Not so very long ago medical doctors believed in some wonderful theories relating to pathogenesis, the origin, development and subsequent effects of disease. Melancholy, they thought, was caused by black bile, which was secreted by the kidneys or the spleen. Whenever a vast amount of this secretion was produced the patient would go into a deep depression and end up worrying himself to death about his health. This disease they called hypochondria, a Late Latin word from the Greek hypo, which meant under, and chondros, the cartilage of the breast-bone. The specialists in this branch of medicine thought that depression, in all its forms, originated in the region just under the breast-bone.
And take hysteria. This was thought to be a woman's ailment. The theory was that because it seemed to affect more women than men, it had its origin in the womb. Hystera is Greek for womb; the genitive gave hysterikos, of the womb, and in time, the English hysteria.
Now the ordinary man or woman-in-the-street didn't pick up these learned Greek terms for quite some time, but they got the drift of things from the physicians, and blamed hysteria on mother, an archaic term for the womb. In the fifteenth century a fit of hysteria was known as mother. Later, Shakespeare knew it as such. This is what troubled poor old King Lear when, upset by the carry-on of his daughters, he figuratively assumes what he considers their position and cries: `O, how this mother swells up towards my heart! Hysterica passio! Down, thou climbing sorrow!'
I wonder was Shakespeare familiar with a tract written a bit before his time, Andrew's Brunswyke's Distilled Waters (1527)? Contrast this with Lear's speech, above: "Dronke of the same water . . . is very good for women whose moder dooth roone upwarde to the hearte."
The jade stone was considered good for mother troubles and for other disorders. Sir Walter Raleigh mentions the stone and its use in his Discoverie of the Large and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (1596): `A kinde of greene stones which the Spanish call Piedras Ijadas, and we vse for spleene stones.'
But the idea is much older than that. The ancient Greeks had it. They considered the kind of jade we call nephrite, a cure for kidney ailments. Nephros is Greek for kidney, and nephrology is that branch of modern medicine which deals with diseases of that vital organ.