One matter of gender? The sexual difference as a value in the history of hysteria

Abstract

Contemporaneously, several authors have been addressing the issue of ‘objectivity’ of science and scientific values. The most basic question is the existence of values in the current practice, methods and products of science. This article intend to present the historical discourse about hysteria as a nosological theory guided by values which are, at the same time, social and cognitive values, and whose intimate interrelation casts doubt on the thesis of the objectivity of epistemic values. Therefore, the hysteria stands as an example of medical-scientific theory in which social values (including political and religious values that have institutionalized a gender difference) decisively influenced sometimes the rejection of the existence of the disease entity and sometimes its description and treatment. Such it was the strength of social values in the etiopathological theories of hysteria that even in the psychoanalytic theory, if it is no longer described as a ‘disease of women’, it still remains as a ‘female suffering’.