Hysteria Beyond Freud by Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porterz, G. S. Rousseau and Elaine Showalter Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1993,  xxiv + 478 pp., $30.00 The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle by Sander L. Gilman Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993,  xiii + 298 pp., $31.95 Freud, Race, and Gender by Sander L. Gilman Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1993,  xvi + 277 pp., $24.95

The leitmotif of the books reviewed here is hysteria, the great disease, the protean psychosomatic imitator of any other pathology, which has fascinated Western Europe for nearly two and a half millennia, ever since the father of medicine, Hippocrates. In the title Hysteria Beyond Freud one agenda is that the word “beyond” suggests that hysteria is dead; the other, that Freud's explanation of hysteria is dead. Had the book been called “Hysteria Beyond Veith,” the reference would have been intelligible only to the initiated few and the book would have sold fewer copies. And yet this book is a spiritual child of medical historian Ilza Veith's (1965) classic, Hysteria: The History of a Disease, and a wide-ranging discussion of her ideas. Hysteria Beyond Freud is truly encyclopedic in the wealth of information and bibliographical sources it offers, it is brilliantly written, and it is an excellent read. It is a must for anyone interested in the subject and its history, written by outstanding authorities in the field of medical history and humane letters.

Is there hysteria beyond Freud? The answer depends on the answer to the question, what is hysteria? and what was it for Freud? The word hysteria is derived from hystera, the Greek word for womb. In spite of the widely used word hysterectomy, which