On a cross-country tour to promote her book Hystories, Princeton English professor Elaine Showalter was repeatedly heckled and even received death threats. Her book argues that several contemporary phenomena—chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, recovered memory, multiple personality disorder, satanic ritual abuse, and alien abduction—are hysterical epidemics with psychological rather than physical causes. Showalter reports in the London Review of Books that the sustained, coordinated effort to disrupt her book tour nationwide, as well as the death threats, came mostly from people with chronic fatigue syndrome.

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