Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations by Mark S. Micale Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1995,  xii + 327 pp., $29.95 Once upon a Text: Hysteria from Hippocrates by Helen King in Hysteria Beyond Freud by Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1993,  xxiv + 478 pp., $35.00 Hysterical Psychosis: A Historical Survey by Katrien Libbrecht New Brunswick, NJ:  Transaction, 1995,  xviii + 283 pp., $39.95

A century after its heyday as a clinical diagnosis, hysteria is enjoying a second life as an object of historical study by clinicians and historians alike. Members of the multiple personality disorder movement find precursors in the late 19th-century French accounts of hysterical “double consciousness” (Hacking, 1995), and academics of several disciplines study every imaginable aspect of the subject. The three works under review, all examples of what Micale calls “The New Hysteria Studies,” are not equally valuable. King's long essay is an important piece of philological analysis and reception history of the concept of hysteria ascribed—falsely, she argues—to Hippocrates. (See Psychoanalytic Books, 6, 1995, 74-80, for a review of the other essays in Hysteria Beyond Freud.) Micale's Approaching Hysteria is a superb, profoundly learned book. The scholarship and argument of Libbrecht's Hysterical Psychosis can't stand comparison with either of the others.