The concept of hysteria is one that doesn't exist in the same way anymore. It is no longer accepted as a malady of women. The condition of hysteria as an illness dates back to 1900 BCE. They found Egyptian papyrus that documented a condition where women were being difficult and weren't behaving themselves and were becoming nervous. The reason that the scientists identified these Egyptian depictions as the same thing that the Greeks later called hysteria was that they indicated that a woman's uterus or womb was moving around inside their body. This is where the term comes from. The Greek word hysteria means womb. The idea was that as the uterus migrates around a woman's body, it causes her distress. Truthfully, a woman's actual womb does not move unless her uterus is detached or prolapsed, but this idea has persisted. Socrates upheld this belief, and Plato wrote about it, likening the uterus to a living creature that wandered around the body, usually in response to smells. He called it "An animal within an animal." According to Plato, the uterus moved towards good smells and away from bad ones, which was also a way that you could get the uterus to move back to it's original position. If the uterus was too high, then the woman could put something that smelled nice lower down and the uterus would move towards it.
So, by 2nd century Rome, this idea was still widely held and Galen, who wrote a lot of medical opinions of the time, thought that women weren't freeing themselves of their "female semen" enough. This was also why hysteria began to be known as the "widow's disease", because it was thought that intercourse could relieve hysteria, so if a woman was not married and was no longer engaging in sexual activity, then she would become hysterical. That meant that if a woman did not have a husband, the physician could take care of that problem. This was known as a pelvic massage. This idea did not take hold until much later, but this is where the idea came from. That a woman's hysteria could be cured with an orgasm or a "hysterical paroxysm". This did not mean that the doctors were having sex with their patients. This was like a pelvic exam, very sterile and professional. The woman would put her legs up and was covered in a sheet and the doctor would use his hands to bring the woman to orgasm. Although, the doctors did not know that was what they were doing because it was believed until very recently that women could only have an orgasm through heterosexual, traditional sexual intercourse.
There were conflicting opinions. Soranus, known as the father of gynecology, thought that the cure was not to have sex, but instead to have a massage, take a bath, exercise, and generally relax. The Middle Ages were a bad time for medicine. At the time, everything smelled bad, and disease was thought to be transmitted by miasma or bad air, so the solution to many diseases was to make things smell less bad. Like a suppository with some potpourri in it or a salve. This was usually what doctors recommended at the time. Hysteria could have been anything that a woman exhibited that was not considered proper behavior such as nervousness, faintness, insomnia, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, disinterest in sex, over interest in sex, loss or increase in appetite, or a tendency to cause trouble. It was a catch-all for women who weren't acting the way that they were supposed to act. It was a bucket diagnosis. It didn't really mean anything, but was instead a diagnosis that covered all of the bases that doctors couldn't figure out the actual cause of. It was probably the first psychiatric disorder documented among women, and women were considered inferior and not very complicated, so they probably only had one psychiatric problem. Thus, hysteria. There were also women who were accused of having their hysteria as a result of demonic possession and were exorcised as a cure. If the treatments didn't work, then it was probably the devil.
By the 1600s, Nathaniel Highmore, an English surgeon, put together that this hysterical paroxysm was probably just an orgasm. He also said that knowing this was basically useless because achieving a female orgasm is pretty much impossible and he likened it to trying to pat your tummy and rub your head at the same time. You might as well try to catch a unicorn. Thomas Sydenham ranked it the second most common disease and said that pretty much all women were going to get it at some point in their lives. If a woman had PMS or menopause or was upset about something normal or wanted to have sex or didn't want to have sex, then she was labeled hysterical. Some things that were actual disorders like anxiety probably fell into that category as well, but they weren't going to be cured with an orgasm. The Salem witch trials were probably also linked to hysteria. This persisted until the 1800s. In 1859, they began to tease out the idea that hysteria was a nervous disorder that was brought on by the pressures of modern society on fragile female continence. Pierre Briquet thought that a quarter of women had hysteria and there was a list that contained at least 75 symptoms on it, which was considered incomplete.
In young America, as more young women were diagnosed with hysteria, it was seen as a sign that the country was becoming more modern. This point was really when they pinned the problem on the idea that women were not having enough hysterical paroxysm. The number one symptoms of hysteria were said to be erotic fantasies and vaginal lubrication. It is fascinating how this concept has shaped women's role throughout history, whether it is as this wild temptress who is prone to lead men to sin or as this fragile thing that we must protect, or the way that women are using sex as a weapon. There was a female writer of the time, Tutuila Ruggerio, who wrote that, since sex was too sinful an idea for women to engage in for their own pleasure, women should just take sedatives to calm themselves down. She prescribed that women should take some mint and musk oil and take a nap to quell their sexual desires and get over it.
Starting in the 1850s, doctors got really serious about treatment. At this point, the idea that wombs were wandering was not around anymore. This is the point where the pelvic douche was invented. It was similar to a douche that women should not be using today, except it was just to direct a stream of water towards the pelvis until the woman felt better. In 1869, there was an American physician who built the first steam-powered vibrator. It was essentially a big table that the woman was strapped to that had a hole in it with a vibrating sphere that they sat on. This was not something that she would have in her home. It was a medical device only to be used at a doctor's office under the supervision of the doctor or at the very least her husband. This was still true for the 1880s version when Joseph Mortimer Granville invented the battery powered vibrator, which weighed about 40 pounds. Physicians were thrilled because up to this point, they had been causing hysterical paroxysms manually, which they found exhausting. They said that terrible task that usually took hours now only took minutes with the help of the battery powered vibrator.
Freud got involved at this point (of course he did). In the 1890s, he and another physician named Joseph Brewer came up with the idea that doctors could use talk therapy to talk women out of their hysteria. He advised bringing up their repressed memories and their sexual needs to help them. Part of the reason that he suggested this was that he apparently wasn't very good at causing hysterical paroxysms. By the 1890s it was advertised that if you didn't have enough money to afford a battery powered vibrator, then a woman could ride a horse, ride in a carriage, or "vigorously" use a rocking chair to alleviate her own symptoms. Or they could buy an electric saddle machine, which was essentially the same as one of those quarter operated play-horse machines that can be found outside of grocery stores. By the 1900s, there were all kinds of vibrators available. In fact, by some accounts, the vibrator was the 5th home appliance to be electrified, after the sewing machine, the electric fan, the electric kettle, the toaster, and the plug-in vibrator. It beat out the vacuum and the iron by over a decade.
This whole time people are still saying that these are strictly for medical use. They advertised these machines for the whole family, although not for use in the same way. It was thought back then that any vibrations were good for people's health. Vibrators could be used to vibrate your face or your back or your arm. Vibrations were essential to a healthy life, like that machine with the belt that rubbed you and "helped you lose weight". In fact, some vibrators were marketed as weight loss machines. They were portrayed as cures for dozens of diseases, such as deafness, malaria, fatigue, and impotence. They weren't, though. None of this was real. In the first 30 years of the 20th century, the vibrator appeared in major newspaper and ads in popular magazines. They were sold in electrical shops and could be found in the Sears catalogue. By the 1920s, these machines started showing up in pornography and people started being honest about what they really were, which shoved them underground for a while. They showed back up in the 1950s, but it was a very conservative decade.
They fell out of favor and then in 1952, at long last, the American Psychological Association said definitively that hysteria was not a real disease and the term was dropped from the diagnostic catalogue. Interestingly enough, as of 2009, it is still against the law in Alabama to buy a sex toy for anything other than medical purposes. To buy one, you have to sign a waiver stating that you are going to buy and use it for medical reasons. The Hitachi company marketed its plug-in Magic Wand vibrator as a massager until 2013.
A quick note: after doctors decided that hysteria was not as a result of a wandering uterus, there were men who were diagnosed with hysteria through the years, but they were incredibly few and far between. It impacted society's view of women for centuries.
No comments:
Post a Comment