For various scientific disciplines, this past decade has been marked by turbulence; in particular, the disciplines touching upon the study of culture and society. This sociocultural movement also surfaced within the historical discipline. Since the 1980s, a social historical movement has been active within medical, and more particularly within psychiatric, historiography. This "revisionism" took medical historiography out of its ivory tower and placed it within broader social, political, and/or cultural contexts. The historical study of medicine in its various aspects became the study of medicine as an object, not only taking part in broader social dynamics, but also bearing the mark of these dynamics. In this way, so-called objective scientific histories of disease entities were reread and reinterpreted as affected by and reflecting broader contexts. Above all, illness became a (social) metaphor or a (cultural) representation. This contextual historiography, which is influenced by the works of Michel Foucault, is on-line with the so-called cultural studies. From a favorable point of view, this "new" option implies that historiography is no longer seen as a mere act of recording and reconstructing historical facts, but is being recognized as an act of interpretation. From a more critical point of view, the question arises whether one ideological discourse is not just being replaced by another, more complex ideological discourse. This coincides with recurrent warnings for ideological tendencies within the social sciences in general. Within the new "tradition," hysteria figures as a sublime object of research, which is not surprising -is there any "disease" other than hysteria that has known more variety in terms of content and attribution, that represents more diversity in symptoms, and has stronger tendencies to imitation? If there is any consensus of opinion detectable in the writings on hysteria, then this certainly relates to its intangibility. Due to this wave of sociocultural interest, a disease entity that had officially been buried for several decades was dredged up again as a metaphor or a representation.
Within this context, the book by Mark Micale, a young historian of science and of medicine, came into being. For years, Micale has shown a special interest in the historiography of hysteria in general, and in the history of hysteria in the male in particular. In Approaching Hysteria, he deals with the history of the interpretations of hysteria, starting off with the idea that the present explosion of interest in the history of hysteria should be considered as a historical phenomenon in its own right and, as such, as a development with an actual, cultural meaning. The boom of what he calls the new hysteria studies comprises more than a compilation of cultural-historical studies. There is a general historical interest in hysteria at work. And although the "new" hysteria studies are, strictly speaking, not clinical or scientific in nature, various historical clinical and scientific studies are rediscovered. There is, for instance, the reevaluation of a select company of scientists and their theories -including Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet, who dedicated a major part of their work and lives to the study of hysteria. Along the same lines, the current tendency to relabel or rename hysteria -e.g., Briquet's Syndrome -can be read as a return to important figures of the past, albeit that the reference to hysteria is absent for those not familiar with the history of hysteria as such.
Another interesting observation is the absence of Freud's studies on hysteria in this rediscovery. This brings us back to an important American influence on the disappearance of