Free Trials of Passion by Lisa Appignanesi

necessary employment to occupy the mind, as well as from the various causes – such as novel reading, poetry, romance, dancing, theatricals, and so many other excitements which elevate to the highest pitch the sexual desires, and paint the delights of love in the most glowing colors’.
    Hysteria begins, in his view, with puberty when the young girl is filled with tempestuous desires and surrounded by endless temptations and excitements that are necessarily ungratified. She is forced to hide her feelings and desires. ‘That which should have been the young girl’s pride and delight, becomes her shame and her torture; she must conceal, the unhappy one! And studiously repress her eager and beautiful emotions, and can we wonder that bewilderment, timidity, and impotence result?’ The inability ‘to select her marital mate’ for herself compounds the difficulty of her condition: ‘... nature cannot bear this constant state of slavery; and ever and anon she shows in the hysterical convulsions, in the wild tumultuous hysterical emotions, or in the delirious excitement of nymphomania (love-madness) that she will not be repressed. The passions of youth are a volcanic fire, which in the end will burst through all obstacles.’
    Drysdale, though not a woman, had experience of this ‘volcanic fire’. Son of a prominent Edinburgh family, he had had a deeply troubled adolescence which resulted in a breakdown brought about byguilt over his uncontrollable desire to masturbate. Fleeing to the continent, he had disappeared so totally that his family thought him dead. When he finally returned, it was as a free-thinking social and sexual radical. Unrepressed sex had cured him. After studying medicine, Drysdale published his book anonymously: voicing his ideas as himself would have brought shame on his family.
    Drysdale is an early feminist. He links hysteria to the fact that a girl is never allowed ‘to go about alone, like a young man’. Subjected to a ‘constant espionage’, she is frequently forced to do things in an underhand manner, to the destruction of her sense of dignity and rectitude. Nor do things necessarily get much better with age. Hysteria, that disease which can take all shapes and any, also attacks the ‘single or widows, or barren women, or such as are indifferent to, or dislike their husbands (which last class in this country of indissoluble marriage is unhappily so large a one)’.
    The intolerable Victorian restrictions on women’s movement and desires are in the name of that supposedly great female virtue of chastity. As long as the ideas regarding this so-called virtue remain, it is impossible for woman to obtain greater freedom. ‘Until the difference in “sexual privilige” between man and woman is attended to,’ Drysdale emphasizes, nothing will make much impact on hysteria. ‘If we do not remove the main cause of hysteria, namely, insufficient sexual gratifications’, it is totally impossible to prevent the disease.
    Nor is cure by a physician to be anticipated. Like some early Freud recommending a dose of penis normalis , ‘love is the only physician, who can cure this peculiar disease; and it is vain for a medical man to expect to supply his place. The passions, which have been repressed and thrown into disorder, must be gratified, and the proper healthy stimulus given to the sexual organs, so as to restore their nervous balance, before we can have any rational expectation of a cure.’
    Reading Drysdale, one begins to think, as Freud might later have done, that Christiana Edmunds’s ‘love-madness’ was an unconscious attempt to initiate a self-cure.
    It is not altogether impossible that an educated woman likeChristiana, whose life was criss-crossed by members of the medical profession, would have read the revolutionary primer on sexuality that The Elements was. A doctor like Charles Beard, who had