Green’s Dictionary of Slang

oysterics n.

[a pun on the SE, intensified by the worries generated after bad oysters allegedly created a typhoid epidemic c.1900]

(middle class) hysterics.

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[UK]Daily Tel. 11 Nov. in Ware (1909) 190/2: Once again the public is thrown into a state of what is grimly known in the trade as ‘oysterics’, owing to reports of deaths at Portsmouth from infected oysters. It is two years since the great oyster scare followed on the deaths following the mayoral banquet at Winchester.