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The Prevalence of Hysteria and Conversion Symptoms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

James Farley ,
Robert A. Woodruff Jr.  and
Samuel B. Guze
James Farley
Affiliation:
supported by Summer Research Scholarship, U.S.P.H.S.
Robert A. Woodruff Jr.
Affiliation:
Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri, 63110
Samuel B. Guze
Affiliation:
Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri, 63110
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Extract

Since 1962, a series of studies have appeared in the psychiatric literature which define hysteria with increasing precision, differentiating that syndrome from the presence of conversion symptoms alone. Hysteria was described in a recognizable fashion more than a century ago by Briquet (1859). Some fifty years later, the syndrome was redescribed by Savill (1909). After a further period of nearly fifty years, Purtell, Robins and Cohen described hysteria as it occurred in a controlled series of patients (1951). Working from Purtell's clinical data, Perley and Guze introduced specific checklist criteria for the diagnosis of hysteria in 1962. These criteria defined a female population homogeneous in prognosis, a population to be distinguished from that defined by conversion symptoms alone. Conversion symptoms are seen in a variety of medical and psychiatric illnesses, and by themselves, conversion symptoms are of little prognostic value (Gatfield and Guze, 1962; Perley and Guze, 1962; Slater and Glithero, 1965).

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 114 , Issue 514 , September 1968 , pp. 1121 - 1125
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1968 

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References

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