The transcription discusses female hysteria, its historical implications, and treatments over time. It explores how ancient Egyptian physicians believed that female illnesses were caused by uterus problems, associating anxiety and panic attacks with the uterus. The podcast host shares personal struggles and reasons for starting the show, hoping to bring humor to the topic. The episode delves into the origins of female hysteria dating back to ancient Egypt and the belief in uterine displacement causing various symptoms. The discussion aims to make listeners question if they would have been considered for treatments like lobotomies in the past.

Do you struggle with anxiety, depression, insomnia, or emotional instability? Are you a woman? Do you tend to be a little outspoken? If this sounds like you, I'll have to diagnose you with hysteria. Well, hysteria is 1800s. What's the cure? Well, there's lots of cures, some more shocking than others. But for now, maybe a trip to the asylum will do the trick. Today we'll be discussing female hysteria, its implications, and its cures over time. This is the first episode of the series, My Healing Era, that talks about how medicine has changed over the years, or important moments in time that changed medicine forever.

This is Historically Unsupervised. Well, this really might be the worst idea I've had to date, or the best, I don't know. I guess we're going to find out. You'll have to bear with me. I'm probably going to laugh a ton during this episode. There's many different laughs that you might hear from me. You might get the Windex laugh that just kind of sounds like a... That's probably my favorite. Sometimes I'll give you a bit of a hyena.

And Lord knows, please, Lord, do not let me do a cackle during this episode, because I think that just might make everyone lose their minds. But losing your marbles is exactly what we're going to be talking about today, and I cannot wait to get into it. I wrote out this whole mumbo-jumbo intro, and it's like... Half of it's sappy, and then the other half is serious, but funny, and I decided to forget it to just about all of it, because usually I'm a talker, and I could literally talk anyone's ear off forever.

I've been recording all of these episodes in the morning, and I don't know if maybe my brain's just not awake yet or what, but I'm recording this one at 9 o'clock at night, and it might just be the perfect answer that I've been looking for. I just came back from doing hot yoga, so I don't know if I'm, like, high on the sauna fumes or what. I don't know, but I'm just feeling a little more hilarious today than I usually do.

I think it also might just be because I'm mentally trying to prepare myself for the topic that we're discussing today, because you'd think you'd know, like, oh, okay, it's just female hysteria. It can't be that bad. Well, the research I get on this is over-the-top insane. Every now and then, I'm just going to have no words, like I do right now. I don't know if my upstairs neighbors can hear me or not, and they might think I'm insane, and that's okay, because that goes perfectly into our topic today.

In fact, by the end of this thing, I'm probably going to start questioning to myself if I would have been the perfect candidate for a lobotomy. Mental health is so important, y'all, and this is going to make me question the state of mind by the time I'm done recording this. If you know me personally, this is either the time to log off, or actually, no, stay, because I need the views and the listens, please. I need you to stay here with me, but you're going to have to bear with me, and just do me a favor and pretend like you don't know me.

That would make this a lot easier on my part. Some of the topics we discussed today are purely medical, okay? I'm really kind of hoping that this episode kind of makes me chill out a little bit, because I feel like my other episodes have been a little more serious, a little more straightforward, but the whole reason I started this podcast is because I'm someone who can naturally speak from the heart and just speak to a wall if it talks back, so I'm kind of hoping that this will set it up for the future episodes and kind of remind me that I can be a little more silly and have fun with it, because this is definitely silly, and I'm going to have to have fun with it, or else it's just going to, if I don't have fun with this, I'm just going to embarrass the H-E double hockey sticks out of myself, and I'll just have to be mentally prepared for that.

And I need you to be mentally prepared for it, too, because this is a journey that we're going through together. Do you understand? I cannot do this alone. Please, for the love of all that is good, respond back. Laugh with me. I don't really care. Comment on this. Just don't make me feel alone in this battle, especially on this episode alone, because I'm just, it's a lot. And if you don't want to say anything, laugh with me, okay? And honestly, making this podcast in the first place is probably embarrassing enough as it is, so you've probably been laughing at me this whole time, and you know what? I'm okay with that, because I'm just doing this for me, and I'm enjoying it for myself, and so I hope that if anything, if you're not feeling educated by my episodes, you're at least having fun with it and laughing at me.

I will take it, okay? So I guess I'll read a little bit of what I wrote, because it's almost like a diary for me. I'll be honest with y'all. No. Feelings. Okay. Okay, let's talk about feelings. I'll be honest with y'all. For a little while, I was feeling pretty depressed. I think it was just because I was going through a bit of a transitional period in my life. I've been in school my entire life. I pretty much have been in fire flight mode for the past two years while I was finishing up grad school, and as soon as that part was over, I just kind of felt like I was going insane, because I was like, well, what do I do now? And I think anybody can agree that it just feels a little weird to enter the real world after not being a part of it for so long, but I like having a creative outlet, and the job field that I chose to go into does not require any sort of creative outlet, and so I kind of felt like doing this gave me that opportunity to let out my creative feelings and enjoy myself and research things that I actually enjoy, and then on top of that, talking is absolutely a hobby of mine.

I could really talk anybody's ear off, so this is the perfect opportunity for me. I didn't want to be like everybody else, so I didn't want to do a podcast about my life, because my life is interesting, sure, but it's not that interesting. This at least gives me a little bit of an outlet and gives me something to talk about, so I guess it kind of helps me gossip about other people's lives rather than my own, and that makes it a lot more fun.

You might ask me, well, Emily, if you love painting and art so much, then why didn't you just go into the art world instead of doing what you do now? But I do like the idea of having somewhat of a stable relationship when it comes to money and a job, so I'll take that instead, and this is just what I'm going to be doing on the side for fun. It makes it a lot easier, because I can stop anytime I want to.

But for now, you don't have to worry about that, because I am here for you to tell you all the random crazy lore behind history and weird things that people do, because these people are insane. But for a while when I was done with school, I kind of felt like I was bored in a way. I had been so stressed for the past couple years that it's like now I was kind of like, well, what do I do now, and I just didn't know what to do with myself.

I was bored out of my mind, but at the same time I was feeling a little depressed, and anything that I enjoyed doing was just out of the question for me. A lot of stuff that I used to be really passionate about, I just was kind of like, eh, I don't have to do it. But y'all, I'm back and ready to roll, all because of you listening to this podcast today. I swear, if this is the episode that makes me get big or something, I'm going to lose it, because the stuff we're talking about here today is a little weird, but kind of funny, but kind of not, I don't know.

There's a lot to dive into. Okay, great, so now that all the emotional vulnerability stuff is buried out the window, let's move on to the crazy stuff. My goal for today is that you listen to this and you question to yourself if you would have also been sent to an insane asylum or been the perfect candidate for a lobotomy, because after doing my research, I definitely think that I would have been pretty high on their list, but that's okay.

I am here today and lobotomies don't exist, so you know what? We are surviving and we are thriving, okay? But enough about me and enough about being funny and silly. Let's get right into the juicy stuff. Okay, so we're going to date it from the very, very beginning. Time to go right back to ancient Egypt, y'all. So when discussing the origins of female hysteria, we have to go all the way back to ancient medicine. The first known references for female hysteria date back to ancient Egypt around 1825 BCE.

This reference is the Cajun gynecological papyrus, and this is the oldest known medical document devoted specifically to women's health, hence the gynecological. So many ancient Egyptian physicians believed that a lot of the female illnesses were caused by problems with the uterus itself, whether that be mental, physical, anything like that. They believed that it all had to do with the uterus, like the uterus had its own brain or something. So, for example, anxiety or panic attacks were associated with female illnesses.

So because women have a uterus, for example, things like anxiety and panic attacks were associated as these female illnesses, because I guess at the time men couldn't have anxiety or panic attacks because he simply has no uterus, right? So symptoms that are associated with anxiety or panic attacks were typically attributed to the uterus moving or blocking other organs, which is like uterine displacement. So they really believed that the uterus was in the incorrect spot, which is what caused other things to create issues within the body.

Feelings of suffocation or choking, dizziness, anxiety, distress, inability to move or speak, kind of like a panic attack, essentially. These were believed to have happened because the uterus was displaced, because I guess it just has a mind of its own, essentially. So how does one treat a displaced uterus that is in your chest, for example? Well, the treatment consisted of scent therapy. So they would burn incense or oils near the pelvis to essentially encourage the uterus to return to its proper place.

It's like they were gentle parenting the uterus to return back to where it belongs. I can't. So to kind of give you a visual example, if you're feeling suffocated because you're having anxiety, the treatment would be applying strong scents near the nose to propel the uterus back downwards to its rightful place. Or they would put good scents near the pelvis to kind of encourage it to come back to where it belongs. Now, the concept of the uterus moving around the body was laying out the groundwork for later Greek medical theories that would talk about this thing called the wandering womb.