‘The Pathology and Treatment of Mediomania’, by Frederic Rowland Marvin (1874)

During the nineteenth century there were several examples of attempts to pathologize mediumship. One of them was the work of US physician Frederic Rowland Marvin (1847–1918), who is the author of this Classic Text. The excerpt presented here comes from the second part of Marvin’s book, The Philosophy of Spiritualism and the Pathology and Treatment of Mediomania (1874). Marvin argued for a diagnosis he called ‘mediomania’, conceived by him as a neurosis of uterine aetiology that could assume epidemic dimensions. His views are consistent with nineteenth-century somatic ideas of psychopathology as well as with ideas about the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of women.