Was there a male parallel to 18th/19th century Hysteria?

by TOMATO_ON_URANUS

Especially considering the humors theory, it doesn't seem far-fetched in my opinion that some physicians might have considered semen another "humor" that needed to be expelled from the body, in the same logic as bloodletting.

Now that I'm writing this out, I suppose I'm asking if "blue balls" has ever been considered a legitimate medical syndrome.

TRB1783

According to the theory of humors, semen was considered a variation of blood. Some believed semen to be frothed or whipped version of blood - think of turning milk to butter (and the similar motions involved!).

I have never come across reference to a man being mentally deranged by an excess or lack of sexual release. Both of these, however, would have been considered moral or character defects.

As Thomas A. Foster argues in Sex and the Eighteenth Century Man, public manifestations of one's sexuality were a Big Deal for men in eighteenth century America. Having children, and many of them, fulfilled religious obligations and social expectations, but also served as signs of man's virility and his ability to take on the responsibilities of family. Before reaching that point, young men were expected to "sew their oats" through a certain degree of carousing and paid or unpaid sexual encounters. Inability or refusal to do anything of these things would have marked a man as a social deviant, though not necessarily pathologically so.

rcharb

I can't speak to "blue balls", but I'm a historian of science and medicine at the University of Oxford, and although my specific area of expertise isn't on 19th century medicine, I have done a bit of research into hysteria, as I'm quite interested in gender in history. In popular memory, hysteria is remembered as a uniquely female phenomena, but in reality, men were also diagnosed with hysteria. It was often a catch-all diagnosis, applied to a wide variety of symptoms, many of which were not limited to the female sex. If you're interested in a historiography of hysteria, I highly recommend reading Mark Micale's "Hysteria and its Historiography: The Future Perspective", as well as his book, Hysterical Men. For an interesting and specific case study, "Mitchell's Case of "Pendulum Spasms": Psychogenic Movement Disorder Considered as Male Hysteria" by Douglas Lanska may also be of interest to you if you want to learn more about the complicated history of hysteria diagnoses in the 19th century.

candidate0

Well humour theory was not widely accepted in the 19th century, but the male equivalent to hysteria was called melancholy. But this changed over time as well particularly after the World Wars when ideas like "shell shock" came into popular usage. Hysteria was specifically a feminine disease and even into the 20th century when it became acceptable to diagnose men as hysterics this was because these men were seen to be "effeminate" in some way. One of the first to describe male hysteria was Freud, and he was greatly criticised for this, and the idea of a male hysteric did not pick up steam until the mid-20th century.

Hysteria was a catch-all phrase for any "female" related problem, and this changed over time, so it was not specifically linked to, what Freud would call, "repressed" sexual desires until the late 19th century.

I'm not sure about blue balls, but there is a thread in medicine from Ancient Greece to the early 20th century (and in cultural practices now), where the male's act of ejaculation was seen as the man loosing his "life force" and therefore he needed to abstain from ejaculation, which I think some men still believe today. Google "semen retention" for its history- I think there's even a subreddit! But, I guess this is the opposite of blue balls and I didn't answer your question.