A  history of what philosophers, poets, scholars, scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists have said about tears, tracing the changing meaning of tears throughout the years and across the continents.

Hysteria, insomnia, hypochondria, asthma, skin rashes, hay fever, premature baldness, inebriety, nervous exhaustion, brain-collapse—all were symptoms of neurasthenia, the bizarre psychophysiological illness that plagued America's intellectual and economic elite around the turn of the century.