Скачать или смотреть Why Victorian Doctors Made Women Reach Orgasm as a Medical Treatment

Why Victorian Doctors Made Women Reach Orgasm as a Medical Treatment

London, eighteen fifty-nine. Miss Whitmore visits her doctor complaining of anxiety, insomnia, and irritability. Diagnosis: hysteria. Treatment: manual pelvic massage until "hysterical paroxysm." This wasn't a charlatan, but standard medical practice in the finest clinics of Europe and America.
For over two thousand years doctors treated hysteria, a disease believed caused by a wandering uterus. In the Victorian era, doctors provoked orgasms in women as medical therapy, without recognizing what they were actually doing. The belief that respectable women had no sexual desires created an enormous blind spot in medicine.
Doctor Russell Thacher Trall complained that obtaining paroxysm required over an hour of fatiguing manual stimulation. In eighteen eighty, Joseph Mortimer Granville invented the first electric vibrator to spare his hands. By nineteen hundred, vibrators were the fifth most common household appliance in American homes, advertised next to toasters.
Doctors wrote detailed clinical articles on inducing hysterical paroxysm without connecting it to orgasm. Victorian medical education completely omitted female sexuality. The clitoris was labeled as a "vestigial organ of no function." Doctor John Harvey Kellogg treated hysteria with vibrators while crusading against masturbation.
The end came in the nineteen twenties when early pornographic films showed women using vibrators for sexual purposes. Vibrators disappeared from medical offices. Hysteria was eliminated from medical texts in nineteen fifty-two. Only in the nineteen sixties did Masters and Johnson properly study female sexuality.
📚 Subscribe to discover more bizarre chapters of medical history.