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Dark Victorian Age Secret
Recently I discovered a dark secret of the Victorian age which remained in our Christian culture all the way until around the 1940's or 1950's.
While women were encouraged to withhold sex from their husbands, they could go to the doctor who would masturbate them to climax.
Female hysteria was an incorrectly diagnosed medical condition in Western medicine that is not currently acknowledged by the medical community. It was a popular diagnosis in the Victorian era for a wide array of symptoms including faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and a "tendency to cause trouble".
Patients diagnosed with female hysteria would undergo "pelvic massage" — manual stimulation of the woman's genitals by the doctor to "hysterical paroxysm", which is now recognized as orgasm.
Hysteria's history can be traced back to ancient times; it was described by both the philosopher Plato and the physician Hippocrates, in ancient Greece, and was earlier recorded in Egyptian papyri. An ancient Greek myth tells of the uterus wandering throughout a woman's body, strangling the victim as it reaches the chest and causing disease. This theory is the source of the name, which stems from the Greek word for uterus, hysteria.
A prominent physician from the second century, Galen, wrote that hysteria was a disease caused by sexual deprivation in particularly passionate women: hysteria was noted quite often in virgins, nuns, widows, and occasionally married women. The prescription in medieval and renaissance medicine was intercourse if married, marriage if single, or massage by a midwife as a last recourse.
A physician in 1859 claimed that a quarter of all women suffered from hysteria, which is reasonable considering that one physician cataloged 75 pages of possible symptoms of hysteria and called the list incomplete; almost any ailment could fit the diagnosis. Physicians thought that the stresses associated with modern life caused civilized women to be both more susceptible to nervous disorders and to develop faulty reproductive tracts. In America, such disorders in women reaffirmed that the United States was on par with Europe; one American physician expressed pleasure that the country was ”catching up” to Europe in the prevalence of hysteria.
Rachael P. Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction, has observed that such cases were quite profitable for physicians, since the patients were at no risk of death but needed constant treatment. The only problem was that physicians did not enjoy the tedious task of massage: the technique was difficult for a physician to master and could take hours to achieve ”hysterical paroxysm”. Referral to midwives, which had been common practice, meant a loss of business for the physician.
A solution was the invention of massage devices, which shortened treatment from hours to minutes, removing the need for midwives and increasing a physician's treatment capacity. Already at the turn of the century, hydrotherapy devices were available at Bath, and by the mid-nineteenth century, they were popular at many high-profile bathing resorts across Europe and in America. By 1870 a clockwork driven vibrator was available for physicians, and in 1873 the first electromechanical vibrator was used at an asylum in France for the treatment of hysteria.
While physicians of the period acknowledged that the disorder stemmed from sexual dissatisfaction, they seemed unaware of or unwilling to admit the sexual purposes of the devices used to treat it. In fact, the introduction of the speculum was far more controversial than that of the vibrator, perhaps because of its phallic nature.
A 1918 Sears, Roebuck and Co. ad with several models of vibrators. By the turn of the century, the spread of home electricity brought the vibrator to the consumer market. The appeal of cheaper treatment in the privacy of one's own home understandably made the vibrator a popular early home appliance. In fact, the electric home vibrator was on the market before many other home appliance 'essentials': nine years before the electric vacuum cleaner and ten years before the electric iron. A page from a Sears catalog of home electrical appliances from 1918 includes a portable vibrator with attachments, billed as ”Very useful and satisfactory for home service.”
It has been argued that a major theme of the nineteenth century is the conflict between sex as a reproductive act and an erotic act. Although the icon of the period, Queen Victoria, had a large family, reproductive rates actually declined over the course of the century. As these rates declined, the reproductive purpose of sex became less central. Much of the medical and marital advice literature of the period prominently featured the passionless woman as an ideal. The "ideal" woman would engage in sex only in order to reproduce, as it was supposed to hold no other allure for her. This "ideal" influenced the social structure in many ways, including providing a basis for arguments against contraception. However, at the same time, it resulted in sexual dissatisfaction in many women, fueling the increased demand for treatment of hysteria.
Today, after the Clinton era, I suppose we would have to say the doctors who treated hysteria were having sex with their female patients - since they masturbated them to orgasm.
It seems very hard to believe that husbands were not aware that their wives were being brought to an orgasm by the doctor. I don't think married men are that naďve. So I would assume married men were aware that their wife was being turned on by the doctor and brought orgasm when she went to the doctor for hysteria.
So why did a married man allow his wife to go to a doctor who basically had sex with her? Possibly because married men like to give their wife sexual favors. This same reason may be why Abraham pawned his wife off as his sister for long periods of time, while secretly meeting for romance with her. Possibly the married men were appeasing their consciences because they frequented prostitutes or they had a concubine or secret lover on the side. I don't really know the answer to why men allowed their wives to go to the doctor to be masturbated to orgasm. But it is interesting that I find no record that the Christian culture condemned this practice of women having sex with the doctor.
(Portions of the text above were used from the following link and may be reused under the GNU Free Documentation License:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria)
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