User:LizzieB2327/Female hysteria

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Female Hysteria

20th Century

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In the 1910s, psychiatrist L. E. Emerson was heavily involved in treating patients of hysteria at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital. Emerson published case studies on his patients, who were often "young, single, native-born, and white" and either had been raped or a had a lack of healthy sexual relationships. One of his more famous works was a case study of a woman called "Miss A". In the study, Emerson summarized the patient's experience with sexual violence, which he said that most women with hysteria had encountered. Miss A would practice self harm, and Emerson deduced that this practice was a release for the sexual assault she had previously experienced, and substituted for a form of masturbation. Another case study was of Sally Hollis, a woman who often viewed her experience with sexual assault by the terms of her own failing actions and female aggression. : ~ Believing the roots of hysteria lay in sexual conflict, Emerson paid attention to the theme of lack of sexual knowledge amongst these women, viewing them as repressed. The lack of sexual knowledge ranged from not knowing what menstruation was, how conception began or what the process of giving birth was.