"Tracing the transformation of the category of hysteria over the course of a century and half, Arnaud analyzes the role medical, literary, philosophical, and political writing played in shaping medical knowledge. In keeping with the varied and widespread writing on hysteria during this period, Arnaud explores a wide range of issues, including sexual difference, mental illness, and sexuality.  In using a rhetorical methodology to study the history of hysteria, the author adds a new and necessary dimension to the existing literature, which has focused largely on medical institutions, disciplines, and devices associated with hysteria.
Highly recommended."

Choice

"Arnaud's new book explores a history of discursive practices that played a role in the construction of hysteria as pathology. On Hysteriaconsiders a wide range of issues that are both specific to the particular history of hysteria, and more broadly applicable to the history medicine. Arnaud pays special attention to the role played by language in the definition of any medical category, basing her analysis on a masterful analysis of a spectrum of written medical genres (including dialogue, autobiography, correspondence, narrative, and polemic) that have largely been forgotten by the history of medicine. In a series of fascinating chapters, the book interweaves the history of hysteria with studies of gender, class, literature, metaphor, narrative, and and religion. It’s an expertly-researched and compellingly-written account that will amply reward readers interested in the histories of medicine and gender."

New Books Network

"On Hysteria focuses on the socio-medical category before its better-known (and more heavily studied) late nineteenth century instantiations, not to trace the prehistory of hysteria from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries,but in order to demonstrate how hysteria takesunexpected form during these earlier epochs."

Somatosphere

"This is an elegant, convincing, and beautifully constructed book, an important and fresh contribution to the history of medicine. We are left, as will be the case with any book as original and intriguing as this one, wanting to know more....Arnaud has given us a rich, multilayered understanding of how a category becomes a category. She shows how medicine can suck in the forms of knowledge, modes of thought, and commonplace morality of the people who form a society, and represent it all, magically metamorphosed into knowledge that belongs exclusively to the medical profession. When we write medical history, we know that deep cultural layers underpin the words, and gazes, of medical people—Arnaud’s On Hysteria is an exquisite archaeology, working with verve and insight in the subterranean deep."

H-Net

“Arnaud’s book stands in clear contrast to the usual treatment of the history of hysteria by historians of medicine; it focuses neither on institutions nor on personalities, but on rhetorical and discursive strategies…. [On Hysteria] is original and interdisciplinary, exploring a relatively obscure period in the history of hysteria. The focus on language and its power, while not novel, has not been applied to the concept of a pathology in this way (nor to this particularly rich and fascinating pathology). This is a well-researched and well-developed work, which will be of interest to a varied audience.”
 

British Journal for the History of Science

"In this profoundly original and interdisciplinary work, Arnaud provides us with a major study on the dynamics on science, medicine, and culture in the eighteenth century. Her analysis complements the recent pioneering works by Anne Vila, Elizabeth A. Williams, and Jan Goldstein, among others, while all along offering the most extensive treatment of the early hysteria phenomena since the classic work by Ilza Veith. Her study is essential reading for anyone interested in this quintessential but enigmatic malady—one that so defines long-standing perceptions of gender, bourgeois culture, and modernity itself."

Sean Quinlan, author of The Great Nation in Decline

"Arnaud has given us a rich slice of eighteenth-century cultural history and a bold methodological intervention into the history of science and medicine. Against the now-familiar background of late nineteenth-century and early Freudian hysteria as a mode of covert feminine protest, she presents for the era of the Enlightenment an unstable discursive field where medical writing overlaps with other literary genres and the hysteric is as often a man as a woman and is usually an aristocrat. An original and fascinating piece of scholarship."

Jan Goldstein, author of Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy

"In recent years our historical understanding of the processes of construction has been enriched by the integration of literary hermeneutics into the history of medicine. Perhaps the most ambitious and impressive example to date is Sabine Arnaud’s On Hysteria, which we now have, fortunately, in a translation by the author...On Hysteria is a landmark book"

Journal of Modern History

The book makes important contributions to the history of women, science, rhetoric, and literature. Arnaud is particularly successful when she takes readers into the archives of the Société Royale de Médicine and notes how physicians became story-tellers, blurring the frontiers between medical narrative and fiction along the way. The bibliography and footnotes constitute an impressive resource, and the text incorporates engaging quotes that are meticulously analyzed."

Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal