We’re publishing today a piece by Eduardo Zugasti, which looks at the history of syndromes “without clinical explanation” and asks whether Long Covid should be understood in this context, as being primarily psychogenic or sociogenic. Here’s an excerpt.
It would be a great mistake to assume that the modern extinction of tarantism, or of the picturesque – to us moderns – medieval epidemics of dancers (pictured), is simply the end of sociogenic illness and the disorders formerly known as neurasthenic or hysterical. Post-traditional society, with its new avenues for digital information and (dis)information, the empowerment of ‘civil society’ and the fragmentation of medical authority, seems to multiply the opportunities for the flourishing of ‘medically unexplained diseases’ in recent decades. According to Abigail A. Dumes from the University of Michigan: “What was understood as neurasthenia from the mid-19th to early 20th century came to be understood as hypoglycaemia in the 1960s, Briquet’s syndrome in the 1970s, chronic fatigue syndrome in the 1980s, and, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, multiple chemical sensitivity, Gulf War syndrome and chronic Lyme disease, among others.”
For Elaine Showalter, the feminist scholar and medical historian, these are ‘hystories’, epidemics of post-Freudian hysteria. Modern syndromes would be characterised by the expression of individual and social stress, powerlessness and physical or sensory symptoms without clinical explanation, but often attributed – by patients and activist doctors – to an unidentified external cause. The new ‘tarantula bites’ range from physical candidates such as viruses, environmental toxins, products of Big Pharma, electromagnetic waves or chemical warfare, to such fantastic agents as satanic conspiracies, in the case of the false memory syndrome or extra-terrestrial infiltration, in the case of ‘abduction syndrome’. The ‘hystories’ – for Showalter – have three basic ingredients: “a doctor, or other authority to define, name and publicise a disorder; unhappy patients with vague symptoms; and a supportive cultural environment”, starting with the USA itself, the “hot zone of psychogenic illnesses” and the true genesis of the new biomedical labels.
Worth reading in full.
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