The idea that doctors used vibrators to masturbate women for hysteria can be traced back to a book called The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction. Published in 1999, it was written by the historian of technology Rachel Maines, now a visiting researcher at Cornell University in the US.
“From what I knew of the history of sexuality, it sounded unlikely that doctors would be doing this,” says Hallie Lieberman, a historian of technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and one of the paper’s authors. “When I checked the [book’s] sources, that was when I first really thought, okay, there’s something up with this.”
Lieberman proposes an alternative view. Yes, mechanical devices known as ‘vibrators’ – and advertised as back or neck massagers – were being used by women in intimate ways as early as the 1900s and 1910s. But there’s no evidence that that was the case prior to 1900, when vibrators were being marketed to physicians, not directly to consumers. And it certainly wasn’t the case that doctors, unaware of what the female orgasm really was, were using these devices to cure women of their hysteria.
Maines cites five sources towards the start of the book to back up her claim that doctors commonly used vibrators “especially in gynaecological massage”. But several of these sources don’t back up this claim. One doesn’t mention vibrators, hysteria or gynaecological massage at all – in fact, the passage referred to is about treating period pains with electrical currents. The author stresses that for patients with period pains “complete absence from sexual excitement is of the highest importance”.
Another of the sources makes no mention of hysteria, massage or vibrators. A third also makes no mention of gynaecological massage, only general massage, and the term ‘vibrator’ doesn’t appear anywhere in the book. Throughout the book, Lieberman found this pattern repeated over and over.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181107-the-history-of-the-vibrator
This is one of those topics where it’s hard to pin down what the claim/counter-claim actually is or how to prove/disprove it. Dealing specifically with the text, one can check if a claim is clearly substantiated or not by the sources as phrased, but:
ReplyDelete1. there may be an oral tradition (sorry) that the author’s interpretation relies on;
2. records may be euphemistic or encoded;
3. perhaps there were some doctors providing services off the books (perhaps there are now);
4. the author may simply have read a source differently from the reviewer.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, I’m just here to say that debunking is commonly subject to all the same problems as the thing it debunks.
....and I strongly suspect that some doctor somewhere some time made off-label use of a vibrating massager, while also suspecting that this wasn’t common practice.