The title here “A brief discourse of a disease called the Suffocation of the Mother” is really misleading. Not a tract about matricide, instead it was the first English publication (1603) on hysteria — thought to be a disease that only infected women.
And it’s pretty messed up from every angle. For instance, the intent of the author — a physician named Edward Jorden — was genuinely well intentioned, and grounded in rejecting religious superstition and embracing science for the sake of a wrongly accused woman.
The woman was one Elizabeth Jackson, and she had been accused of bewitching another woman called Mary Glover. Jorden argued the accusation was groundless. Elizabeth Jackson was no witch, but rather — according to Jorden — was the unfortunate victim of hysteria.
In the Ancient Greek tradition, a woman’s womb (the term hysteria etymologically comes from the Greek word for womb, which Jorden calls “the mother”, because Freud) could go terribly wrong. As Jorden tells, it might bob around her body, bumping into her organs and causing a type of insanity: “the womb can cause ‘suffocation in the throate, croaking of Frogges, convulsions, hickockes, laughing, singing, weeping, crying . . .”.
Oh, dear. Jorden wrote that hysteria disproportionately affected single women — virginal maidens and widows — because they don’t have sex and apparently that sets one’s womb all a-quiver.
Jorden was unsuccessful in getting the accusation of bewitchment overthrown. However, the diagnosis of hysteria as a sort of catch-all for female maladies lasted for hundreds of years afterwards.
Sources: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/first-english-book-on-hysteria-1603#:~:text=This%20unsettling%20little%20book%2C%20A,first%20English%20work%20on%20hysteria
