The Wandering Womb and the Convulsions
Suffocation of the mother, hysteria, and functional neurological disorder.
In the Texts
The convulsions, the choking, the paralysis without wound, and the insensibility to pins that marked the bewitched were also, in the physicians’ books, the signs of suffocatio matricis, the suffocation of the mother, the womb risen to the throat. Edward Jorden’s Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603) was written to show that a London girl said to be bewitched had this, and lost the case.
What Medicine Makes of It
The nineteenth century called it hysteria and Charcot photographed it at the Salpêtrière; the twentieth called it conversion disorder; the present calls it functional neurological disorder, and it is among the commonest reasons for a visit to a neurologist: seizures without the brain’s electrical storm, paralysis with an intact nerve, blindness with a working eye, and insensibility to the pin. It is real, it is not malingering, and it is not caused by the womb; it is a disorder of how the brain runs the body, treated now by physiotherapy and psychotherapy, and once by exorcism, which was a treatment of the same kind. The witch-pricker’s pin, finding the place that did not feel, was finding a functional anaesthesia.
The Evidence
- Stone et al. (2010) found that 16 per cent of 3,781 new neurology outpatients in Scotland had symptoms unexplained by disease, the commonest diagnosis after headache; functional seizures make up a fifth of referrals to epilepsy clinics.
- Jorden’s Briefe Discourse (1603) was written for the trial of Elizabeth Jackson, accused of bewitching Mary Glover, whose fits Jorden said were the suffocation of the mother; the jury convicted Jackson anyway, and Glover was cured by a day of Puritan prayer and fasting.
- Charcot’s hysterical patients at the Salpêtrière in the 1880s showed the same insensible patches (anaesthesia hysterica) that the witch-finders had sought with the pin, and Charcot said so, in Les démoniaques dans l’art (1887), reading the old possession pictures as his wards.
- Functional neurological disorder is now understood in terms of attention and prediction: the brain’s expectation of a symptom produces it (Edwards et al., 2012); treatment is physiotherapy and psychotherapy with explanation, and the diagnosis is made on positive signs, not exclusion.
- The sex ratio has held: about two women to one man in the modern clinics, as in the manuals and the asylums.
Where They Part
Jorden and the manuals disputed the cause and agreed on the picture; the modern name is a confession that the cause is still not well understood. The manuals’ patients were nearly all women, as Charcot’s were, and as the clinic’s still are by two to one.
In the Materia Medica
Sources
- Jorden, E. (1603). A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother.
- Stone, J., et al. (2010). “Who is referred to neurology clinics? The diagnoses made in 3781 new patients.” Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery 112.
- Micale, M. S. (1995). Approaching Hysteria. Princeton University Press.
Historical and interpretive; not medical advice.