Hystera

now it is widely accepted that not a single text of the Hippocratic corpus can be attributed with any certainty to the Father of Medicine
Eliot Slater, questioning the value of the diagnosis in our own times, has argued that "the justification for accepting 'hysteria' as a syndrome is based entirely on tradition and lacks evidential support
If a fresh reading of the ancient texts shows thattheir use by the tradition is unwarranted, this will have important implications for the history of hysteria in general.
Since the publication of Veith's book, these points have achieved canonical status
the text claimed by Veith as the inaugural moment of hysteria, "the thirty-fifth aphorism."
there is no "thirty-fifth aphorism." A. Rousselle[11] has criticized Veith for reading backcontemporary ideas into antiquity, but the problem is greater than this would suggest; Veith puts too great a trust in poor secondary sources. What she is referring to here is, in fact, Aphorisms 5.35 (L4.544), which does not use the term "hysteria" at all; instead, using the plural form hysterika , it begins Gynaiki hypo hysterikon enochloumenei , and it may be translated as: "In a woman suffering fromhysterika , or having a difficult labor, a sneeze is a good thing."
Hysterika , he wrote in his commentary on the Aphorisms , could refer to all diseases of the womb[12] or to only a particular condition called hysterike pnix (best translated "suffocation of the womb"), described by a number of post-Hippocratic writers and which will be discussed at length below, or to problems with theafterbirth, also known as ta hystera . He favors setting the aphorism in the context of hysterike pnix , for the following reasons. First, hysterika cannot refer to the afterbirth, because hystera and hysterika are not the same word. Second, it cannot refer to all diseases of the womb, because Hippocrates says that it is helped by sneezing. Clearly, not all diseases of the womb are helped by sneezing and,since Hippocrates cannot be wrong, Galen concludes that the passage must refer to hysterike pnix .
The argument that not all such diseases are helped by sneezing does not necessarily apply to pre-Galenic medicine

The idea that it is in the Hippocratic corpus that hysteria is not only described but also given its name can be traced back beyond her to the Emile Littré edition of 1839-61, thegynecological volumes of which—numbered 7 and 8—appeared in 1851-53
The origin and process of transmission of the error in translation should now be plain. Littré read the Hippocratic corpus in the context of the mid-nineteenth century, in which hysteria was a recognized condition of debated etiology; he expected to find hysteria in the text, duly found it, and drew it out in the headings he wrotefor the various sections. Robb translated into English the passages headed by Littré as "Hysteria," and subsequent readers of the Hippocratic corpus have accepted the categories imposed by Littré on his material. Taking only the Aphorisms passage, Littré translates "Chez une femme attaquée d'hystérie. . ." while Francis Adams gives "Sneezing occurring in a woman with hysterics," and J. Chadwickand W. N. Mann have "When a woman is afflicted with hysteria." In giving "When a woman suffers from hysteria. . ." Veith is following the widely available Loeb translation.
Thus the diagnosis of hysteria is one made not by the ancient authors of the texts, but rather by the nineteenth-century translator of the Hippocratic corpus.
At this point it would be possible to argue that this is of onlyminor importance;
A concept may exist even if it is not named;
our task is only to find the sections in the texts which provide a more or less accurate match with our chosen clinical picture. This task, however, is complicated by the belief that hysteria, like chlorosis, is a disorder that apparently disappeared in our own century
Is it a disease at all?[
If hysteria is constant, found...