to find
between hysteria and the sexual emotions, it still found supporters in the
eighteenth and even the nineteenth centuries. James, in the middle of the
eighteenth century, returned to the classical view, and in his _Dictionary
of Medicine_ maintained that the womb is the seat of hysteria. Louyer
Villermay in 1816 asserted that the most frequent causes of hysteria are
deprivation of the pleasures of love, griefs connected with this passion,
and disorders of menstruation.
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