For centuries, women were told their pain came from their wombs.
Long before mental health was understood scientifically, medicine had an explanation for almost every physical or emotional problem a woman experienced: hysteria.
It was not a disease in the modern sense. It was a diagnosis built on misunderstanding, cultural prejudice and profound ignorance about women’s bodies.
Anxiety, grief, anger, chronic pain, sexual desire -- or even simply refusing to conform to society’s expectations -- could all be dismissed under a single label.
For nearly two thousand years, that label shaped how women were treated by doctors, religious authorities and society alike. It justified bizarre treatments, reinforced stereotypes and delayed scientific understanding of women’s health.
The story of hysteria is therefore not simply the story of a forgotten medical diagnosis. It is the story of how gender bias became embedded in medicine.
The idea dates back to ancient Greece.
Physicians such as Hippocrates and Aretaeus of Cappadocia believed the uterus could wander around a woman’s body, triggering physical and emotional disturbances. Plato went even further, describing the uterus as an unhappy organ that became “sad” if a woman neither married nor bore children.
These ideas reflected a worldview in which women’s bodies were viewed primarily through reproduction rather than health.
As Europe entered the Middle Ages, medical knowledge became intertwined with religious belief. Women displaying unusual behaviour were increasingly seen not as patients but as victims of demonic possession or witchcraft.
Instead of receiving medical treatment, many underwent prayers, exorcisms and religious rituals.
One of the best-known examples was the “biting nuns” phenomenon reported in several European convents, where groups of nuns suddenly began biting one another and exhibiting strange behaviour.
Rather than searching for medical explanations, church authorities largely interpreted the incidents as evidence of demonic possession.
By the nineteenth century, hysteria had become one of the most common diagnoses given to women.
Its symptoms were astonishingly broad. Abdominal pain, chest discomfort, anxiety, insomnia, excessive emotion, changes in sexual desire, loss of appetite or simply behaviour considered “unladylike” could all be attributed to hysteria. In many cases, women were effectively diagnosed for failing to conform to society’s expectations.
The treatments were no less extraordinary.
Doctors prescribed bed rest, bland diets and herbal concoctions. Earlier practices attempted to “reposition” the uterus through physical manipulation or by hanging women upside down. None addressed the real causes of illness because the diagnosis itself rested on flawed assumptions.
By the late nineteenth century, medicine slowly began abandoning those beliefs.
French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot argued that hysteria was a neurological condition rather than a disease of the uterus.
Later, Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria (1895) shifted attention toward psychological trauma and emotional distress. Although Freud helped move the conversation beyond anatomy, many of his own ideas about women remained shaped by the biases of his time.
Eventually, hysteria disappeared from medical textbooks, replaced by diagnoses such as conversion disorder and somatic symptom disorder.
Yet the attitudes that sustained it have proved harder to erase.
Research continues to show that women are more likely than men to have their pain underestimated or their symptoms dismissed.
A study published in Academic Emergency Medicine found that women arriving at emergency departments with severe abdominal pain waited significantly longer for treatment than men with comparable symptoms.
In countries such as Bangladesh, gender inequality continues to delay diagnosis and treatment for conditions including breast and cervical cancer. Cultural expectations, financial dependence and unequal access to healthcare still shape women’s medical experiences long after hysteria disappeared as a diagnosis.
Medicine has advanced enormously since the days of the “wandering womb.” But the history of hysteria serves as a reminder that medicine is never shaped by science alone. It is also shaped by the assumptions of its time.
And when those assumptions are rooted in ignorance, it can take centuries before patients are finally believed.
