Vibrator Miscellanea

My post-doc director of training frequently reminded us that 20 years from now we'll look back at the kind of therapy we practiced and be unable to believe we practiced that way. Our ways of understanding will become more complex, new types of therapy will develop and evolve, and things that were once popular will fade into obscurity.

Let's take hysteria as an example. During a large portion of the 19th century hysteria was all the rage. Women's sexually, however, has been deemed pathological and diagnosed long before that. In her book The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction, Rachel P. Maines quotes a medical text from 1653:

When these symptoms indicate, we think it necessary to ask a midwife to assist, so that she can massage the genitalia with one finger inside, using oil of lilies, musk root, crocus, or [something] similar. And in this way the afflicted women can be aroused to the paroxym. This kind of stimulation with the finger is recommended by Galen and Avicenna, among others, most especially for widows, those who live chaste lives, and female religious, as Gradus [Ferrari da Gradi] proposes; it is less often recommended for very young women, public women, or married women, for whom it is a better remedy to engage in intercourse with their spouses.

We have the ancient Greeks to thank for the notion of hysteria. Plato thought the uterus was a living creature that wanders around a women's body. At times it can wander to the wrong area which would cause "blocking passages, obstructing breathing and causing disease." Those pesky uteri.

What are the symptoms of hysteria? They include faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and as Maines aptly writes, "a tendency to cause trouble." Ladies, if you have any of these symptoms you might need treatment.

Charcot demonstrates a case of 'hysteria' c. 1885

Thankfully, treatment options expanded quickly in the 19th century. Physicians, interested in increasing their income, looked for ways to improve tedious manual treatments. It could take hours to manually induce a hysterical paroxysm. This seriously cut into billable hours. Also, for those of you who think physicians enjoyed this--they didn't. There is no evidence that physicians of the time found this an enjoyable task. To the contrary, they found it tedious and uninteresting work. It probably would have been considered unimportant work had it not made a significant amount of income.

How is this for an interesting fact: electric vibrators were first used in medicine in 1878 and were made available as a consumer product by 1900. The first appliances (in order) electrified: sewing machine, fan, teakettle, toaster, and electric vibrator. It took another ten years until the electric vacuum, iron, and frying pan were consumer products that were available for purchase. This tells you a little something about what made money at that time (businesses will develop products most likely to sell) and thus, what people considered important. Hysteria was big business.

Vibrators were so widely available they could be purchased for home treatment (medical use only, please!) from the Sears catalog:

We also have an advertisement from a 1913 edition of the New York Times:

Curious for even more images? Check out the vibrator museum. There is a collector for everything, isn't there? I wonder how many accidental electrocutions there were from these contraptions.

Cabinet Card Gallery

Curious why a fainting couch appears here on this post? It appears that these Victorian ladies, reclining on their fainting couches experiencing "the vapors," were actually having a personal physician apply the appropriate treatment for hysteria. Who knew? I certainly never did.

Back to Maines book one last time:

Hysterical women represented a large and lucrative market for physicians. These patients neither recovered nor died of their condition but continued to require regular treatment. Russell Thacher Trall and John Butler, in the late nineteenth century, estimated that as many as three-quarters of the female population were "out of health," and that this group constituted America's single largest market for therapeutic services. Furthermore, orgasmic treatment could have done few patients any harm, whether they were sick or well, thus contrasting favorably with such "heroic" nineteenth-century therapies as clitoridectomy to prevent masturbation. It is certainly not necessary to perceive the recipients of orgasmic therapy as victims: some of them almost certainly must have known what was really going on.

And now back to my point. We forget in our current modernity that we all all one day be obsolete. While we might not be applying "vibration" to heal the wounds and maladies of our day, our current notions of sanity and insanity are as tightly wound with the Zeitgeist of 2011 as they were in 1900. 

The vibrating doctors meant well--at least most of them probably did. We mean well, too. We do the best we can with the knowledge and understanding of the world that is currently available to us. Too bad only a few of us have figured out that some certain portion of what we call therapy now will sound ridiculous in another 100 years.


 (Not to mention the aspects of therapy that already sound ridiculous but clung to to by a some ardent believers of different kinds of historical therapies).

By the way, apparently Maggie Gyllenhall is staring in the upcoming movie "Hysteria" that was recently screened at the Toronto Film Festival