Jean-Martin Charcot, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Hysteria is a real disease of the nervous system, not simulation and not the malady of the womb the ancients supposed. What I observed at the Salpêtrière — the regular attacks, their phases, their stigmata — I observed as a clinician observes any natural form, and I described what appeared before me with the same eye that found the lesions of sclerosis.12345
Five or six years ago, at a time when our attention was particularly drawn to the modifications which the field of vision undergoes in the subjects of hysteria, we discovered in her the existence of a very marked retraction of the visual field, on both sides, but much more pronounced on the right. An examination repeated once or twice a year has never failed to recognise the permanence of this retraction.Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System, Series III, pp. 226–227
This is interesting to the physician in the highest degree, who learns thus to take his bearings in what appears to be an inextricable labyrinth.Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System, Series III, pp. 13–14
However it be, you observe that, just as happened in the case of experiments made on animals, here also the contrast is striking between calculous ischuria, which almost certainly kills the patient, and hysterical ischuria, which allows the patient to survive during long months without seriously disturbing the general health. We are thus placed in presence of a grave problem. Is it really insoluble?Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System, Series I, pp. 233–234
While thus engaged we shall bring to view the likenesses and the differences that exist between the symptoms of hysteria observed in men and those with which we are familiar every day in the corresponding form of the disease in women. Lastly, I intend to present after the manner of a summary, certain general considerations on the great hysteria (hysteria major) as seen in the male sex.Clinical Lectures on Certain Diseases of the Nervous System, pp. 133–135
This is a fact which is to-day well understood, and the last few years Prof. Verneuil and his pupils have shown the interest and importance belonging to the study of phenomena of this kind from a surgical point of view. But what is less known, perhaps, is that certain local phenomena of hysteria, and in particular the contracture of a limb, sometimes manifest themselves in the same way and under the same influences.Clinical Lectures on Certain Diseases of the Nervous System, pp. 97–99
That hysteria is real and neurological, and occurs in men, I hold and time has confirmed. That the grande hystérie unfolds in fixed regular phases stood in tension with a force I did not reckon with — suggestion, working within the very clinic that displayed the disease — and the schema of four phases did not survive the scrutiny of those who came after. The phases were real to my observation; their regularity, I did not see, was partly the making of the setting.