U

UTERUS

There are some letters in the dictionary that are more Latinate than others. In consequence, u, v and, to an extent, o are largely dominated by medical terminology (because doctors, bless ’em, love a bit of Caecilius est in horto).

In Utero

Sexy tudors. Henry VIII, after Holbein.

Uterus derives from a Latin homonym meaning ‘womb’ or ‘belly’, with reference to the proto-Indo European udero (= ‘abdomen’), and, possibly, a Slavic usage, vedro, meaning ‘bucket’. Much like the ‘bucket’ (and indeed the shape of the letter u with which the word commences), the first sense of uterus is as a vessel – ‘the organ in which the young are conceived, developed and protected till birth; the female organ of gestation; the womb’.

Much has been made of this ‘protective’ element – it has been frequently observed that the ‘fetal’ position babies adopt to fill the uterus endures into adulthood as a comforting or even instinctual reaction to anxiety, pain, distress or cold – a kind of retrospective communion with the mother’s body. This sort of thing, it seems, is not above a bit of marketing, and the uterus is often invoked as a place of calm, darkness and peace.

Opposed to this, we have the sort of ambiguity nowhere better demonstrated than through tanks. (yes, tanks). The Mark I tank, the world’s first combat tank, was renamed from ‘Big Willie’ to ‘Mother’ (…), and its successors were colloquially dubbed ‘Mother’ throughout both world wars. The reasons are obvious: the inside of a tank is small, hot and protective. Childlike, a crew could be forgiven for considering themselves invincible within it – yet once the fuel tank is hit, the men inside suffer a hideous, incestuous death, incinerated by their own machine. This sort of thing runs right the way through conceptions of the mother’s body, particularly in psychoanalysis, which is never tired of exposing the deeply conflictual nature of many mother-child relationships, and with mapping those onto the cisgendered female body – we might think particularly of Melanie Klein’s famous ‘good breast’ and ‘bad breast’. If we’re going there.

HOWEVER. BACK TO THE RENAISSANCE. In its early incarnations in English this ‘womb’ is rarely so clearly gendered (as you may remember, King Lear thinks he has one), and, true to its ambiguous etymology, early modern minds frequently considered the uterus to be a generic bodily pouch. Thus it was often conflated with the gender-neutral belly (ah, Isidore of Seville), and in this form it was thought to be proof of the body’s retentive faculties. So even when considered as a specifically reproductive organ, the thinking went, the uterus still resembles the digestive system in how long it takes to do its business, since it creates infants over a leisurely period of nine months. While I doubt it takes quite that long for your morning Alpen, digestion is certainly something of a gradual process – consider, if you will, the hangover.

Horn of Plenty

If you remember the Alphabet post on ovary (to which this is in many ways a companion), you may also remember that until the seventeenth century sex organs were considered to have analogues across the genders (penis = vagina, labia = foreskin and uterus = scrotum). Along with its reproductive and sack-like qualities – I am reminded of the beautifully named ‘Mermaid’s Purses‘ – in this model the uterus also matches the scrotum in its creative properties. After all, reproduction is six of one and half-a-dozen of the other.

But this was not just something tossed around in the Renaissance lab and subsequently ignored: the scrotum-uterus comparison actually spread into what we might consider a bizarre arena – fashion. I am, of course, talking about the codpiece, ‘a bagged appendage to the front of the breeches; often conspicuous’. This was a sartorial fave of Henry VIII (above, right), who clearly took his outfits very seriously – but I note that sexy Jonathan Rhys Meyers has avoided the sexy codpiece throughout the BBC’s Sexy Tudors. Too sexy?

Originally a modesty device to get round the, ahem, ‘shortcomings’ of the hose, this strange appendage quickly grew to a size that redefined it as a disturbing kind of hyper-masculine power-dressing. Yet the word derives from the Old English codd (+ piece), which came to mean ‘testicles’ in early Medieval times (quite possibly because of exactly this phenomenon) but originally meant simply ‘a bag, pouch or husk’. Indeed, the codpiece was frequently dubbed a belly, and, through fun with synonyms, the womb could become a cod: my good friend Thomas Laqueur highlights the Pardoner’s exclamation ‘O wombe! O bely! O stynkyng cod!’, in the Canterbury Tales, and also points out that the codpiece quickly started to resemble…(I like this bit)… ‘a finely embroidered and bejewelled horn of plenty’.

Horn.

So it seems that, while Henry VII might not thank you for it, we could observe that this most macho of garments is in fact drawing attention to the womb-like, generative, and retentive properties of what lurks within (which, of course, it also helped protect – gender-ambiguous Russian dolls, anyone?). Indeed, glancing at a couple of examples in portraiture, a lot of these men look rather like they have an artificially constructed uterus poised over their genitalia (love how he’s pointing, just in case we miss it). Less Blackadder, more… actually, I don’t know what that is.

Bag for Life

But, of course, eventually someone had to seize on anatomical differences to posit a definition of gender, and thus it that (around 1615) the uterus started to be considered something exclusively female – as regular readers will be aware, this was a chain that began with independent naming of the organ in question and eventually reached the pitches of hysteria in the nineteenth century. There is also a strange quasi-legal term, uterine, apparently first spotted in the seventeenth century but not dictionary-cited until 1816, meaning ‘related through the mother’. Thus, ‘the property devolves to his brothers or uterine uncles’, with the body of the mother here serving a dynastic link, since all these uncles can be proved to have shared a uterus. They could even be half-brothers, since an alternative meaning for uterine is ‘having the same mother, but not the same father’. Working on a similar premise, if you are particularly toolish, and your sister has a son, you would (in pre-paternity test times) have been best off leaving your money to your nephew: his link to you is purely uterine, unlike your link to your son, who could be anyone’s spawn.

As we draw near the end of the Alphabet series, threads begin to resolve themselves. Uterus has been the final word of three (hysteria and ovary were the other two) all of which address the issue of mapping the cisgendered female body. Following the three, we have seen a model of sex and gender that does not conform with what many experience as the current status quo. Conversely, the distinction between genders does not seem to have been primarily based on the body until the nineteenth century (or even later). Thus, we have seen women turning into men with comparatively little contemporary comment, the female orgasm (and in some cases her entire sexual appetite) vanish from the everyday realities of heterosexual sex, and now, and perhaps most bizarrely, an epidemic of hyper-masculine men apparently walking around with giant uteri affixed over their genitalia. (Yes, I did just say ‘uteri’). Perhaps this is worth thinking about…

NEXT WEEK: V is for Vitriol

“She gave her aid to all in need
To hungry, sick and cold
Open hand and heart, ready to give
Kind words, and acts, and gold.”

– Punch Magazine

The only known photograph of Mary, c.1873.

Mary Jane Seacole is perhaps somewhat better known than most of those appearing in this series, having been included in Britain’s National Curriculum and featured on postage stamps as part of the National Portrait Gallery’s 150^th anniversary. Despite this she stands as a perfect example of the sort of person we’re interested in here: one who went to extraordinary lengths to achieve their goals, facing risks and giving freely of their time and energy, yet without becoming a household name associated with awesomeness. In Seacole’s case this was primarily due to the fact that she’s been overshadowed in popular consciousness by the similarly impressive Florence Nightingale. So, let’s look back to the 19^th century and find out a little about the Crimean War’s other famous nurse.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1805, Seacole was exposed to medicine from an early age. Her mother was a ‘doctress’, using Caribbean herbal remedies to treat diseases – chiefly the yellow fever that was endemic in Jamaica at the time – and Seacole followed in her footsteps. Travels throughout the Caribbean and Central America gave her the chance to broaden her knowledge of herbal treatments, and even to perform an autopsy on a victim of cholera in Panama, an experience she described as “decidedly useful”.

Cholera, along with yellow fever, was one of the biggest sources of patients throughout Seacole’s career. An outbreak hit Kingston in 1850, killing over 30,000 Jamaican people, and Seacole played a role in stopping the death toll from rising higher still. She would battle a cholera epidemic again in 1851 whilst visiting Panama, and a yellow fever outbreak upon returning to Jamaica in 1853. During this time she also began treating people surgically as well as herbally, helping victims of knife and gunshot wounds. Whilst her obvious skills earned her a measure of respect, that respect was tinged with both racial and sexual prejudices, often depicting her as someone who was talented “for a woman,” or “for a non-white.” In her autobiography, she remembers an American delivering a speech at a dinner in Panama, who said of her that “if we could bleach her by any means we would […] and thus make her acceptable in any company as she deserves to be.” This attitude quite rightfully incensed her.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the last time Seacole faced issues as a result of discrimination based on her gender or race. The outbreak of the Crimean War brought with it a concurrent outbreak of disease, especially cholera. Disease was soon proving more lethal to troops by far than injury at the hands of the enemy, and word went out about the need for trained medics. Seacole, as we have established, was something of an expert on cholera by this point, and set sail for Britain. She arrived carrying letters of recommendation from Jamaican and Panamanian doctors, and offered her services to the British Army. She was denied an interview, as the British Army were not entirely keen on female medics at the time.

Conditions in the Crimea, however, forced them to reconsider, with public outcry following an exposure in The Times leading them to form a nursing corps, headed up by Florence Nightingale. Seacole applied to join this group and was again rejected. This time, she felt, the rejection was due to her race.

Having run into two different strands of prejudice and having had her services refused twice, did Seacole go home? Did she return to Kingston, where her work would be appreciated, and where her fairly successful business was located? Of course not. There were people that needed helping, and she was an expert in the skills that would help them.

Seacole travelled to Crimea using her own funds, presenting herself at Nightingale’s hospital in Scutari. Once more she was rejected. So she she did what any incredibly determined badass would do: she built her own hospital. She didn’t have proper building materials or the finances to acquire them, so she built the hospital just outside Sevastopol, using salvaged metal, driftwood and packing cases. Because when you’re awesome you don’t let a little thing like not having a hospital or anything but the most rudimentary of construction supplies stand in the way of helping those in need.

Seacole provided treatment for the sick during the mornings, travelling out to the battlefield later in the day to tend to the wounded. This was often done with the battle still raging on; she would treat injured soldiers from both sides whilst under fire. She reportedly asked no payment for her services from those who were too poor to pay, accepting money only from those who could spare it. Despite this, and continuous thefts of her hospital’s supplies, she prospered, becoming a well-known figure amongst the soldiers in Crimea, who called her “Mother Seacole.” When Sevastopol fell during the autumn of 1855 she was the first woman to set foot in the captured city, again bringing supplies and healing to both sides.

Mary's blue plaque, Soho, London. Image by Flickr user Simon Hariyott, shared under a Creative Commons licence.

But following the war, Seacole did not fare well. With the fighting over there was no more need for her hospital, and little profit to be made from selling off the supplies there. Hounded by creditors, she returned to England destitute, having given everything she had to provide care to people who needed it. In return, the public took care of her, with several prominent people donating to a fund for her, encouraged by a plea from Punch magazine.

Following her death in 1881 Seacole’s impressive actions faded from public awareness, forgotten in favour of Nightingale for the larger part of a century. It has only been in the last decade or two that awareness and recognition of her deeds has begun to resurface.

I lingered behind, and stooping down, once more gathered little tufts of grass, and some simple blossoms from above the graves of some who in life had been very kind to me, and I left behind, in exchange, a few tears which were sincere.

A few days latter, and I stood on board a crowded steamer, taking my last look at the shores of the Crimea.

– Mary Seacole

Seacole’s autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole In Many Lands, is freely available from Project Gutenberg here.

• Unsung Heroes: a new series on BadRep spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school…
• Guest blogger Rob Mulligan… is a guest no longer! We’ve had such a good response to this series he’s boarded the good ship BadRep on an ongoing basis. Hurrah! He also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes.

OVARY

Oh! Darling.

Ovary hopped onto the semantic stage around 1658 meaning ‘the female organ of reproduction in animals, in which ova or eggs are produced’ (ova being the Latin plural form of ovum = egg). Eggs, of course, are now generally recognised as a crucial part of reproduction in all species (a chicken ovulates every day, fact fans), making the ovary rather important for the construction of little’uns. Straightforwardly, the word derives from ovarium: ‘ovum’ + ‘-arium’ (aquarium, oceanarium, planetarium, toastarium). Consistency: it’s helpful. But hold! 1658? Really? What about before? Was there some mass genital evolution in the late seventeenth century that made early modern cisgendered Woman so drastically different from her medieval sisters?

Hartsoeker's drawings of 'homunculi', or 'little humans' inside sperm. (1695)

Well no, but there was an evolution in what Scientists considered “Woman” to be. For hundreds of thousands of years previous, the established thinking had been that they were simply men ‘turned outside-in’: female genitals were held ‘up there’ by a colder body temperature than their male counterparts, and, thus, sex differences were a matter of degree. Women were men who hadn’t quite unfurled properly.

Oh My God

With this thinking, the vagina became an inverted penis, the labia a foreskin, the uterus a scrotum, and the ovaries testicles – and all these now-familiar gynecological terms date from the same period: the oft-maligned vagina (= ‘sheath’) is faux-Latin from 1680, labia (= ‘lip’) slightly earlier (1630s) and uterus the earliest, from 1610 (although, as already mentioned in these pixellated pages, it was conflated with the gender-neutral ‘womb’ or ‘belly’, its original Latinate meaning). Pre-seventeenth century ovaries were consequently referred to as ‘female testicles’ or ‘stones’, and the synonymity was so literal as to accept the possibility that if a girl got too hot through strenuous exercise, her entire reproductive system could accidentally pop out and turn her into a boy.

So if sex was a false distinction to make, how did male and female manage to breed? Seventeenth-century scientists approached this question firstly through Aristotle and his theory of epigenesis (= ‘origin through growth’). Aristotle reckoned male semen gave the embryo its form, and female menstrual blood supplied the raw materials.¹ The ‘soul’ enters the embryo at the moment the mother first feels the baby kick.

However, by suggesting new people can spring into being organically, epigenesis risks dispensing with divine involvement. Not cool. So a much more palatable alternative, for seventeenth-century scientists, was preformation (the idea that the parents’ seed already contained a miniature adult, so all the embryo has to do is increase in size). Bit creepy, right? Nicolaas Hartsoeker (1656-1725) was well into this idea and even claimed he could see these ‘homunculi’ through the microscope (above, right).

But once this had been agreed, there came the inevitable Swiftian debate about how you like your eggs, with scientists divided into ‘aminalculists’ and ‘ovists’: those who were with Hartsoeker in believing the ‘germ’ of life to be in the sperm, and those who preferred the ‘egg’ (= ‘the female’). Arguing in favour of the latter was the (understandable) confusion about why God would be so wasteful as to create thousands of Hartsoekerean sperm-germs to be lost on every egg-ward excursion for the sake of one single fertilization: from the outside, the female looked a bit more efficient.

Oh! You Pretty Things

But clearly, all this Knowledge was better on the subject of males than females (and even the women themselves were hard pressed to explain menstruation or recognise pregnancy): ova were still shrouded in mystery, and ovulation a great unknown – it was not even certain whether human females could conceive without orgasm, or if they were more like cats, rabbits, llamas (now known as ‘induced ovulators’) and, er, men. Official advice erred on the side of caution and recommended that both man and wife reach orgasm during procreation – as a side-effect, a rapist could get off scott-free if his victim fell pregnant, since, until the nineteenth century, the law worked backwards and considered conception to imply enjoyment and, therefore, consent.

It is William Harvey (1578-1657), most famous for ‘discovering’ the circulation of the blood, who is commonly credited with realising the importance of an ovary-thing, and the frontispiece to his treatise on the subject blazons the tag ‘ex ovo omnia‘ (‘everything from the egg’). But he was thinking less of a modern day ‘egg cell‘ and more of a ‘spirit’: an egg was the mother’s ‘idea’ of a fetus which was ‘ignited’ in her womb during sex. It was a general generative catalyst, not technical anatomy – as is clear from the image (below, left).

Can of worms... The frontispiece to Harvey's Treatise on Generation (detail). Image from http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/visibleembryos/

Oh My Gosh

After kicking around for just over a century, ovary suddenly became enshrined in anatomy books as an independent organ that somehow encapsulated ‘woman’: in 1844 Achille Chereau declared that ‘it is only because of the ovary that woman is what she is’ (oh dear). In part, this was to do with a retreat from the previous centuries’ idea that women and men were anatomically the same and an advance towards the notion that sex equalled gender (a surprisingly modern invention, if you listen to Thomas Laqueur). With this came an increasing focus on specifically ‘women’s’ problems via hysteria (= ‘womb trouble’), and, neatly (if disturbingly) a favourite cure for this pre-Freud was the bilateral ovariotomy, also dubbed ‘female castration’: removing a patient’s healthy ovaries to man them up a bit (just as men become ‘feminized’ through removal of the testicles). The ovariotomy would thus, it was believed, act not just as a cure for hysteria, but also for behavioural pathologies including nymphomania, and even general aches and pains. Of course, it also stopped menstruation, rendered women infertile and carried risks endemic to c19th surgery methods. WE DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS DOES, SO LET’S JUST TAKE IT OUT.

It was not until the 1930s that scientists got near a hormonal understanding of ovulation, how it worked and how it could be controlled. Here we really should give a nod to that symbol of 1960s sexual liberation: the combined oral contraceptive pill, a great source of division between parents and children, as epitomised in the backstory to the seminal Beatles song She’s Leaving Home (1967). See, children of the 1920s and 30s must have found the idea of their daughters silently and imperceptibly controlling their ovulation terrifying, whereas the children of the 1960s saw such control as simple empowerment. In miniature, this gives us the whole history of ovary and its linguistic cognates: what cannot be seen is inevitably free for appropriation by a host of meanings. Meaningarium.

Further Reading:

• Making Visible Embryos – an ‘online exhibition’ from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. And Thomas Laqueur, of course (as linked).

NEXT WEEK: P is for Pussy

1. Yes, menstrual blood.

N

NANNY

Sonic Nurse

After the army of Important Academic Languages, and their Distinguished And Layered Relationship With Modern English, we reach this. Nanny has no real relation to Latin, Greek, French, Middle or even Old English, but derives from ‘a child’s corruption of the word nurse‘, tellingly akin to mamma. Nurse, it must be granted, has slightly more pedigree: it derives from the twelfth-century Old French term norrice, via the Latin nutricius (= ‘that suckles, nourishes’). It first appears in 1530 as a verb ‘to suckle’, and as a noun fifty years later, where it has the meaning we probably use most often: ‘one who takes care of the sick’.

Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, in Gone WIth The Wind. Image from http://www.gonemovies.com/

Nanny is first cited as an independent word meaning ‘a child’s nurse-maid’ in 1795, whence it proves itself as fluid as you would expect, also encompassing a quasi-proper name, Nana (Cf. Katy Nana in Mary Poppins, and the Newfoundland dog in Peter Pan). In 1830s America, we meet another deviant form of the same idea: mammy, a dialect corruption of mamma referring to ‘a black woman who looks after white children’. In extended form, mammy refers to a racial stereotype: ‘the loud, overweight and good natured black woman’, epitomised (in proper name form) in Gone With The Wind, and controversially brought to life in an Oscar-winning performance by Hattie McDaniel (above, right). And it’s not all the Americans: this phenomenon has certain similarities to the British use of native women as nursemaids in colonial India, ayahs, so named in reference to the Hindi word meaning ‘nurse’.

Dude Ranch Nurse

All this leads back to one place: the whistleblowing potential of an infant’s cries, in this instance naming the truly maternal figure in their formative years. But then, of course, until the late eighteenth century (the nineteenth, in France), no fashionable woman would even consider nursing her own child: on the contrary, wet nursing (sending your kid out to be suckled by a hired breast) was so common as to be automatic. Newborns were generally sent away for up to two years to be nourished, at a rate of anything from a few shillings a week to between £25 – 50 a year.

The reasons were as varied as the price, spanning the apparently trivial (social custom, and the desire to return to public life ASAP); the medical (fears for the mother’s health after the strain of lying in sans twenty-first century advantages), and the ‘medical’ (the widespread notion that sex with a nursing woman would damage her milk and therefore the child, and the belief that conception was impossible during this time anyway). It also seems possible that rampant infant mortality may have contributed: parents would send their children away until they had survived their most dangerous years, rather than invest emotional energy in a little’un who might well leave you before their first birthday.

That said, the enduring influence of the nanny qua mother-figure lasted long into the twentieth century, albeit mostly among the mega-aristocracy: The King’s Speech (2011) imagines the future George VI to have been closer to his nannies than his family; one of these, Charlotte Bill, was famously also an effective mother to his autistic and epileptic younger brother, Johnny (re-created in the 2003 BBC serial The Lost Prince).

Maggie’s Farm

Louis XIV of France painted with his wet-nurse, by Charles Beaubrun (c.1640)

The women who actually did all this nursing were inevitably of a lower social class than their clients – if not a different race – although they could earn good money (and possibly a nice pension) in the process. Here we tumble into a parallel nanny universe: the word in its more formal sense originating from another proper name. Through a bit of shuffling, good old Ann became first Nan and then Nanny, in which incarnation, around 1788, the word came to simply connote femininity, as in Nanny-goat (= ‘a female goat’, on which see also ‘Jenny Wren’ and ‘jenny-ass’). Like Doll, Nan’s trajectory suggests commonness, generic feminine identity, and while the dictionary is specific on the two nannies‘ separation, its stated origin in an infant’s mouth is by definition uncertain, language development fluid, and the connections between milking and the farmyard in need of little exposition – compare the nineteenth-century term baby farmer, a lower-class wet nurse happy to let her charges die because her one-off fee encouraged little else. The term was always pejorative, and synonymous with the dangerous, non-nurturing female.

In contrast, we have the nannies who stayed with one family for generations (like the mammy and the ayah abroad): these last are inevitably conventionally ‘older’ than their baby-farming colleagues, and presumably played a more extended mothering role. It is these strange insider-outsiders who appear in literature as bawdy and decrepit old women, inevitably depicted as their job title suggests: firmly on the side of the children they raise, to the extent that they will happily aid their improper sexual dalliances. It is thus that the Nurse appears in Romeo and Juliet, and in Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes. The suspicion inevitably directed at these figures is certainly class-based: wet nursing’s detractors had been arguing for years that by withholding mothers’ milk parents risked their children absorbing working-class mannerisms – and criminal tendencies – from their surrogate teats.

Na na na na na.

The next stop for the nanny is in the inter-war years, with representatives including P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins, the poems of A. A. Milne, and Noel Streatfeild‘s legion of sexless ‘cottage loaf’ Nanas. Streatfeild’s children are almost invariably orphaned, and their Nana-figure keeps them nourished through ‘nursery ways’, a stubborn lack of sentimentality, and a feeling of permanence sadly lacking in the increasingly fragmented world of war-torn Britain. A similar idea is repeated in the 1964 Disney film of Travers’ novel, which makes the significant decision to backdate events to 1910, when the focus is on ‘moulding the breed’ for future colonial greatness:

A British nanny must be a general!
The future empire lies within her hands.
And so the person that we need
To mould the breed
Is a nanny who can give commands!

Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964)

In so doing, Disney’s film situates the nanny as part of ‘tradition, discipline and rules’, nurturing Britain’s future rather than its children, and flying in the face of its very etymology.

Mr Banks’ song does, however, lead us to the final stop on nanny’s childishly simple word-journey: its modern incarnation as the Dreaded Nanny State (first appearing some time between the fifties and sixties). Always an opprobrious term (attempts to re-appropriate it have met with derision)  critics of government intervention ranging from the welfare state to the smoking ban hark back to the nanny to point up ‘mollycoddling’, the infantalisation of the people (who are presumably thus reduced to the baby-talk of the nursery) returning to childhood with a fussy female at the helm. Wash your face, dearie.

NEXT WEEK: O is for Ovary

H

HYSTERIA

O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element’s below.
– King Lear, II.ii.246

No Reason To Get Excited

In its purest sense, hysteria simply refers to the womb, no more, no less; like all those other lovely hy- words, it comes from the Greeks, and specifically from their word hysterikos – hystera (= yes, ‘womb’. Think ‘hysterectomy’). There may be little trace of its origin in modern usage, but its ‘female’ signification is perfectly in line with the word’s association with legions of Anna Os, Doras and Victorian virgins, eyes rolling, bodies attractively prone.

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, c. 1781

But here we must pause, and take an exciting medical-historical diversion. The Latin equivalent of hysterikos is the homonymic ancestor of our modern term ‘uterus’, and means ‘womb’ or ‘belly’; and this last strangely ambiguous definition seems less odd when you realise that ‘womb’ itself, in its Old English form, refers not to the generative organ but to a ‘belly’ or ‘paunch’ and that history is full of scientists arguing that this now-feminized organ was gender-neutral, with the ‘female’ womb simply some kind of equivalent to the ‘male’ stomach. Well? It does have some kind of logic: both are cavernous places where you, er, store stuff, but the female of the species may be more creative than the male.

Oh, Mother.

So, grasping this information in our sweaty little palms, to Shakespeare. When King Lear complains of ‘this mother’ he is referring to, as he says, ‘Passio Hysterica’, or ‘the suffocation of the mother’ – mother here used as a synonym for ‘womb’, as in Edward Jorden’s Treatise on the subject. Contemporary medical belief held that there were circumstances (Jorden specifies ‘of a wind in the bottom of the belly’, but refuses to elaborate on whether this is indigestion or some meterological force) in which this sexless womb-stomach could physically wander round the body, where ‘it causeth a very painfull collicke in the stomack, and an extraordinary giddiness in the head’. Uh, yeah: ouch. Or, in Lear’s terms: ‘O me, my heart! My rising heart! But down!’

She’s Lost Control.

The development of  the female-specific womb may be a topic for another day, but hysteria meaning what we would understand by the term, ‘hysteric fits or convulsions, a convulsive fit of laughter or weeping’ was in use as early as 1727. In 1791, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote what is arguably the first attempt to put hysteria into musical form – with The Magic Flute‘s Queen of the Night, also a ‘mother’ – spectacular as the music is (and her arias in particular), its driving purpose is to contrast the hysterical irrationality of women with the enlightened forces of Men and Freemasonry (gendering hysteria explicitly female in the process).

One to be taken each night with a mug of cocoa

There is then a gap in the word’s lexical development until the medical issue resurfaces: hysteria as a diagnosable condition was first officially used in 1801, where, as the dictionary points out, it was in reference to a seeming epidemic of women Going Crazy – or, specifically, experiencing ‘a functional disturbance of the nervous system, characterized by anaesthesia, hyperaesthesia, convulsions, etc., and usually attended with emotional disturbances or perversion of the moral and intellectual faculties’. Covering all its bases, you could either have no sensation at all, or hyper-sensation. Brilliant. That’s exactly what today needed.

It’s Not Easy Being Green.

One explanation for its seeming explosion during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is its use as a catch-all term for Generic Women’s Troubles (hence calling it, essentially, ‘womb-problem’), and indeed, it does seem to have been partially conflated with chlorosis (a type of anaemia), which is perhaps better known to Renaissance drama fans as ‘green sickness’. Thus, in John Ford’s play ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore (you’d think you couldn’t top that title, wouldn’t you?) Annabella is thought to be suffering from ‘an overflux of youth’, in which case ‘there is no such present remedy as present marriage’. Translation: get a willy in her, quick.

Something along these lines, dubbed ‘pelvic massage’, was indeed considered to be a helpful course of action for hysterical women of later years, and this, bizarrely, is where the vibrator makes its entrance on the historical stage. Helped along in its retail life by widespread use of electricity in the home, this particular modern gadget was originally a time-saving device for hard-pressed, fee-jealous doctors with hundreds of hysterical women to bring to ‘hysterical paroxysm’ before lunch. It was a young medical man named Sigmund Freud who decided that the ‘talking cure’ might be more helpful, and his early work in hysteria underscored much of his subsequent work on psychoanalysis.

Pervert Doc Caged

In its post-medical life (unsurprisingly, it is no longer considered a valid diagnosis), hysteria continues to rejoice in its second definition, a figurative use, meaning ‘unhealthy emotion or excitement’ (1839). Its most common modern usage would probably be in reference to media hysteria, which does, alas, tend to be aimed at women: the Daily Mail, the archetypal screeching tabloid, was, from its initiation in 1896, a newspaper aimed at women, and to this day its readership is over 50% female. As such, it tends to focus on condemning threats to ‘traditional family values’ – primarily immigrants and those on benefits, but it also simmers with barely suppressed homophobia (‘Abortion hope after “gay genes” finding’ was a headline from 1993, and Jan Moir’s article on Stephen Gately more recently attracted justified ire from all corners).

This, sadly, does tend to suggest that in the eyes of People Trying To Sell Us Stuff, women are still very much the hysterical creatures they were considered in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, this does not stop legions of women actually buying what they sell.

NEXT WEEK: I is for Infant.