While in the Hippocratic texts a wide range of women were susceptible – including in particular the childless – Galen in the 2nd century omitted the childless and saw the most vulnerable group as "widows, and particularly those who previously menstruated regularly, had been pregnant and were eager to have intercourse, but were now deprived of all this" ( On the Affected Parts, 6.5). The concept of a pathological "wandering womb" was later viewed as the source of the term hysteria, which stems from the Greek cognate of uterus, ὑστέρα ( hystera), although the word hysteria does not feature in ancient Greek medicine: 'the noun is not used in this period'. The standard cure for this "hysterical suffocation" was scent therapy, in which good smells were placed under a woman's genitals and bad odors at the nose, while sneezing could be also induced to drive the uterus back to its correct place. Timaeus also argued that the uterus is "sad and unfortunate" when it does not join with a male or bear child. Aretaeus of Cappadocia described the uterus as "an animal within an animal" (less emotively, "a living thing inside a living thing"), which causes symptoms by wandering around a woman's body putting pressure on other organs. Plato's dialogue Timaeus compares a woman's uterus to a living creature that wanders throughout a woman's body, "blocking passages, obstructing breathing, and causing disease". In ancient Greece, wandering womb was described in the gynecological treatise of the Hippocratic Corpus, "Diseases of Women", which dates back to the 5th and 4th centuries BC. In this culture, the womb was thought capable of affecting much of the rest of the body, but "there is no warrant for the fanciful view that the ancient Egyptians believed that a variety of bodily complaints were due to an animate, wandering womb". Dating back to 1900 BC in ancient Egypt, the first descriptions of hysteria within the female body were found recorded on the Kahun Papyri. The history of hysteria can be traced to ancient times. In extreme cases, the woman may have been forced to enter an insane asylum or to have undergone surgical hysterectomy. Even though it was categorized as a disease, hysteria's symptoms were synonymous with normal functioning female sexuality. In Western medicine, hysteria was considered both common and chronic among women. Its diagnosis and treatment were routine for hundreds of years in Western Europe. It is no longer recognized by medical authorities as a medical disorder. Women with hysteria under the effects of hypnosisįemale hysteria was once a common medical diagnosis for women, which was described as exhibiting a wide array of symptoms, including anxiety, shortness of breath, fainting, nervousness, sexual desire, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, (paradoxically) sexually forward behaviour, and a "tendency to cause trouble for others".
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