ABSTRACT
In his Treatise, Mandeville drew attention to hypochondria as a kind of pathological form of sociability. The hypochondriac wanted constant medical attention, as well as sympathy, for his condition, and his interactions with others revolved around his illness. Dr. Purcell rather comically attempted in his Treatise on the Vapours to provide a mechanical account of the social dimension of hysteria in his explanation of the crying fits of the hysteric:
But such crying fits suggested to others more skeptical of the medical reality of the diagnosis that hypochondriacs and hysterics were in fact somehow more actively and intentionally using physical illness behaviors to express, to mask, or perhaps to legitimate and understand, emotional perturbance, and many suggested that hysteria was a ploy of specifically female desire. Sydenham had written that “as often as Women advise with me about this or that Disorder of the Body, the reason where cannot be deduced from the common Axioms, for finding out Diseases, I always diligently enquire of them, whether they have been disturbed in their minds, and afflicted with Grief, which if they confess, I am abundantly satisfied that the Disease must come under this Tribe we now discourse of.”2 Pace Sydenham, some suggested that the link between emotion and hysteric symptoms called for a moral rather than a medical analysis of hysteria.
