Around the world, ceremonies, public art installations, concerts, lectures, and educational events are commemorating the fallen of the First World […]
Seeking Health and Doing Harm: Gender Bias, Medical Sexism, and Women’s Encounters with Modern Medicine
A 2011 survey completed by faculty at forty-four medical schools in the United States and Canada indicated that 70% of […]
Golden Girls, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and the Legacies of Hysteria
On September 23, 1989, the fifth season of Golden Girls opened with a two-episode arc entitled “Sick and Tired.”1 The […]
Finding Satisfaction: A Review of Hysteria
Having researched and delivered conference papers on the topic, the medical historian in me danced a little jig when I heard Sony Pictures Classics was releasing a movie called “Hysteria.” I did, however, enter the theater with some reservations. Motion picture portrayals are notorious for being historically inaccurate, and if films are true to history, those not in the field tend to find it a little, well, boring. (That is unless Werner Herzog is narrating it with his dry but inadvertently humorous observations.) Thankfully, the $7.50 spent on a matinee wasn’t a waste at all. Just about anyone- unless you are akin to the Victorian “social purist” Anthony Comstock- can walk away from this movie feeling quite satisfied.