/hɪˈstɪəriə/
[noun] A state of extreme and uncontrolled emotion, such as fear, excitement, or panic, often affecting a group of people at the same time. In older medicine, it was wrongly used to describe a mental illness believed to affect only women.
The word 'hysteria' literally means 'of the womb' — doctors once blamed the uterus for all female emotional distress.
The story of hysteria begins in the ancient Greek world, where physicians believed that a woman's womb was capable of wandering freely around her body. The Greek word for womb was 'hystera' (ὑστέρα), and from this came 'hysterikos' (ὑστερικός), meaning 'of or belonging to the womb.' When a woman experienced fits of emotion, fainting, or erratic behaviour, ancient doctors — Hippocrates among them — concluded that her uterus had migrated upward and was pressing on vital organs. The remedy, they suggested, was often marriage or pregnancy, which would, in theory, keep the womb contentedly in place.
This extraordinary medical belief was not a brief curiosity. It persisted and was absorbed into Roman medicine, carried forward by Galen in the 2nd century AD, and later transmitted through medieval Islamic scholars and into European university medicine. The Latin form 'hystericus' sat comfortably within medical texts for centuries, referring to convulsions and emotional disturbances thought to originate in the female reproductive system. The womb, in the medical imagination of the ancient and medieval worlds, was a troublesome, almost semi-independent creature living inside women.
The word entered English in its modern clinical form — 'hysteria' — in the early 19th century, drawn directly from New Latin medical terminology. Before that, English writers had used the adjective 'hysterical' from around the 1650s, always tied to its bodily explanation. The noun form solidified just as European psychiatry was attempting to become a proper science. Ironically, the word gained its widest medical use precisely at a moment when doctors like Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris were putting 'hysterical' patients on public display, and when the young Sigmund Freud began studying the condition — work that would eventually help dismantle the very diagnosis itself.
What makes the word's history so unsettling is how long the gendered assumption survived. For most of its medical life, hysteria was by definition a female condition. A man could not, technically speaking, suffer from it — he had no womb. This did not stop male patients showing identical symptoms, of course, but those cases were named differently or explained away. It was only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, partly because of the shell-shocked soldiers of the First World War, that medicine was forced to accept that extreme emotional disturbance had nothing to do with female anatomy.
In the 20th century, hysteria gradually disappeared from formal psychiatric diagnosis. The American Psychiatric Association removed it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1980, replacing it with more precise and gender-neutral terms. But the word refused to die in everyday language. Today, 'hysteria' and 'hysterical' are used to describe any episode of mass panic, wild excitement, or uncontrolled laughter — the womb entirely forgotten. 'Mass hysteria' describes collective panics from medieval dancing plagues to modern social media frenzies. The word has travelled from an anatomical theory that was entirely wrong to a cultural description that everyone understands, carrying its ancient prejudice quietly inside it, like a stowaway that nobody ever checked for.