The universality of nerves

The focus on nerves addresses the universalist-particularist debate and illuminates the differential experience of nerves between men and women. Using illustrative materials from Mexico and the United States, the hypothesis is advanced that the experience of nerves is not a culture-bound syndrome but is embodied distress, universally experienced by all human beings. Its diffuse symptomatology signals the embodiment of generalized adversity and recreates in the internal world of the body the perceived disorder of the external world. The important task for medical anthropology is to identify the processes by which embodied distress becomes transformed differentially into specific symptomatologies along gender lines. Cross-cultural data are needed to test the proposition.