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This thesis traces the re-conceptualisation of melancholia as a biomedical mental disease in Victorian medicine, with an emphasis on the uptake of physiology into British psychological medicine. Language appropriated from experimental physiology allowed physicians to speak about ‘disordered emotion’ as a physiological process occurring when the brain was subjected to repeated ‘irritation’. When it came to diagnosing asylum patients, however, internal biological explanations of disease were of little use. Instead the focus was on externally observable ‘symptoms’, chiefly ‘depression’, ‘mental pain’, and ‘suicidal tendencies’. The late-nineteenth-century symptomatology of melancholia was in part constituted through statistical practices put in place by the Lunacy Commission, and which emphasised certain symptoms and nosological categories in the diagnosing of asylum patients. At the same time, the symptoms that emerged as defining criteria of melancholia were theorised within a biological explanatory framework. Thus, diagnostic descriptions of melancholia travelled back and forth between the casebook and the textbook, producing a disease concept that on the surface displayed remarkable coherence yet simultaneously spoke volumes about the negotiations that take place when medicine seeks to neatly label and classify the complexities of human life. In sum, this thesis shows how melancholia was constituted as a modern diagnostic category in nineteenth-century British medicine. In doing so, it also tells the story of how ‘disordered emotion’ was made into a possible and plausible medical concept.

abstract: In the last 200 years, advancements in science and technology have made understanding female sexual function and the female body more feasible; however, many women throughout the US still lack fundamental understanding of the reproductive system in the twenty-first century. Many factors contribute to the lack of knowledge and misconceptions that women still have. Discussing sexual health tends to make some people uncomfortable and this study aims to investigate what aspects of somewhat recent US history in women’s health care may have led to that discomfort. This thesis examines the question: what are some of the factors that shaped women’s reproductive medicine in the US from the mid 1800s and throughout the 1900s and what influence could the past have had on how women and their physicians understand female sexuality in medicine and how physicians diagnose their female patients in the twenty-first century. A literature review of primary source medical texts written at the end of the 1800s provides insight about patterns among physicians at the time and their medical practice with female patients. Factors like gendered expectations in medical practice, misconceptions about the female body and behaviors, and issues of morality in sex medicine all contributed to women lacking understanding of sex female reproductive functions. Other factors like a physician’s role throughout history and non-medical reproductive health providers and solutions likely also influenced the reproductive medicine women received. Examining the patterns of the past provides some insight into some of the outdated and gendered practices still exhibited in healthcare. Expanding sexual education programs, encouraging discussion about sex and reproductive health, and checking gendered implicit bias in reproductive healthcare could help eliminate echoes of hysteria ideology in the twenty-first century medicine. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Biology 2019

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