ABSTRACT
In the second half of the nineteenth century medical discourse intertwined etiologies of nervous diseases with political concerns by connecting such maladies to nationality and ethnicity or, as practically all European physicians put it then, to 'race'. Above all, this link was established by the concept of 'mental degeneracy', introduced into European medicine in 1857 by Benedict-Augustin Morel. Morel's theory of morbid heredity not only dominated the thinking of European physicians and psychologists at the time, it also became common currency in the general cultural discourse. Medical discourse on hysteria was political in that it formed an integral part of the discourse on the nature of ethnic groups. Summing up the debate on the racial origins of nervous disorders, Max Sichel concluded that race and heredity did play a role as etiological factors, but he emphasized that the race-biological point of view often simply expressed the inability to explain phenomena otherwise.
