Illness as a Result of Shock

So, in the clip/movie/whatever that we watched today, it said that Woolf got sick after she got married, and the English Professor that they were interviewing seemed very sure that her nearly life-threatening illness was the result of shock, which came from her "having to become a sexual person" or some such. Now, I'm no doctor, but the level of matter-of-fact assuredness with which this was said seems out of place to me. Why is it that only literary women from the eighteenth, nineteenth,  and early twentieth centuries are susceptible to these deadly maladies? You can hardly read an Austen novel without some girl taking a walk in the rain and then getting pneumonia, or hearing that her little sister ran off with a scoundrel and then falling deathly ill, and so forth. I'd always chalked it up to Austen's poor understanding of medical science, but apparently it carries over into real life as well. I've never heard of a modern (as in, 21st century) woman falling physically ill because of "shock" or what have you, but for some reason the only time when women from a certain era find themselves sick is when there's a very obvious and recent psychological cause for it. I'm certain that books could be written commenting on what this says about the traditional view of mind and body as more connected, or comparing it to certain Buddhist philosophies, or using it to critique the drug-fixated modern medical establishment, but for some reason, no one but me sees it as in the least odd.