Welcome And Show Mission

palmi 0:00

Welcome to our podcast, When Life Gives You Lemons. I'm Kevin.

Kevin 0:06

And I'm Palmy. We consider ourselves disability advocates and intend to highlight some disability issues and things we find interesting that we frequently encounter when we're out and about. Also, some history on disability that we find interesting. This year we're going to include more of the interviews of the people that the disability affects. We hope you enjoy it.

Solo Host And Content Warning

Kevin 0:32

Hello everybody. It's me, Kevin. Just me today. I'm going rogue. Pommy's outside selling the rest of our belongings before I move. And we're gonna talk about female hysteria. So just a word of caution to adults who may be supervising children listening. This may not be the content you want them to hear.

Defining Female Hysteria

Kevin 1:13

Okay, you have to imagine that you're back in the 1900s and you're visiting a doctor with a problem. You feel anxious, irritable, or ambitious. Only to be diagnosed with a medical condition rooted entirely in your uterus. Welcome to the show. We're unpacking one of the most persistent, bizarre, and damaging diagnoses in medical history, female hysteria. And I don't know if it's as big a thing as it was in North America around the world. So, if you do not live in North America and do not know what I'm talking about, just bear with me. You'll get the gist of it soon enough.

The Wandering Womb Myth

Kevin 2:22

Okay, the ancient Greeks made this word for uterus. From the Greek word uterus hysteria. Okay, they introduced the concept of the wandering womb. That would have been the belief that uterus was an independent animal, like a creature inside the woman's body that could dislodge and wander around. Imagine that. This would choke on their organs and would cause physical and emotional chaos. The prescribed cure or how ancient physician treated it, ranging from ancient Greek times to the nineteenth century, was a strong smelling substance to draw the eaters back down to prescribe marriage and frequent pregnancy as ultimate remedies.

Victorian Boom And Symptom Lists

Kevin 3:51

Okay, the nineteenth century explosion. I imagine that was because women were becoming more vocal, more commonly are expressing their interest in women's issues in common society. Just guessing there, I wasn't alive during that era. But you have to imagine that Victoria, England, and America, where hysteria reaches peak medical popularity. The definition balloon due closed sentences varies, nervousness, shortness of breath, insomnia, and loss of appetite.

Laudanum And Office Culture

Kevin 5:03

It was medicated. In those days, they had medication called laudam. There was an opiate derived from the Harlan Poppy. In the doctor's office because of the polite society you're raised in, you didn't really open up too much about all these things.

Pelvic Massage And Medicalized Orgasm

Kevin 5:33

And imagine you're being diagnosed as hysteria and being treated with pelvic massage or vibrators, exploring how medical professionals treated the condition under the guise of inducing hysterical paroxysm. In other words, what we would term today is an orgasm.

Mislabels And Institutionalization

Kevin 6:11

If you want to go back to brief famous case studies, briefly touch on how real women, writers, archivists, or those suffering from postpartum depression or epilepsy were frequently mislabeled and institutionalized under this umbrella.

Freud And The Diagnosis Shifts

Kevin 6:46

The decline came when Freud, Dr. Sigmund Freud, another modern deconstruction doctors uh specializing in studying the mind, began shifting the package from a purely physical uterine malfunction to a psychological condition affecting both men and women, though disproportionately diagnosed in women.

Decline By The 1950s

palmi 7:50

Okay, up until the uh 50s, when actually women started uh uh speaking their own minds about the issues and refused to be forced upon by their husbands. Okay, our final thoughts concerning this are going to be the fact that uh all this could be prevented by good sex life, but that was not easily uh tolerated by the men of the era who called the shots. So the women were kind of left to their own devices, literally. The um advances of psychiatric treatment for the problems uh kind of led to a downfall of misdiagnosis, mistreatment in the 1950s. That's how long it took for doctors to actually study what they had been treating for a couple thousand years, all the way back to Greek times. So that about concludes

Recording Changes And Background Noise

palmi 9:32

the uh talk we had about uh female hysteria, but we do have a couple uh housekeeping issues to discuss. Our house is no longer set up for podcasting in the way we used to. So we're experiencing every now and then some uh difficulties recording. You may hear noises in the background, etc. They weren't there before but are now. That's because our acoustics set up for where we normally podcast has changed, and that affects how acoustics operate here. So once we get moved, we should be able to find a new place to record from, assume those audio difficulties will go away.

New Theme Song And AI Licensing

palmi 10:45

Um, I'd also like to play for you a uh song that was considering replacing our uh basically the music we playing when we're introducing our show. Some we find that drag the file here.

Speaker 2 11:11

Another day in rooms not built for me. The sidewalk flows at a different speed. Feels like I'm watching my own movie through a hazy sunlit filter. All the little signs are invisible lines that only make sense in my own time. There's a quiet strength in adaptation, a soft hum of my own creation. Yeah, a soft hum of my own creation.

palmi 11:46

Now this should be about the right length. However, Pommy feels the lyrics will muddle up the part where we're talking. So we're gonna see how it works today. As long as you are still hanging in there. When you go back to the very beginning, this will be the song that we play. I'll play this song in its entirety if it sounds very muddled. And um the good news is it's very hard for me to find copyright-free music to use for the podcast. This is indeed copyright-free because I created it myself on AI. If you go to an AI that says it creates songs, they actually charge you for a license to use it. I did not use such a DI. I used AI AI. I use already. So this was totally on my own. Uh and just let me know

Listener Feedback And Where To Find Us

palmi 13:17

what you think. Shoot me the email or fan mail. I'm also very excited about our uh Facebook page. We're getting quite a few people out there, and I'm not sure all of them speak English. So I'm not sure all of them are listening. So what I would like to see from everybody on the Facebook page is take the uh flag emoji or a picture of a flag from your country and put it in, post it on the Facebook page. That kind of gives me an uh estimate of how many people actually listen from other nations, not just North America or England. If you'd like to download episodes from previous months or years, or just see what we were talking about in previous seasons, you can always download the episodes from our website at www.givesylovens.net. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next time.