Terrain of terror
Social upheaval has been linked to agoraphobia, which can refer to a dread of open spaces as well as a fear of crowds
In 1871, Berlin psychiatrist Carl Otto Westphal found himself treating several men with a terror of traversing the city. One patient, a 32-year-old travelling salesman, had a dread of neighbourhoods in which the streets were deserted and the shops shut. At the edge of the city, where the houses ran out, his nerve would fail him entirely. He was disturbed by busy spaces, too, and experienced palpitations when boarding an omnibus or entering a theatre.
Westphal's study of these afflicted men led him to coin a new word to describe the condition: agoraphobia. Derived from the Greek , or marketplace, this wide-ranging term can mean a fear of social contact, of leaving one's home, of
