Hysteria is the rare emotional word that is literally about an organ.
It comes from Greek hystera, "womb," which shares an ancient root with the Latin uterus. Etymonline says medical Latin coined hysteria in 1801 as an abstract noun, for a nervous disorder thought to affect only women because of a problem in the uterus. Merriam-Webster dates English use to 1772, so the exact first year depends on the dictionary.
The adjective is older. Etymonline dates "hysterical" to the 1610s, with the sense "relating to hysteria," the nervous disorder blamed on the womb. The idea behind it is far older still.
Greek medical writers, including those of the Hippocratic collection, described a womb that could move through the body. It was thought to drift when deprived of sex, pregnancy or moisture, and to cause fainting, loss of speech and other symptoms. Aretaeus of Cappadocia called the womb "like an animal within an animal." Cures included foul smells held to the nose and sweet ones placed near the vagina, to coax the womb back into place.
Note the gap in time. The Greeks had the theory, but the word hysteria itself is a modern coinage built from their vocabulary. Calling the old theory "hysteria" is a later way of labeling it.
The meaning widened quickly. By 1839 the word described any unhealthy emotional excitement. In 1939 "hysterical" picked up the sense of "very funny."
In medicine the term faded in the twentieth century. The American Psychiatric Association's third diagnostic manual, the DSM-III of 1980, dropped hysteria as a standalone diagnosis. Its former territory was split among the somatoform disorders, histrionic personality disorder and the dissociative disorders. The personality category was called "histrionic" rather than "hysterical."
Today, "mass hysteria" survives as an everyday phrase, long after the womb was taken out of it.