Mental health is fast becoming an issue at the forefront of the public consciousness, but it has not been without struggle; history is littered with a multitude of inhumane ways those suffering from mental health issues have been treated - all you have to do is look through the history of ‘lunatic asylums’ to discover that their methods were usually cold, brutal and often detrimental to the patient.
These asylums commonly had a high volume of women within their walls; many of whom were abandoned at the gates by their husbands or other family members, as they were unable to deal with their ‘issues’ - which could have been anything ranging from mood swings and nervousness, loss of appetite, or even simple dizzy spells. The diagnosis: a bad case of female hysteria. The treatment? Well, a pelvic massage, of course!
Rachael Elizabeth explains.
Marie Wittman in a cataleptic pose taken, circa 1880.
The Queen of Hysterics
One such place where these afflicted women would be sent was the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, France. The Salpetrieire Hospital was originally a gunpowder factory until its recondition in 1656, when it was converted into a ‘hospice’ for women suffering from hysteria, epilepsy, and dementia, along with poor women and female criminals. Although it is cited as a ‘hospital’ or ‘hospice’, the Salpetrieire Hospital quickly became a notorious insane asylum, and the go-to place to dispose of women suffering from so-called ‘hysteria’. The hospital had a capacity of 10,000 “patients” and 300 prisoners - but among the women, a patient named Marie “Blanche” Wittman became the unlikely star of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot’s hysteria show.
Dr Jean-Martin Charcot was a French neurologist, and famously became known as ‘the father of neurology’. Dr Charcot would use Miss Wittman, along with other female patients, for his hypnosis shows, demonstrating his ability to induce and stop moments of hysteria. Whilst on stage, Charcot could arouse an attack of hysteria from his female host via hypnosis, and it was Wittman who became the main attraction - due to the fact she would reenact any scenario Charcot asked with an extreme display of emotion, making her audience coo with disbelief. In one such event, Charcot made Wittman believe that an image of a donkey was in fact a nude image of herself, and through her shock and embarrassment, Wittman smashed the picture.
In order to “switch off” Wittman (or the other women), Charcot would use ovary compression, as this was believed to bring them out of their hypnotic state - at first, Charcot would manually press down on the women's bodies - that is, until he invented the first ovary compression device, aptly named “the ovary compressor”.
The first demonstration of the device was on February 7, 1888, with Wittman as the hypnotized demonstrator. The straps, made from leather, would fasten around her back and the padded screws were placed over the abdomen, before being slowly tightened which would squeeze the woman's abdomen, towards the “hysteric centre”, and would magically appease their hysteric state.
The History of Hysteria
The word ‘hysteria’ is derived from the ancient Greek word ‘Hystera’ (which, loosely translated, means ‘uterus’), and it was believed that if a woman didn’t keep her uterus in check (usually by engaging in sexual encounters with her husband or by producing offspring), her uterus would angrily ‘wander around her body’ - like a naughty child throwing a tantrum - and thus cause a myriad of symptoms and diseases; but because hysteria was only thought to be caused by the womb, this “condition” was only ever attributed to women.
In the Victorian era, hysteria diagnosis was rampant, and the physicians of the time concluded that rubbing the woman’s pelvis until she reached “hysterical paroxysm” was a way to cure (or at least provide some temporary relief to) the hysteria-ridden woman and help bring the womb back to its rightful place.
The action of massaging the woman’s pelvis consisted of the physician physically performing the task himself - and although this could be construed as predatory, the act itself was supposedly never considered or intended to be sexual. Unfortunately, however, as with many archaic medical interventions, there were downsides to the procedure - it was a difficult technique to master, and could in some cases take hours to gain a successful result. The laborious task of curing a woman’s hysteria quite rapidly became a hindrance, both due to the volume of women affected, and the volume of women who needed ‘repeat prescriptions’, if you will.
In 1734, the invention of the first clock-work vibrator named the ‘Tremoussoir’ provided welcome relief to the cramping hands of the physicians, as now they had an apparatus to take the strain out of manual pelvic massages. A little later, around the early 1800s, Joseph Mortimer Granville patented the first ‘electromechanical’ vibrator; its original purpose was for the relief of muscular aches and pains for men, and he specifically stated that it should NOT be used to treat hysterical women - although many physicians began implementing the devices regardless.
Although the invention of the vibrator did help to alleviate the workload of the physicians, they were still manually using the devices to treat the women. As electricity became a growing staple in people's homes, women were now able to buy their vibrators to use in the comfort of their own home; in the 1920s, the vibrating devices began making an appearance in adult films, therefore catapulting them deep into the world of eroticism, and they were subsequently rendered obsolete by the medical community.
A Happy(ish) Ending
To our modern minds, doctors facilitating the use of a vibrator sounds ludicrous, and perhaps even ominous, but we have to remember that in the 1800s, when this was a popular topic, not one iota of the device's purpose, nor the treatment itself was intended to be sexual - in fact, physicians sometimes even used the device to help deter women who made ‘sexual forward advances’, as that behavior was also seen as an affliction.
Although it is tempting to poke fun at the historic medical blunders that seem so outlandish by today’s standards, it’s important to remember that historical sexism towards women’s ailments was a deeply troubling and disturbing time, and even though ‘hysteria’ is no longer a diagnosis, it took until the 1950s for Female Hysteria to be declassified as a mental health issue.
Even today, although thankfully vastly improved, the remnants of the dismissive attitude towards women’s health problems are still ingrained in us - a study on heartandstroke.ca details, “Women who mention stress, along with physical symptoms of cardiac disease, are more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety than men reporting the same issues”. According to the British Heart Foundation, another study has also shown that women have a fifty percenthigher chance of heart disease being misdiagnosed as anxiety-related disorders when compared with men.
Although it is easy to look back at the science of the time and laugh at its absurdness, we should also consider that they were probably trying to do the best they could with the information they had available at the time. Nowadays, we can rest assured that medical science has evolved in a variety of ways which has had an overwhelmingly positive effect on many people's lives.
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References
https://www.glamour.com/story/the-history-of-doctors-diagnosing-women-with-hysteria
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/female-hysteria_n_4298060
https://www.rti.org/insights/myth-female-hysteria-and-health-disparities-among-women
https://theamericanscholar.org/beyond-nerves/
https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/130/12/3342/285315
https://www.bestfranceforever.com/the-hysteria-show/
https://gizmodo.com/meet-the-queen-of-hysterics-who-was-freuds-early-muse-1604567867
Quackery by Lydia Kang
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3480686/
https://victorian-era.org/female-hysteria-during-victorian-era.html
https://victorian-era.org/female-hysteria-during-victorian-era.html?expand_article=1
