Most people only know, like, three things about the way mental illness has historically been treated. They know that it was often barbaric, they can picture a straight-jacket and a padded room, and they know that old-timey vibrators were sometimes used as a way to cure women* of their uterus-related ailments.
The third thing — let’s call it clinical stimulation? — is the one I get asked about the most when talking about this subject. People really want to know about the whole “treating wandering uteruses with vibrators” thing.
Let’s get into it.
In Hysterics Over Hysteria
If you’ve ever had to explain to a cis man how tampon sizing works (“s” does not mean small. I know. It’s wild.), you know exactly how mysterious reproductive organs can be, even to educated, seemingly well-informed individuals. Many cis men have never had to consider the goings on of a uterus or even had to learn how birth control works (as evidenced by the sheer number of dipshits on Twitter who think Plan B is an abortion pill).
Now scale that up by a million. Imagine that much of the medical profession is just people who look like Sam Alito, which is to say, they most likely could not find a clitoris with a map, a magnifying glass, and a guided tour. Before x-rays, genetic testing, and the notion of listening to people who menstruate about their bodies, men like the conservative justices on the Supreme Court (except Clarence Thomas) diagnosed and treated women using their own observations, suppositions, and the writing of other doctors who went to the University of Ben Shapiro Telling On Himself With His WAP Thoughts.
It’s against this backdrop that we get the diagnosis of “hysteria,” a centuries-old catch-all term for Lady Problems which, in the Victorian age, became the preferred way to explain away everything from depression to psychopathy to garden variety dissatisfaction with a boring and unempowered life. Hysteria was linked to everything from overactive humors to exhaustion to laziness to just having defective womanly bits.
In the 1770s, François Boissier de Sauvages wrote that though the cause was mental — a “change to the soul” of a woman — the symptoms were physical, including “a swollen abdomen…cold extremities, tears and laughter, oscitation [yawning], pandiculation [stretching and yawning], delirium, a close and driving pulse, and abundant and clear urine.”
For two more centuries (!!!), the diagnosis of hysteria would serve as a way to control women, whether through mental suppression or physical containment. You’ve read The Yellow Wallpaper, right? It’s like that — just gaslighting on a macro level for hundreds of years. Because the more women were told they were crazy, the crazier they got.
But it was a very familiar fellow in psychology, though, who isolated (he thought) the specific issues of hysteria: Women being broken about sex stuff.
“…until Freud, it was believed that hysteria was the consequence of the lack of conception and motherhood. Freud reverses the paradigm: hysteria is a disorder caused by a lack of libidinal evolution…and the failure of conception is the result not the cause.”
Wow. Original, Sigmund.
In a paper cowritten by Freud and Joseph Breuer, the pair detailed a handful of case studies in treating hysteria. They described the symptoms (including nausea, difficulty breathing, and what definitely sounds like a panic attack), the patient’s backstories, and how they were treated. Freud also makes the assertion that most of the issues are due to past trauma because “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.”
Freud “argued that hysteria was the conversion of psychological issues into physical symptoms, often with an element of erotic suppression.”
Naturally, the cure must be weirdly sexual too, right? He called his treatments “cathartic experiences,” and extolled the values of using them on “hysterical” women — though he cautioned against getting too close to the patients, since this kind of activity could lead to bonding or transference. What a damn freak that dude was.
Anyway, in the War On Hysteria, Freud and his disciples employed a number of techniques, including a combination of talk therapy, hypnosis, physical stimuli (like ice and heat), and yes, ~release.~
Not everyone was on the same wavelength, though. In his 1883 publication, Nerve-vibration and excitation as agents in the treatment of functional disorder and organic disease, Joseph Mortimer Granville cited vibration as the cure for everything from pain, spasms, and “morbid irritability.” However, he actively would not treat hysteria with “percussion,” because he did not “want to be hood winked, and help to mislead others, by the vagaries of the hysterical state or the characteristic phenomena of mimetic disease.”
“Science points clearly to psychical states as the bases of nervous and mental phenomena,” he wrote. “The female organism is characterized, not inaccurately, though popularly, by the phrase 'finely strung nerves.' It is literally mobile, and it is chiefly among females the phenomena of hysteria, and the allied states, are observed.”
Ladies be crazy, am I right? Out there on the prowl trying to get off, even when they were perfectly healthy and sane. RIDICULOUS.
Highway to the hysterogenic zone
So how does that get us onto the Hitachi Express? Because Freud believed that catharsis was necessary to get past the past — and he meant both mental catharsis (abreaction) and physical catharsis.
To achieve this, he would stimulate the “hysterogenic zone,” which, as it sounds, is like an erogenous zone but more medical I guess. The term was coined by (or at least made popular within the field) by Jean Martin Charcot, a French neurologist who was a contemporary of Freud. The Oxford Reference says this about the term:
According to Charcot, the patient describes them as painful but experiences sexual pleasure if they are stimulated (they function as erotogenic zones), although this can precipitate a hysterical attack.
Now, setting aside the fact that sex and sexuality were so thoroughly condemned by the Puritanical views of the Victorian era — all but ensuring that sex was rarely pleasurable for women because they weren’t encouraged to know their own bodies — the idea that manipulating the “hysterogenic zone” could relieve pain is not entirely off-balance. We now know about the brain’s ability to flood the body with homegrown feel-good drugs is pretty powerful. But not as powerful as, you know, longterm therapy for trauma.
There were plenty of doctors who were regularly using some kind of manual stimulation (“gynecological pelvic massage”) to achieve “hysterical paroxysm” i.e. orgasm, which was thought of as an aberration. Which like, I guess it still is in a lot of hetero sex, huh? Orgasm in women wasn’t necessarily seen as sexual — there was no penetration, which many, including Freud, believed was the only way a woman could experience pleasure. Instead, it was curative and viewed as another way to bring about emotional release. They literally did not see orgasms brought about by clitoral stimulation as sexual.
This manual stimulation was a lot of work for psychiatrists, not to mention a little more intimate than many wanted to get. They might shop the work out to midwives or even instruct husbands as to how to perform them. But this was labor-intensive and not always efficient. In her book, The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction, Rachel Maines wrote that "physicians seem to have been no more eager to take on the task of producing orgasm in women than were the sexual partners who sent them there for therapy.” So they tried a number of hand-saving devices. Doctors first used water — basically the Ol’ Showerhead Trick that we all learned about on LoveLine — and later, mechanical vibrators to bring about le petite morte.
From an ASU publication:
In 1869, American physician George Taylor patented one of the first medical vibrators called The Manipulator. Patients sat on a padded table with a hole cut out to reveal their lower abdomen, through which a vibrating sphere massaged the woman’s genitals. Because the apparatus was large, heavy, expensive, and coal-powered, large spas and physicians with large practices primarily purchased and maintained the devices for their guests and patients. While most historians agree that physicians of the time believed vibrators most reliably treated hysteria, they also used vibrating devices to relieve constipation, arthritis, and muscle fatigue.
COAL-POWERED.
Unlike a lot of the truly abysmal treatments that people underwent, lying on the Victorian version of a coin-operated vibrating motel bed doesn’t sound TOO bad, especially if it meant no one was actually touching the patient. As Maines points out, many women sought this treatment; those with domineering husbands who wanted to deem them “hysterical” would have preferred to get off than get locked up or locked down.
“It is certainly not necessary to perceive the recipients of orgasmic therapy as victims,” she wrote, “some of them almost certainly must have known what was really going on.”
That said, sexual touching without consent is absolutely cause for empathy — many women were brought into the offices of psychiatrists for literally no substantial reason and may have been treated against their will.
Medical vibrators started showing up in porn around the 1920s, which means that they were being used for that purpose a decade before or more. As plastic became cheaper, electronics and batteries got smaller, and marketing got more sly, “neck massagers” and other vibrators meant that women no longer had to play hysteric in order to get treatment. Yay!
But don’t get confused. If this all seems like ancient history, here’s a reminder: Hysteria remained in the DSM as a valid diagnosis until 1980. Yikes.