Alec Ramsdell wrote:
>
> I was talking with someone the other
> night working on a history of hysteria, and the
> accounts she's read have "womb sickness" as something
> that moved around the body (it could start in the womb
> and make its way to the neck, for instance). So one
> sees the beginning of a proliferation of gendered
> illnesses. This is way before Freud.
>
> Some male-gendered equivalents include neurasthenia
> and melancholy. What is, and what are the historical
> origins of neurasthenia?
>
Rather essential back ground here is Thomas Laqueur, _Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud_ (Harvard UP, 1990). There was a fine review of it by Gould in the NYRB.
Carrol
Re mental illness and gender: In Pope's _Rape of the Lock_, Cave of Spleen episode, there is a line referring "And maids turned bottles cry aloud for corks." (Spleen, some times known as the English Malady, was also called melancholy, both terms going back to medicine based on the four elements, four humours, etc.)