I was listening to this here episode of the Histocrat on Spring Heeled Jack, and this made me realize that accounts and fiction of the time before, say, roughly the 1960s constantly portrays people as sensitive and psychologically fragile in the face of fear that would be considered very excessive today. At the extreme end, the stereotypical depiction is the woman fainting or screaming and climbing a chair at the sight of a mouse. This motif seems to have been very common in the 1950s. Was this really a common behaviour then? Or did media just pick out the few women who do act that way (there's got to be one or two in every town even today) and depicted those with preference?

But the psychological issue is more widespread when we look at accounts from even earlier times. If we are to believe novels and even newspaper articles from the 19th century, people, both men and women, get frightened into permanent institutionalization, "never regaining their wits", from seeing a spooky figure in a lane, wearing a cloak, carrying what is possibly a real live dagger twinkling in the moonlight.

Today, some people live in da hood where shootings are daily (e.g. Oakland, CA, or the Atlanta metropolitan area now - not to insult those places, but to give you an idea of what I mean). Sometimes, people witness mass shootings. Those people are surely shaken, but the psychological impact witnessing these horrible events rarely attains the heights that a shadowy figure in cloak and dagger could impress upon people's minds in 1850s London.

What's going on here? Were people really more sensitive? Why? Childhood trauma? Environmental toxins? Were they just not used to the sight of an actual violent criminal? As for the case Of Mice and Women, did they act that way because they felt it was good and proper and socially desirable to be a woman who goes through the effort of screeching and climbing onto a chair because that's cute? Or was this always just a big fat misdepiction in the media at the time?

edit: Now that I think about this more, it's possibly not only fright. Psychosomatic responses to negative emotions in general seem to have been a problem before roughly the interwar period to a degree that would make Freudianism seem plausible. For example, routinely, people come down with nonspecified "fevers" and remain bedridden for days after hearing shocking news about dark family secrets, maidens die of heartbreak when their beau is lost at sea, and so forth. Authors used to take things like this for granted. Were they the reality of people in that era? Just how is that possible that "snowflakes" were such a common phenomenon?