Melancholia Scytharum: the early modern psychiatry of transgender identification

Abstract

Herodotus’s enigmatic Scythian theleia nousos/morbus femininus and its Hippocratic interpretation interested many early modern authors. Its seeming dimension of transgender identification invited various medico-psychological and psychiatric reflections, culminating in nosologist de Sauvages’ tentative 1731 term, melancholia Scytharum. This article identifies pertinent discussions and what turn out to have been entangled, tentative psychologizations in late-seventeenth through mid-nineteenth-century mental medicine: of ‘effeminacy of manners’ ( mollities animi such as observed in London’s Beaux and mollies) and male homosexuality ( amour antiphysique/grec); of the mental masculinity of some women ( viragines, Amazones); of ubiquitous attributions of impotence to sorcery ( anaphrodisia magica); and lastly, of transfeminine persons encountered throughout the New World and increasingly beyond.