ABSTRACT
Galen describes a syndrome he associates with an emotion called lype, with specific symptoms and a course that may lead to humoral imbalance, disease, and death. Lype is an emotion that encompasses distress at a loss, as the death of a close friend or the destruction of one's books by fire; but Galen also associates it with chronic worry about a future threat, and a physiology between the emotions of worry and fear (that is, 'anxiety'). Lype can cause a progressive syndrome characterised by insomnia, fever, pallor, and weight loss that can kill patients or degenerate into psychotic illness. This syndrome can be described in modern terms as an anxiety disorder.
Subject(s)
Anxiety Disorders/history , Manuscripts, Medical as Topic/history , Patients/history , Greek World , History, Ancient , Humans , Patients/psychologyABSTRACT
Starting perhaps in the second century BCE, and with Hippocratic precedent, ancient medical writers described a condition they called hysterike pnix or "uterine suffocation." This paper argues that uterine suffocation was, in modern terms, a functional somatic syndrome characterized by chronic anxiety and panic attacks. Transcultural psychiatrists have identified and described a number of similar panic-type syndromes in modern populations, and a plausible theory of how they work has been advanced. These insights, applied to the ancient disease of hysterike pnix, demystify the condition and illuminate the experience of the women who suffered from it.
