NUMBER THEORY We’re guessing 26 is probably closer to Kapsalis’s heart.

Photo: John Corbett

Terri Kapsalis spent six years researching the history of hysteria as a medical phenomenon. The idea was to put together a reader of the various ways the diagnosis had been used in the medical field over the years. But as she readied to write an academic book on the subject, to follow up on her 1997 study of gynecology, Public Privates, her interest shifted—seismically.

“I was already turning away from critical writing and transitioning into fiction,” says Kapsalis, 41, a professor at the School of the Art Institute. “What mainly interested me were the metaphors, images, outlandish treatments and symptoms found in these medical writings.”

The result is The Hysterical Alphabet (WhiteWalls, $15), a book far removed from her original designs. The slim volume is a collection of fictionalized vignettes based on the primary sources Kapsalis had researched, but organized by letter of the alphabet. “H” tells the story of Hortensia of Hippo, a woman believed to be cursed who is “freed” via torture. “V” is for Vienna, where Sigmund Freud perfected the art of hysteria diagnosis. The book reads as an odd hybrid of historical fact embedded in fablelike fiction.

“It’s fiction, but the diagnosis was fiction,” she says. “It was medicine’s story about gender and sexuality and femaleness. So I like that conceptual play that it is a piece of fiction about something that is fiction, but which people thought was fact.”

Kapsalis’s stories are helped along by the Gorey-esque ink drawings of Chicago artist Gina Litherland. Each letter gets its own graphic treatment, adding to the feel of the book as one creepy children’s story.

The collaboration with Litherland is just one of the ways Kapsalis has pulled from various parts of her life and put them in the book. A founding member of the fringe theater outfit Theater Oobleck, Kapsalis produced a short audio version of The Hysterical Alphabet in 2007—wherein she read some of her stories set to music—before the book’s completion. She collaborated on that project with her husband, John Corbett, one of the proprietors of the excellent Corbett vs. Dempsey art gallery, where her book-release party will happen on Saturday night. (Litherland is also represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey.)

Kapsalis says all of that collaborating informed the book, adding to the lyricism in the series, which she has termed a “chronology,” rather than a history.

“I wanted to look at hysteria playfully, not through a shame-on-you history book,” she says. “But it would be a shame if people walked away saying ‘weird story’ and left it at that.”

To that end, Kapsalis provides a fairly extensive bibliography. It’s a strange juxtaposition, reading a book with illustrations of spiders with women’s heads and sentences like “What tourists wombs are,” backed up by Bernard de Mandeville’s 1711 salvo A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysteric Passions. But it does add another layer to the reading, knowing that even the most outlandish stories in the book have a basis in history—including women accused of demon possession or “cured” through genital mutilation. And at the very least, the bibliography testifies to the work that went into it.

“I spent six years researching an 80-page book,” says Kapsalis. “I guess that does seem a little silly.”

The Hysterical Alphabet launches Saturday 28.