Encountering hysteria: doctors' and patients' perspectives on hysteria in Denmark, 1875-1918

The history of hysteria stretches over several millennia and contains a plethora of different understandings and interpretations. This paper focuses on a central part of its Danish history, from the last decades of the nineteenth-century 'age of nervousness' until the end of World War I. It is argued that the understanding and negotiation of hysteria and its explanations took place in a complex interaction between doctors and their patients. Whereas the psychiatrists during this period moved towards an understanding of hysteria as a functional disorder, the patients, of whom approximately one-third were male, maintained that their illness was of somatic origin, and closely related to social, economic and working conditions.