Mercury’s Shadow: The Pharmaceutical Sources of Hysteria

Abstract

This essay reconsiders the nineteenth-century epidemic of hysteria in the context of common pharmaceutical practice. Examining the health records of industrial workers, Civil War soldiers, and such prominent figures as Abraham Lincoln, Louisa May Alcott, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, this essay argues that hysteria in its distinctive nineteenth-century manifestation was the result of mercury poisoning. Physicians throughout the nineteenth century commonly prescribed mercury treatments for everything from teething and diaper rash to dysentery and syphilis. Nineteenth-century Americans were habitually exposed to mercury, and yet physicians did not recognize the symptoms of chronic mercury poisoning, which included numbness and paralysis of hands and limbs, tremors, seizures, and difficulties speaking, seeing, and walking. The symptoms of mercury poisoning correspond directly with the symptoms of hysteria, and even Sigmund Freud’s famous case histories of hysteria attest to the presence of mercury in his patients’ medical backgrounds. It is no accident that hysteria disappeared in the early twentieth century, just as antibiotics and more effective treatments emerged, but hysteria’s legacies nonetheless endure in recent environmental catastrophes and episodes of pharmaceutical malpractice.