The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.
Diederik Janssen is doctoral student at the Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Janssen obtained medical (MD) and anthropological (BA) degrees and focuses on medical history, specifically its various intersections with gender/sexuality studies. He is past (co-)founding editor of two journals including Culture, Society & Masculinities (2009-2016).
What is your article “Dhat Syndrome East and West: A History in Two Acts” about?
This article explores the early history and prehistory of dhat (semen loss) syndrome, one of the most widely researched Cultural Concepts of Distress (as the DSM-5-TR has it). Dhat syndrome experts invariably refer to both ancient Ayurvedic and analogous European notions of “semen loss”. Both references merit closer inspection. The turn from somatic-hygienic to psychiatric constructions of “semen loss” evident in the mid-1950s nomination of this “culturally determined neurosis” very much recalls a similar turn in Western medicine between roughly the late eighteenth through early twentieth century. Ubiquitous nineteenth-century verdicts such as “imaginary spermatorrhea” can be cited as evidence, and help understand the post-Ayurvedic, medical-anthropological turn of Indian semen loss anxieties as an assertion of sexual modernity in replay. At the same time, this concept of distress may reflect not so much ancient Ayurveda as the enduring commercial success, rather, of an amalgamation of colonial-era Indian and European ethnophysiologies of semen.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.
I am broadly interested in the life cycle of notions of suffering and sensibility, specifically their historical emergence across the health and life sciences. Cultural biographies of purportedly discrete types of distress show health professionals and patients struggling to inhabit the conceptual apparatus they co-author during the clinical encounter. Identities (personal, professional, national) are made up during this writing process. Medical history reminds both professional and patient of their creative roles, past and present.
What drew you to this project?
Compiling a multilingual etymological dictionary of gender and sexuality studies as a side-project, I was frustrated by not being able to get hold of an often-cited but seemingly rarely read 1960 (or 1959) text by N. N. Wig (1930-2018), the purported place of coinage of “dhat syndrome”. I may have triggered some unforeseen cultural sensibilities among my contacts; in any case I am still on the lookout for this text. I was also struck by the present-day survival of the historical European term “spermatorrhea” in traditional Chinese medicine and among Ayurvedists.
What was one of the most interesting findings?
In a footnote to a 1991 article in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, Alain Bottéro (1954–2014) expressed his puzzlement over encountering a curious bit of andrological wisdom (“forty drops of blood make one drop of semen”) in both Indian sexual ethnography and eighteenth-century anti-masturbation tracts. This being an aphorism of Avicenna directs attention to the as yet poorly researched medical history of sexuality in pre-Independence India.
What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now? (Doesn’t have to be anthropological!)
I am currently hunting references to what is colloquially known as blue balls in seventeenth-century medicine, guided by the informed guess that they have to exist. For laughs, I am perusing Ernest Borneman’s hilarious Sex im Volksmund: der obszöne Wortschatz der Deutschen (2 vols., 1971).
If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?
Sexual physiology and sexual hygiene have always been two sides of the same coin, with pride and sanity awarded to conformists, and crushing hypochondria to sinners. Seminal truths (Joseph S. Alter’s expression) persist when and as long as they are profitable: markets, nations and reputations are built around them. Sometimes sexual lore is unmasked as scaremongering, creating a new market of soul-saving. And sometimes this unmasking drops out of memory so hard that it repeats itself seemingly unbeknownst to most stakeholders. In the case of dhat syndrome, this may be seen to animate the scattering of post-Independence professional identities along lines of andrological, anthropological, and psychodynamic knowledgeability.
Other places to connect:
Website
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 