Of recent years, however, such views usually aroused violent antagonism.
The main current of opinion was with Briquet (1859), who, treating the
matter with considerable ability and a wide induction of facts,
indignantly repelled the idea that there is any connection between
hysteria and the sexual facts of life, physical or psychic. As he himself
admitted, Briquet was moved to deny a sexual causation of hysteria by the
thought that such an origin would be degrading for women ("_a quelque
chose de degradant pour les femmes_").
It was, however, the genius of Charcot, and the influence of his able
pupils, which finally secured the overthrow of the sexual theory of
hysteria. Charcot emphatically anathematized the visceral origin of
hysteria; he declared that it is a psychic disorder, and to leave no
loop-hole of escape for those who maintained a sexual causation he
asserted that there are no varieties of hysteria, that the disease is one
and indivisible. Charcot recognized no primordial cause of hysteria beyond
heredity, which here plays a more important part than in any other
neuropathic condition. Such heredity is either direct or more occasionally
by transformation, any deviation of nutrition found in the ancestors
(gout, diabetes, arthritis) being a possible cause of hysteria in the
descendants. "We do not know anything about the nature of hysteria,"
Charcot wrote in 1892; "we must make it objective in order to recognize
it.
Pages:
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393