FOR all the 21st century’s medical expertise, societal judgements still taint illness: cancer patients are to be pitied, those with heart disease probably gorged on fatty food, and people with herpes just weren’t careful enough.

Andrew Scull‘s sharp and witty biography of hysteria, part of Oxford University Press’s new “Biographies of diseases” series, explores the history of a condition that was once practically a fashion statement, so strongly linked was it with breeding and social superiority. Its treatment ranged from the bizarre pharmacopoeia of strychnine, mercury and morphine to alpine spas and leeches on the labia.

However primitive the …