ABSTRACT
Professional intervention in sickness incorporates the individual designated as a 'patient' into an overarching system of explanation, a common structural pattern which manifests itself in the bodily economy of every human being and in which accountability is transferred to an agency beyond the patient's control. Women's lack of power is attributed to their greater emotionality and their inability to cope with wider social responsibilities. In the nineteenth century, hysteria was a well-recognised pattern, mainly found in women. The middle-class woman was taught that aggression, independence, assertion and curiosity were male traits, inappropriate for women. The development from simple conversion symptoms to a recognised discrete position as 'a hysteric' seems to provide a parody of some core social values: women's expected dependency and restricted social role, an exaggeration of the socially extruded female. Women taking overdoses are regarded by doctors as a nuisance, extraneous to the real concerns of medicine and less deserving of medical care than patients with physical illnesses.
