ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates psychological theories concerning vision and consciousness in order to examine the earliest visual manifestation of pathological bodies (those appearing in late nineteenth-century medical photographic journals). It then explores the manner in which the aesthetics of the hysterical female body became fertile ground for visual artists, playwrights, and actors associated with the Jung Wien Group, the Vienna Secession, the Klimt Group, and the expressionist movement. Building on the existing scholarship that examines the aesthetics and theatricality of medical hysteria, the chapter demonstrates that hysteria—in both Parisian and Viennese conceptualizations of the disorder—was principally a gendered "disease", given that it was historically believed to be visible on (or apparent in) the female, rather than the male, body. It then discusses a critical re-evaluation and extension of the extant literature, and focuses on the overarching role that hysteria—more than any other neuro-physiological disorder of the turn of the century—played in depictions of the modern body in Viennese visual culture.
