In her review of the book How the Brain Lost its Mind, Anne Harrington discusses the work of Jean-Martin Charcot on the illness known at the time as ‘hysteria’ (see Nature 572, 436–437; 2019). She does not, however, mention the earlier contribution of the French physician Pierre Briquet (1796–1881). Briquet’s treatise of 1859 is still guiding research into the condition, now known as functional neurological symptom disorder.

Charcot embraced the misogynistic pseudo-theory that neurological symptoms with no clear pathophysiology arose from problems in the patient’s uterus (hence the odious moniker ‘hysteria’, from the Greek for ‘of the womb’). By contrast, Briquet took an evidence-based approach. In an epidemiological study of 430 of his own patients, he debunked the association with the uterus by noting that the condition also affected men (P. Briquet Traité Clinique et Thérapeutique de l’Hystérie; Libraries of the Imperial Academy of Medicine, 1859); see also F. M. Mai and H. Merskey Can. J. Psychiatry 26, 57–63; 1981).

Briquet’s prescient conclusion was that ‘hysteria’ arose from the troubles of life weighing on what he called the “affective part” of the brain (as opposed to the intellectual parts) in susceptible individuals.