It’s 2,500 words essay. Please use most of the recommended readings below:
The concept of trauma as we know it is a product of the twentieth century. This
session discusses the kinds of medical conditions that doctors were likely to diagnose
in the nineteenth century, such as the ‘female malady’ of hysteria and ‘railway spine’,
relating them to modernity and the gender and class assumptions of the time.
A. Scull, Hysteria: the Biography, 2009
L. Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from
1800, 2009
E. Showalter, The Female Malady. Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980,
1987
J. Oppenheim, “Shattered nerves”: doctors, patients, and depression in Victorian
England, 1991
M. Micale, Hysterical men: the hidden history of male nervous illness, 2008
Class:
S. Freud, ‘Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria’
