18) that a French physician, Charles
Lepois (Carolus Piso), physician to Henry II, trusting, as he said, to
experience and reason, overthrew at one stroke the doctrine of hysteria
that had ruled almost unquestioned for two thousand years, and showed that
the malady occurred at all ages and in both sexes, that its seat was not
in the womb, but in the brain, and that it must be considered a nervous
disease.[258] So revolutionary a doctrine could not fail to meet with
violent opposition, but it was confirmed by Willis, and in 1681, we owe to
the genius of Sydenham a picture of hysteria which for lucidity,
precision, and comprehensiveness has only been excelled in our own times.

It was not possible any longer to maintain the womb theory of Hippocrates
in its crude form, but in modified forms, and especially with the object
of preserving the connection which many observers continued to find
between hysteria and the sexual emotions, it still found supporters in the
eighteenth and even the nineteenth centuries. James, in the middle of the
eighteenth century, returned to the classical view, and in his _Dictionary
of Medicine_ maintained that the womb is the seat of hysteria. Louyer
Villermay in 1816 asserted that the most frequent causes of hysteria are
deprivation of the pleasures of love, griefs connected with this passion,
and disorders of menstruation. Foville in 1833 and Landouzy in 1846
advocated somewhat similar views. The acute Laycock in 1840 quoted as
"almost a medical proverb" the saying, "_Salacitas major, major ad
hysteriam proclivitas_," fully indorsing it. More recently still Clouston
has defined hysteria as "the loss of the inhibitory influence exercised on
the reproductive and sexual instincts of women by the higher mental and
moral functions" (a position evidently requiring some modification in view
of the fact that hysteria is by no means confined to women), while the
same authority remarks that more or less concealed sexual phenomena are
the chief symptoms of "hysterical insanity."[259] Two gynaecologists of
high position in different parts of the world, Hegar in Germany and
Balls-Headley in Australia, attribute hysteria, as well as anaemia, largely
to unsatisfied sexual desire, including the non-satisfaction of the "ideal
feelings."[260] Lombroso and Ferrero, again, while admitting that the
sexual feelings might be either heightened or depressed in hysteria,
referred to the frequency of what they termed "a p