Hysteria

A comedy set in nineteenth-century London. Mortimer Granville is a young doctor. He keeps being dismissed for insisting on cleanliness and germs in hospitals. Eventually he finds work in a private practice. The practice does this: the medicine of the period counted every kind of unease in women as a single illness called hysteria and prescribed a treatment applied by hand. Demand is so high that the doctor's hand starts seizing up. The solution comes out of a friend's electrical devices. That is what the film is about: the invention, as a medical instrument, of a device everyone now knows. The second line is his employer's daughter Charlotte. She runs a settlement house for the poor, campaigns for the vote and is in constant conflict with her father. The film's real criticism arrives through her: a medicine that counted what women said as a disease. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Charlotte, Hugh Dancy the doctor and Jonathan Pryce the employer. Tanya Wexler directed. An interesting subject for anyone who likes period comedy and the history of medicine. For a viewer expecting hard criticism, the film keeps its register light and places the matter inside a romantic comedy shape.