procreating
children, and, when remaining unfruitful long beyond its proper time, gets
discontented and angry, and, wandering in every direction through the
body, closes up the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing
respiration,[253] drives them to extremity, causing all varieties of
disease."

Plato, it is true, cannot be said to reveal anywhere a very scientific
attitude toward Nature. Yet he was here probably only giving expression to
the current medical doctrine of his day. We find precisely the same
doctrine attributed to Hippocrates, though without a clear distinction
between hysteria and epilepsy.[254] If we turn to the best Roman
physicians we find again that Aretaeus, "the Esquirol of antiquity," has
set forth the same view, adding to his description of the movements of the
womb in hysteria: "It delights, also, in fragrant smells, and advances
toward them; and it has an aversion to foetid smells, and flies from them;
and, on the whole, the womb is like an animal within an animal."[255]
Consequently, the treatment was by applying foetid smells to the nose and
rubbing fragrant ointments around the sexual parts.[256]

The Arab physicians, who carried on the traditions of Greek medicine,
appear to have said nothing new about hysteria, and possibly had little
knowledge of it. In Christian mediaeval Europe, also, nothing new was added
to the theory of hysteria; it was, indeed, less known medically than it
had ever been, and, in part it may be as a result of this ignorance, in
part as a result of general wretchedness (the hysterical phenomena of
witchcraft reaching their height, Michelet points out, in the fourteenth
century, which was a period of special misery for the poor), it flourished
more vigorously. Not alone have we the records of nervous epidemics, but
illuminated manuscripts, ivories, miniatures, bas-reliefs, frescoes, and
engravings furnish the most vivid iconographic evidence of the prevalence
of hysteria in its most violent forms during the Middle Ages. Much of this
evidence is brought to the service of science in the fascinating works of
Dr. P. Richer, one of Charcot's pupils.[257]

In the seventeenth century Ambroise Pare was still talking, like
Hippocrates, about "suffocation of the womb"; Forestus was still, like
Aretaeus, applying friction to the vulva; Fernel was still reproaching
Galen, who had denied that the movements of the womb produced hysteria.

It was in the seventeenth century (16