Hysteria treatment. Engraving of the treatment used to cure hysteria by the Dutch physician Hermann Boerhaave (1668-1738). Boerhaave (at centre) found that people suffering from hysteria (as seen here) could be calmed by making them frightened and so began threatening them with red- hot pokers. Boerhaave took a pioneering, mechanistic view of the human body and was an excellent lecturer, taking his students to patients' beds & so founded clinical teaching. The word hysteria" comes from a Greek word for uterus and was incorrectly thought to be a physical disorder affecting only women. Image of Boerhaave at work in a hospital in Leiden during 1710."