What Was "Female Hysteria," Really? | Rachel Maines | Big Think

What Was "Female Hysteria," Really?

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And did the doctors who claimed to “treat” it by inducing orgasm know better? Rachel Maines reveals the truth behind the historical rumors.

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Rachel Maines:

Rachel Maines is a visiting scientist in the Cornell University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her principal research interests lie in the history of technology, especially issues relating to technology and the body, such as sexuality, medicine, technological risk, and injury epidemiology. She is the author of three books: "The Technology of Orgasm: 'Hysteria,' Vibrators, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction" (1999), "Asbestos and Fire: Technological Tradeoffs and the Body at Risk" (2005), and her most recent, "Hedonizing Technologies: Pathways to Pleasure in Hobbies and Leisure," published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2009.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What was the relationship between so-called hysteria and sexual frustration?

Rachel Maines: Well, hysteria was diagnosed by Hippocrates, as I mentioned, that's 450 B.C., so that's really quite a long time. It didn't really go out of fashion as a diagnosis, well, it was legislated out of existence in 1957 by the American, I think it's the American Psychiatric Association, but there's still a catch-all category for things. Charles Lasegue, who was a 19th century French physician, once said that, "Hysteria was the wastepaper basket of otherwise unemployed medical symptoms." And into this wastepaper basket went all sorts of thing from antiquity until, well, until Freud's time and then he put a new interpretation on it, what hysteria was, and that's the one that we kind of remember most often.

But the disease that, "disease," that is described by Hippocrates and by Thomas Sydenham, who's a, trying to remember, 17th century? He's called the English Hippocrates, a historical British physician, it really sounds like a lot more like sexual frustration, she's nervous, she has trouble sleeping, she has trouble with anxiety, she has these vague feelings of heaviness in the abdomen. And then my two favorite symptoms, you don't see this in every description, but you see them in enough to make you suspicious. One of the symptoms is sexual fantasy and the other is vaginal lubrication. And if these are symptoms, there are an awful lot of sick people out there, right? And they found a lot of sick people, they thought in the 19th century, for example, that three-quarters of all women, middle class women, suffered from hysteria. And if those are the symptoms, maybe they did.

Question: Were physicians really innocent about what they were “treating”?

Rachel Maines: In some cases it was innocence. But I wasn't even sure of my hypothesis myself until I saw the works of a fellow named Nathaniel Heimar wrote about hysteria in 1666, and he wrote it in Latin, so it's a very good thing I took that, you know, did all the classics back as an undergrad, that he said, he just calls what he's producing. He tells you all about how to do it, "Well, you know, here you get some oil, you know, and you get all, you know, greased up, and then you, you know, the fingers of this hand go in here and the fingers of the other hand go here. And then she'll get to breathe hard and then there'll be contractions and she'll get all red in the face, you know." And he just goes right on and says, "Well, it's an orgasm, you know, but it's your job to do this because you're a doctor, right? And you have to relieve the symptoms and she will feel better for a while and then she'll come back, you know, if she can afford to come to the doctor regularly." So it was a great way for a doctor to make a living, you know, these women are not really sick and they're not going to get well either, so, you know, it was, that was one of the things you notice in the 19th century, when the doctors actually write about that, that it's a good source of revenue.

But some of the doctors actually, in the 17th century, that is in Heimar’s time in Britain, Audrey Eccles, who was a British historian of medicine, has documented that there was actually a split between Protestant and Catholic doctors about whether it was really appropriate for doctors to be doing this, because they knew what was going on, at that time they did.

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