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Problems with existing[edit]

Maines' book[edit]

Chapter 1[edit]

  • http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/maines-technology.html
  • "As Forestus suggests here, in the Western medical tradition genital massage to orgasm by a physician or midwife was a standard treatment for hysteria, an ailment considered common and chronic in women" (p. 1)
  • However King criticises this: "She presents the passage given there as his advice for cases of “the affliction commonly called hysteria... and known in his volume as praefocatio matricis or ‘suffocation of the mother’”147. In fact, as the translation makes clear, this is not – as Maines presents it – a summary of “a standard treatment for hysteria”, but a specific case history – an observatio – from 1546 of a 44-year-old widow with suffocation of the womb due to retained seed."
  • "When the vibrator emerged as an electromechanical medical instrument at the end of the nineteenth century, it evolved from previous massage technologies in response to demand from physicians for more rapid and efficient physical therapies, particularly for hysteria. Massage to orgasm of female patients was a staple of medical practice among some (but certainly not all) Western physicians from the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s, and mechanizing this task significantly increased the number of patients a doctor could treat in a working day." (p. 3)
  • "Because the androcentric model of sexuality was thought necessary to the pro-natal and patriarchal institution of marriage and had been defended and justified by leaders of the Western medical establishment in all centuries at least since the time of Hippocrates, marriage did not always "cure" the "disease" represented by the ordinary and uncomfortably persistent functioning of women's sexuality outside the dominant sexual paradigm. This relegated the task of relieving the symptoms of female arousal to medical treatment, which defined female orgasm under clinical conditions as the crisis of an illness, the "hysterical paroxysm." In effect, doctors inherited the task of producing orgasm in women because it was a job nobody else wanted." (p. 3-4)
  • "There is no evidence that male physicians enjoyed providing pelvic massage treatments. On the contrary, this male elite sought every opportunity to substitute other devices for their fingers, such as the attentions of a husband, the hands of a midwife, or the business end of some tireless and impersonal mechanism. This last, the capital-labor substitution option, reduced the time it took physicians to produce results from up to an hour to about ten minutes." (p. 4)
  • "Since no penetration was involved, believers in the hypothesis that only penetration was sexually gratifying to women could argue that nothing sexual could be occurring when their patients experienced the hysterical paroxysm during treatment" (p. 10)
  • "when the vibrator, used in physicians' offices since the 1880s, began to appear in erotic films in the 1920s, the illusion of a clinical process distinct from sexuality and orgasm could not be sustained" (p. 10)
  • "The electromechanical vibrator, invented in the 1880s by a British physician, represented the last of a long series of solutions to a problem that had plagued medical practitioners since antiquity: effective therapeutic massage that neither fatigued the therapist nor demanded skills that were difficult and time-consuming to acquire. Mechanized speed and efficiency improved clinical productivity, especially in the treatment of chronic patients like hysterics, who usually received a series of treatments over time. Among conditions for which massage was indicated in Western medical traditions, one of the most persistent challenges to physicians' skills and patience as physical therapists was hysteria in women. This was one of the most frequently diagnosed diseases in history until the American Psychiatric Association officially removed the hysteroneurasthenic disorders from the canon of modern disease paradigms in 1952." (p. 11)
  • "As we have seen, manual massage of the vulva as a treatment for hysteria or "suffocation of the mother" is continually attested in Western medicine from antiquity through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation and well into the modern era. I have already quoted Forestus's 1653 description of the basic manual technique, which seems to have varied little over time except in the types of lubricating oils. Medical descriptions of this procedure were more or less explicit in their instructions to doctors, according to the temperament of the author. A few, like Forestus and his contemporary Abraham Zacuto (1575—1642), expressed reservations about the propriety of massaging the female genitalia and proposed delegating the job to a midwife. The main difficulties for physicians, however, were the skills required to properly locate the intensity of massage for each patient and the stamina to sustain the treatment long enough to produce results. Technological solutions to both problems seem to have been attempted fairly early in the form of hydrotherapeutic approaches and crude instruments like rocking chairs, swings, and vehicles that bounced the patient rhythmically on her pelvis." (p. 12)
  • "The social camouflage of the vibrator as a home and professional medical instrument seems to have remained more or less intact until the end of the 1920s, when the true vibrator (but not massagers or electrotherapeutic devices) gradually disappeared both from doctors' offices and from the respectable household press. This may have been the result of greater understanding of women's sexuality by physicians, the appearance of vibrators in stag films in the twenties, or both. Electrical trade journals of the period did not mention vibrators or report statistics on their sale as they did for other medical appliances. When the vibrator reemerged during the 1960s, it was no longer a medical instrument; it had been democratized to consumers to such an extent that by the seventies it was openly marketed as a sex aid. Its efficacy in producing orgasm in women became an explicit selling point in the consumer market. The women's movement completed what had begun with the introduction of the electromechanical vibrator into the home: it put into the hands of women themselves the job nobody else wanted." (p. 20)

ch 2[edit]

  • "The term 'hysteria' comes from a Greek word meaning simply 'that which proceeds from the uterus.'" (p. 21)
  • Hysteria [in antiquity and the middle ages] ... was thought to be a consequence of lack of sufficient sexual intercourse, deficiency of sexual gratification, or both." (p. 23)
  • "Hysteria appears in the medical corpus as early as 2000 B.C. in Egypt, but it was not until the time of Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C. that the Western clinical definition of the disorder began to take shape. In the Hippocratic corpus, hysteria is a disease of the womb, treatable with exercise and massage.8" (p. 23) (Though King 2011 disputes this)
  • In the next few pages Maines gives various examples from ancient medical literature of hysteria and the recommended massage treatment, e.g. Galen
  • "By the time of Celsus and Soranus in the first century A.D., genital massage and exercise, usually passive, were standard prescriptions for hysteria.9 Soranus advocated manipulating the groin and public area: 'We ... moisten these parts freely with sweet oil, keeping it up for some time.'" (p. 23) (King disputes that Soranus' advice was akin to masturbation, or that it led to orgasm)
  • "Galen (ca. A.D. 129 - 200), the physician's physician for centuries after his death, described hysteria as a uterine disease caused by sexual deprivation, to which passionate women were particularly susceptible. This theme of female sexuality as pathology was to reappear in various forms in later centuries. He describes in detail a genital massage therapy, resulting in contractions and the release of a fluid from the vagina, after which the patient was relieved of her symptoms. His account is literally the classic description of massage therapy for hysteria, which was to be repeated almost verbatim in later texts and to be regarded as therapeutic gospel in some medical circles until the end of the nineteenth century. Rudolph Siegel's translation has often been quoted: 'Following the warmth of the remedies and arising from the touch of the genital organs required by the treatment, there followed twitchings accompanied at the same time by pain and pleasure after which she emitted turbid and abundant sperm. From that time on she was free of all the evil she felt.'12" (p. 23)
  • However King criticises this, saying it's not clear that Galen is specifically advocating genital massage to treat hysteria
  • "Medieval texts rarely called the disorder in question 'hysteria', although it retained its character as a disease of the uterus" (p. 24)
  • "Abraham Zacuto (1575 - 1642), called Zacutus Lusitanus, endorsed in his Praxis Medica Admiranda of 1637 the standard medical view that marriage was best for hysterics but that friction of the vulva by a physician or midwife could be employed if the preferred treatment failed." (p. 28)
  • "Zacuto expresses concern about whether 'God-fearing physicians' ought really to perform such procedures and concludes that they are acceptable when women are in danger of death from hysteria." (p. 29)
  • "Of all the seventeenth-century physicians who wrote on hysteria, the most matter-of-fact and morally unabashed was Nathaniel Highmore, whose De Passione Hysterica et Affectione Hypochondriaca of 1660 is one of the few medical works in Western history to straightforwardly call the hysterical paroxysm an orgasm. He describes the engorgement of the female genitalia with blood during the arousal stage and the accompanying release of vaginal fluids. The paroxysm, he observes, constricts the blood vessels during the 'crisis' and returns the blood to the central organs. Both his description and the word he uses - orgasmum, which has only one meaning in Latin - leave no doubt that he fully understands the sexual character of the release the patient experiences in the hysterical paroxysm.37" (p. 32)
  • "Some physicians questioned the propriety of vulvular massage; Thomas Stretch Dowse in 1901 quoted the nineteenth-century author Douglas Graham, who said that 'massage of the pelvic organs should be intrusted to those alone who have 'clean hands and a pure heart.'49" (p. 35)

Ch. 3 - My God, what does she want?[edit]

  • "Ancient physicians as a rule had little to say on the subject of female orgasm, except to debate whether it was necessary for conception. Writings attributed to Aristotle, though probably not written by him, noted that women often have difficulty reaching orgasm in coitus." (p. 51)
  • "In Tudor and Stuart England, prevailing medical beliefs were that orgasm was necessary for conception, that lack of sexual satisfaction, following Galen's teaching, caused unhealthful imbalances in the humors, and that orgasm provided an incentive for women to risk their lives in pregnancy.16 Many works of this era discussed the role of the clitoris as the principal locus of sexual pleasure." (p. 52)
  • "The femininst and medical radical Edward Bliss Foote, who has been recently imprisoned for dispensing contraceptives, in 1901 took husbands to talk for failing to understand their wives' sexual needs. He said that when the husband is brutish and insensitive, women are sexually unresponsive ... Like his colleagues, however, Foote considered coitus the norm for sexuality and did not approve of masturbation for either sex" (p. 54)
  • "Even doctors who understood the function of the clitoris did not want to give up the comforting notion of female orgasm in coitus ... Many physicians warned against manipulation of the clitoris, either by husbands or by the women themselves." (p. 55)

Ch. 4 - Inviting the juices downward[edit]

  • "In a discussion of electromedical technologies new in his day, in 1903 Samuel Howard Monell effectively summarized the demand of physicians since Hippocrates for some simple means of getting results with their hysterical patients: 'Pelvic massage (in gynecology) has its brilliant advocates and they report wonderful results, but when practitioners must supply the skilled technic with their own fingers the method has no value to the majority.' For physicians in this line of work, the vibrator was a godsend: 'Special applicators (motor driven) give practical value and office convenience to what otherwise is impractical.'1" (p. 67)
  • "As I mentioned earlier, at no time did physicians show any real enthusiasm for treating hysteria in their women patients. All the evidence points to their having generally considered it a tedious, difficult, and time-consuming chore and having made efforts to delegate the task to subordinates or machines even in ancient and medieval times." (p. 67-68)
  • "In 1734 one Abbé St. Pierre is reported to have invented a mechanical predecessor to the vibrator called a trémoussoir, but little is known about the use and configuration of this device.4" (p. 68)
  • "As I indicated in chapter 2, massage of the vulva was a somewhat controversial practice among physicians after the medieval period, despite the treatment's venerable history. In the nineteenth century, the conflict and ferment of ideas about women and their physicians brought these debates into unaccustomed prominence." (p. 70)
  • "George Massey, a well-known American physician who was actively involved in the development of the electrotherapeutics, nonetheless considered 'massage with the hand as the only efficient method' of treating hysterical women, 'rejecting all machinery, muscle-beaters, etc., as either but poor substitutes for the hand of the masseur or as presenting an entirely different therapeutic measure.'10" (p. 71)
  • "The famous Father Sebastien Kneipp [1821 - 1897], another European hydropath, set great store by the use of pumped water aimed at the pelvis as a treatment for female complaints.25" (p. 74)
  • Maines then gives more examples of the popularity of the douche at spas among women. "Mary Gove Nichols wrote that the douche 'is a very exciting application, acting powerfully upon the whole system,' recommended as a way of reducing congestion caused by 'excessive indulgence of amativeness,' in the form of either intercourse or masturbation.50" (p. 79)
  • "Joseph Mortimer Granville, father of the modern electromechanical vibrator, briefly summarizes the history of his invention" (p. 91)
  • "Alphonso Rockwell reports that electromechanical vibrators were first used in medicine in 1878, at that nineteenth-century Mecca of physical therapies, the Salpêtrière in Paris. Significantly, their first use was on hysterical women.123 Some controversy must have been associated with this practice, since the English physician and inventor Joseph Mortimer Granville, in his 1883 book on vibrator therapy, seems somewhat defensive about the issue:'I should here explain that, with a view to eliminate possible sources of error in the study of these phenomena, I have never yet percussed a female patient [with a vibrator] ... simply because I do not want to be hoodwinked ... by the vagaries of the hysterical state'" (p. 94)
  • "Despite his disclaimer about percussing women, Mortimer Granville tells us that this theoretical understanding was arrived at 'in connection with the paroxysmal, or recurrent, pains accompanying the uterine contractions in the natural process of parturition.'139" (p. 99)
  • "Mortimer Granville asserts his priority in the invention, although Felix Henri Boudet claimed this honor for Vigouroux of the Salpêtrière" (p. 94)
  • "There was a brief rash of publications on the subject, advocating the use of 'vibrotherapy' for a variety of ailments in women and me, including arthritis, constipation, amenorrhea, inflammations, and tumors.127 At English and French hospitals in Serbia, some wounded World War I soldiers received vibrotherapy.128" (p. 94)
  • "Physicians clearly had an interest in maintaining their professional dignity, even as they sought methods of treating such 'elusive' disorders as hysteria with therapies that would attract repeat business to their examining rooms. In some locations they faced competition with beauty parlous, which began using vibrators early in the twentieth century" (p. 99)
  • "The earliest advertisement for a home vibrator I know of is for the 'Vibratile,' which appeared in McClure's in March 1899, offered as a cure for 'Neuralgia, Headache, Wrinkles.'143" (p. 100)
  • Advert for the Bebout Vibrator: "Gentle, soothing, invigorating and refreshing. Invented by a woman who knows a woman's needs." (p. 101)
  • "Popular magazines of the period accepted advertising for them but rarely mentioned them in editorial matter. Two exceptions are a one-liner in the June 1908 Review of Reviews, which cautions readers against 'imprudence' and 'excess in action' when using vibrators" (p. 102-3)
  • She gives many more examples. You can't really tell though if the adverts are implying sexual use or just normal massage
  • "Roger Blake, admittedly not the most reliable of historians, calls vibrators the 'oldest sex gadget of the twentieth century', and mentions the appearance of the vibrator in erotic films in the 1920s." (p. 108)
  • "Vibrators may not have been advertised in respectable publications, at least in the United States between about 1930 and the 1970s, but they must have been available. Albert Ellis does not seem to think, in 1963, that his readers will require any explanation of the assertion that one of the many techniques of arousing women to orgasm is 'massage of their external genitalia with electric vibrators.'171" (p. 109)

Ch. 5 - Revising the androcentric model[edit]

  • "In 1848 the French author Auguste Debay wrote that women should fake orgasm because 'man likes to have his happiness shared.'15" (p. 117)
  • "In the second half of this century the vibrator has become an overtly sexual device." (p. 121) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mabandalone (talk • contribs) 17:26, 10 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Writings opposing Maines[edit]

Helen King 'Galen and the Widow'[edit]

- "Here is the Roman Catholic physician François Ranchin, writing in 1600: 'Very serious and extremely important is the difficulty mentioned, namely whether one is allowed to rub women or handle their parts in their hysterical paroxysm. Those who approve do not lack authorities and arguments. First Galen puts forth the story of some widow restored to health by a midwife inserting her finger in her womb and thus evacuating her semen. From this grew the practice that most [women] use instruments skillfully hollowed out and similar in form to the male penis in order to provoke voluntary pollution and guard against hysterical symptoms. Secondly, Avicenna recommends that midwives insert a finger into the vulva and rub it diligently until the seminal material is expelled143.' Ranchin, however, did not “approve”, at least for virgins; as far as older women were concerned, it was on their consciences rather than on those of their physicians144. The distinction between treatment for virgins and for mature women is commonly drawn; for example, in Houlllier, the midwife’s finger touches the os uteri in virgins, but in other women it passes into the womb145"

Granville's book (Nerve-vibration and excitation as agents in the treatment of functional disorder and organic disease)[edit]

Introduction[edit]

  • "The system or method of treatment which I am anxious to bring under the very serious consideration of the profession consists in the application of the laws of physical, or mechanical, vibration as they affect ordinary substances, to the interruption and change of morbid states of the vibratile organism. The apparatus by which the desired movements are produced is altogether secondary in importance to the principle itself. I use percussion ; others may use vibratory instruments which do not percuss the tissue, but communicate their own vibrations to the organism by simple continuity. This I take to be the method adopted by M. Boudet de Paris, who more than two years after my percuteurs were in the hands of leading physiologists and therapeutists, published a paper in Le Progres Medical, wherein he set forth views and described a method differing in several important particulars from my own, but practically embodying the same idea." (p. 14-15)
  • "The action of metallic applications — metallo-therapy — of which we have heard so much in the last few years, was best explained on the theory of vibrations by Vigouroux, who proceeded to experiment upon the effect of sonorous vibrations, which he thought might have a direct mechanical effect upon the sensory nerves. By the aid of a large tuning fork and sounding-board he caused hemianesthesia to disappear, and provoked contractions in hysterical subjects at la Salpetriere, as rapidly as with the magnet or electricity. The pains of an ataxic were subdued when his legs were brought under the influence of these sound-waves. M. Boudet de Paris then thought this might be applied locally over a nerve — the sonorous being changed to mechanical vibrations by means of a small button attached to the resonater, and applied over the nerve. He therefore contrived a small apparatus consisting of an electrically mounted tuning fork, the vibrations of which were transmitted to a rod which could be easily applied over a nerve. In a healthy man this mechanical excitation produced rapid local analgesia, often anaesthesia, the maximum effect being produced by application over a nerve which could be compressed on a bony surface." (p. 16-17)
  • "As far back as 1862-3, I was, in the course of certain clinical studies of mental and sensory phenomena, induced to believe that many forms of the sensation we call ' pain' were in fact, unnecessary, and might be interrupted by appropriate mental and physical methods and appliances. My first observations were made in connection with the paroxysmal, or recurrent, pains accompanying the uterine contractions in the natural process of parturition." (p. 20)
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