On August 14, 1872, The New York Times ran an obituary for the Mexican president Benito Juarez, who had “succumbed to the consequences of a violent attack of neurosis.”
It was one of the first times that the word neurosis appeared anywhere in the paper. First coined around a century earlier by the Scottish doctor William Cullen as “a functional derangement arising from disorders of the nervous system,” the term was a woefully imprecise one; Juarez had, in fact, died of a heart attack.
It would be a few more decades before neurosis came to be strongly associated with the field of psychology. World War I gave rise to war neurosis, now understood as post-traumatic stress disorder, while Freud’s essay Neurosis and Psychosishelped to turn it into a diagnosable condition—but even then, it remained vague, a sort of catch-all for problems of the mind.
[For more of this story, written by Cari Romm, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...health-words/412630/]
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