This is rather long, sorry:
Mark Micale’s Hysterical Men: the Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (2008) is a panoramic survey of the history of male hysteria, stretching from c.1900 BC to c.1900 AD. The very existence of this book demonstrates how far histories of psychiatry and masculinity have come in only a few short years. In 1995, when Micale’s magisterial historiographical survey of writings on hysteria, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and its Interpretations was published, only a handful of pages could be devoted to male hysteria because so little had been written on the topic. Much of the short discussion centred on Micale’s own research and Showalter’s essays on shell shock, although Micale could also point to recent research on literary male nervousness and was sanguine that future scholarship would be fruitful.(13) In the intervening years, awareness of the extent to which the construction of mental illness is a gendered process has grown, yet hysteria has continued to be identified as a female malady. Hysterical Men therefore fills a noticeable gap in the literature, and although it stops short of 1914, it is a history with important consequences for understandings of shell shock.
Between writing Approaching Hysteria and Hysterical Men, Micale co-edited one of the most important collections of historical essays on trauma in recent years, Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930.(14) The other editor of this essential collection, Paul Lerner, is also an expert on male hysteria, although to date the chronological and geographical scope of his studies has been somewhat narrower. Lerner’s Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930, first published in 2003, has recently been reprinted in paperback form. It therefore formed part of the wave of works on shell shock in the early 2000s, and the reprint attests to the continued appeal of the topic. In the more affordable format this excellent book, still the only English language monograph on shell shock in Germany, will hopefully reach the wider audience it deserves.
The studies of Micale and Lerner both begin with, and largely focus on, hysteria as a formal medical diagnosis. Each author demonstrates that medical concepts of hysteria were not objective scientific descriptions of natural phenomena, but were rather shaped by prevailing social and cultural mores, and in some times and places, driven by powerful political and economic imperatives. Both also show that medicine has never been able to contain hysteria; it has always also existed as metaphor and cultural trope. This is medical history in its most generous dimensions, firmly embedding notions of physical and psychological health and illness in the broader historical context, and therefore encompassing not only the relations of doctors to the state or to their patients, but also such diverse topics as the formation of class and gender identities and the interplay of medicine, literature, and art
But you did say you would love to see an example.
