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Posted: 21 Dec 2022

Taken: 21 Dec 2022

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OF FEAR AND STRANGERS •
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George Makari •
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Phobias

Phobias
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
The First Xenophobes

. . . . In 1871, phobia would be added . . . . when German alienist Carl Westphal en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Friedrich_Otto_Westphal wrote of a gentleman who came to him with an overwhelming terror of open spaces. The doctor suggested that this state was best named by combining the Greek word ‘probos’ with the prefix “agora,’ the place of public assembly in ancient Athens. And so “agrophobia” was born. Eight years later, another physician published case report of an otherwise healthy fellow who became giddy and confused in narrow spaces. Grabbing a Latin prefix, the doctor dubbed this “claustrophobia”

All of a sudden, a swarm of phobias seemed to menace the populace. Doctors reported cases of zoophobia, hematophobia, toxophobia, syphilophobia, monophobia, and phobophobia, the fear being frightened. Demonophobia may have seemed silly to some, but what of theophobia, the fear of death? Anxieties revolving around contamination joined social phobia, gynophobia, and lastly pantaphobia, a terror of everything. In this gathering of great frights, the neo-Grecian compound term “xenophobia” made its debut. Roget’s Thesaurus lited “xenophobia” as a synonymous “repugnance” an cross-referenced it with “hydrophobia” and “canine madness”. Its cause -- a violent shock or some strange inheritance -- never was clear. Still, the term found its way into Thomas Stedman’s influential medical dictionary, defined as the “morbid dread of meeting strangers.” A quarter of a century later, Richard Hutching’s psychiatric dictionary still listed xenophobia among its list of seventy-nine phobias. ~ Page 40

OF FEAR AND STRANGERS
18 months ago. Edited 18 months ago.

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