The intimate connection between femininity and hysteria is well known, and has given rise to an abundant literature. However, up to and prior to the nineteenth century hysteria also had its counterpart in epilepsy which was constituted as a male disease. This gendered history has been successfully sedimented over with references to the masculinity of epilepsy found only in older texts. In addition, unlike epilepsy, it is a common assumption that hysteria no longer exists as a material diagnosis in biological medicine any longer and that, rather, hysteria and its gendered association is an historical anachronism.

In this paper, however, I will point to the practices surrounding the diagnosis of ‘Epileptic seizure’ and ‘Non epileptic seizure’ in contemporary epilepsy medicine and I will trace these current practices to the construction of the epileptic and the hysteric in the nineteenth century to the work of Sigmund Freud and John Hughlings Jackson. Through their work I will identify the hysteric as having been constituted as both female and immaterial, and the epileptic as both male and fully material. Crucially, I will trace this Victorian gendering and its material effects into contemporary neuroscience