Medically Prescribed Vibrator Sessions? Sign Me Up!!

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I just watched the movie Hysteria, and my next blog will be an SSL review of that there movie. Spoiler Alert: the movie was boring as hell, but there are some interesting things to discuss about its depiction and discussion of female sexual response.  Anyway, I thought I'd just write a little primer blog about hysteria.

Basically hysteria is a broad term that was used from ancient times in Europe to describe malfunction in women. Symptoms included [from Wikipedia]

faintness, nervousness, sexual desire, 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" 

An old Victorian vibrator - probably not the first though

It was thought to be caused by a wondering uterus, so be careful of that. One of the treatments for hysteria was to have a doctor manually stimulate the genitals until the woman experienced 'hysterical paroxysm' which....was actually an orgasm. However, the doctors "believed" that, of course, women could only receive sexual satisfaction from a penis, so what they were doing had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with an upstanding and legitimate treatment for a real female ailment. Hysteria kind of hit a high point in the 1800's, and during that time [also from the ol' Wikipedia article]

Rachel P. Maines 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 vaginal massage (generally referred to as 'pelvic massage'): The technique was difficult for a physician to master and could take hours to achieve "hysterical paroxysm."

The way I see this is that some doctors probably had the right idea about how to stimulate the vulva to orgasm. They'd had good feedback from women in their lives, had a sensitive touch, and some, well, didn't. Either way, whether they knew what they were doing or not, manually stimulating women all day is gonna be rough on the hand and wrist. At my company, we would see that as an insanely serious ergonomic injury situation. You know what happened, though? The first electric vibrator (actually I think it was meant for basic muscle aches in men but was immediately misused and marketed as a vibrator) was put on the market and not only helped the physicians hands, but also got the ladies there much quicker. Thank you hysteria!