Hystories

[Vaska]

Jan Klimkowski wrote:
>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. Since   
>the military have consistently, ahem, withheld data about   
>chemical/biological exposure of troops, whilst imposing a drug regime   
>that we know to have been medically incompetent and almost certainly   
>dangerous, it's impossible to say at this stage what GWS is.  But   
>Showalter knows: it's hysteria.

It may well turn out that like the Shell Shock Syndrome, a portion of whose
sufferers were the victims of some WWI chemical warfare that could and did
indeed produce a variety of psychiatric symptoms, the Gulf War one will
eventually be seen as a blanket term for a variety of afflictions whose
etiologies are markedly dissmilar: Showalter may still have a point there.

Vaska