Hystories

[Matthew P Wiener]

Jan writes:
>Eric sez:

>>Need to get a buzz of modern culture, paranoia and hysterical
>>delusion (Deluze-ian?). My very fine senior colleague Willard
>>McCarty has recommended Elaine Showalter's new book, Hystories, and
>>having happily delved, I pass that recommendation on to the list.

>As a (science) hack, I have to disagree.  Showalter's Hystories is
>medicine as literary/cultural criticism.  To say, as Showalter does
>in the book, that Gulf War Syndrome is a hysterical disease (ie
>essentially a late C20 manifestation of Freud's hysteria) is simply
>arrogance.  [...]

I'd have to second your disrecommendation.  Over the years I've read
extensively from the medical and popular literature on MPD (multiple
personality disorder), and a little bit on CFS (chronic fatigue
syndrome), and while the MPD and CFS critics do have some valid
points, I am certain they are completely wrong regarding MPD, and
probably wrong about CFS.

Showalter's own arguments are often quite weak, in addition to her
faulty reliance on one side of a sometimes quite hairy debate.  For
example, she claims that diagnoses go way up when knowledge of the
syndrome arrives, either via doctors or potential patients.  I should
certainly hope so.  Perhaps she could prove that Tourette's Syndrome
is hysterical???
--
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba at sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)