14. Female hysteria was treated in a number of imaginative ways, including electrical sex belts and vaginal massages
Female hysteria was a genuinely believed medical condition that was commonly ascribed to women exhibiting symptoms of faintness, nervousness, sexual desire, insomnia, irritability, or “a tendency to cause trouble”. Stemming once more from Ancient Egypt, the first descriptions of female hysteria date to 1900 BCE and were upheld throughout the early medicines of the Greco-Roman period; Plato’s Timaeus identifies the source as a women’s uterus, described as a living creature capable of “blocking passages, obstructing breathing, and causing disease”, whilst later scholars theorized hysteria was caused by male semen residue left in the vaginal tract after intercourse and, for a brief period during the 17th century, demonic possession. George Beard, a 19th-century physician, compiled a list of more than 75 pages of possible symptoms in an effort to discredit the spurious condition, expressing frustration that almost any ailment could be interpreted as evidence and used to incarcerate a woman in an asylum. Eventually, in 1952 the American Psychiatric Association terminated formal recognition of the so-called disease, with alternative legitimate disorders identified in place of the inane condition including borderline personality disorder, conversion disorder, anxiety attacks, and schizophrenia.
Among the many treatment options recommended to supposed sufferers of female hysteria, which also included the pumping of water into the vagina, perhaps the strangest was the alleged widespread use of professionally-applied vaginal massages. According to historian Rachel Maines, from the classical era until the early 20th century doctors frequently treated cases of female hysteria by masturbating said patients to “hysterical paroxysm”, more accurately termed orgasm; the administering of vaginal massages to treat hysteria remains a matter of historical debate, with some scholars contending the practice was not as widespread as Maines’s research suggests.