Did they used to be focused on things like the humors and stuff like that? Was hypochondria/germophobia not really a thing before germ theory? Are there any other disorders that have changed/presented differently due to new widespread knowledge about the world?
In: Biology
Hypochondria has been around a long time, but you used to be able to do more drugs about it; one of the demographics that the field of patent medicine catered to was people who thought they might have something wrong with them but didn’t have a doctor who agreed.
Germophobia obviously would not have been called that, but if you read period literature you can find characters written into novels who have a fear of miasma/foul odors, of dirt, of disease in general. I feel like the words for anxieties change as much or more than the base fears themselves do.
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