![]() 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. The appeal of cheaper treatment in the privacy of one’s own home understandably made the vibrator a popular early home appliance. ad with several models of vibrators.īy the turn of the century, the spread of home electricity brought the vibrator to the consumer market. In fact, the introduction of the speculum was far more controversial than that of the vibrator, perhaps because of it's phallic nature.Ī 1918 Sears, Roebuck and Co. 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. 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. 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. Ī 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. Referral to midwives, which had been common practice, meant a loss of business for the physician. The only problem was that physicians did not enjoy the tedious task of massage: the technique was difficult for a physician to master and took hours to achieve ”hysterical paroxysm”. 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. ![]() 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. 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. Victorian eraĪ 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. The prescription in medieval and renaissance medicine was intercourse if married, marriage if single, or massage by a midwife as a last recourse. This theory is the source of the name, which stems from the Greek word for uterus, hystera.Ī 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. 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. Hysteria's history can be traced back to ancient times it was described by both the ancient physician Hippocrates and Plato, although it was previously recorded in Egyptian papyri.
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