Until it was finally laid to rest in the mid-20th century, female hysteria was a favored diagnosis for physicians for a litany of symptoms. As you’d guess from its vernacular, female hysteria was a condition which afflicted women exclusively. Symptoms of this dread disease included anxiety, crying fits, surliness, and any behavior that a Victorian-era husband would find improper from his wife. Dating from Plato’s dialogues, female hysteria was assumed to be caused by the womb roving around within a woman’s body, mucking up the works. Galen, famed physician of the 2nd century, was the first to trip onto the notion that this might have something to do with female sexual satisfaction. He noted that deprivation of orgasm among healthy women brought on classic female hysteria symptoms, noting that pelvic massage often brought about beneficial results in the patient. Not a big surprise; a good orgasm can do wonders for your day.
Early treatments for female hysteria revolved around female hysteria massage; allowing the patient to achieve female sexual satisfaction was the goal of pelvic massage, but such blunt talk about orgasm wasn’t bandied about in a proper gentlemanly doctor’s office. By performing an effective female hysteria massage manually, the physician would bring his patient to orgasm, and the dreaded malady would be kept at bay—until it was time for the next treatment. Female hysteria was a gold mine. It wasn’t fatal, and early treatments for female hysteria such as pelvic massage had to be repeated frequently for the good of the patient. Still, achieving female sexual satisfaction through a pelvic massage performed by hand might be all fine and good for the patient, but it was a time-consuming process for doctors. A proper female hysteria massage required quite a bit of stamina as well. There had to be a better procedure to add to the early treatments for female hysteria—one that was effective in bringing the patient to orgasm and one that could do the job quickly and easily.
The solution? Vibrators.
The earliest vibrators were a far cry from the sleek, streamlined sex toys commonplace in the boudoir today. Truly monstrous devices, they weren’t anything that women would be likely to turn to for female sexual satisfaction today. There were hydrotherapeutic models that dispensed huge jets of water aimed straight toward the clitoris at an alarming rate, but they were guaranteed by their manufacturers to offer all of the therapeutic benefits of a manual pelvic massage in a fraction of the time. As long as the patient didn’t mind looking like a drowned rat following the treatment, all was good.
However, technology constantly improves, and with the event of rural electrification, smaller vibrators came quickly to the market for use in the home. In fact, vibrators that could run from electric current were commercially available a decade before electricity-run vacuum cleaners and irons. These relatively small devices became household fixtures—they were for therapeutic use, of course, and it wasn’t necessary to bring orgasm or female sexual satisfaction into the discussion. Doctors recommended them and that was that.
Before long, both vibrators and hysteria faded from the American scene. When vibrators became prominent in stag films, they quickly disappeared from the home. Medicine advanced, any most of the symptoms associated with hysteria were identified as specific, discrete conditions and perception of women’s sensuality progressed in the public mind. Still, female hysteria brings about a whiff of strange nostalgia—with all the peculiar early treatments for female hysteria and bizarre vibrator prototypes that went along with it.
