“Curiouser and Curiouser”: Part VI

Part VI: Language and Time

As my research is specialising in the presence of male hysteria in Nineteenth-Century literature, I need to conduct my research using language of the period to get the results I need.

15th November 2018

The more material I can gather from the Nineteenth Century, the more accurate my work will be. I decide to obtain as many documents from the period as possible, such as newspapers, periodicals and medical journals.

The online tool I am currently using to find these documents is British Periodicals as they have a large selection of texts from the Nineteenth Century. The search function searches for terms included in the texts, not the topic of the texts. For example, ‘mental illness’ was not a term widely used in the period. Terms such as ‘hysteria’, ‘mania’ and ‘hypochondriasis’ were used instead. Therefore, these are the main search terms I am using.

One issue I am having is that the majority of the literature on hysteria is applied to women; as my research is focusing on men this makes a lot of the material irrelevant to my studies. Unfortunately, the process of searching is time consuming and becomes quite frustrating at times with my searches producing fruitless results.

However, I do manage to find several texts covering accounts of hysteria or other mental disturbances regarding men, along with texts covering symptoms and other descriptions of illness which will be useful leads into further research.