The History Of The Vibrator
Nathalie Angier reviews Rachel Maines' new book on an early and very important household appliance:
Electricity has given so much comfort to womankind, such surcease to her life of drudgery. It gave her the vacuum cleaner, the pop-up toaster and the automatic ice dispenser.And perhaps above all, it gave her the vibrator. In the annals of Victorian medicine, a time of "Goetze's device for producing dimples" and "Merrell's strengthening cordial, liver invigorator and purifier of the blood," the debut of the electromechanical vibrator in the early 1880s was one medical event that truly worked wonders -- safely, reliably, repeatedly.
As historian Rachel Maines describes in her exhaustively researched if decidedly offbeat work, The Technology of Orgasm: 'Hysteria,' the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Press, 1999), the vibrator was developed to perfect and automate a function that doctors had long performed for their female patients: the relief of physical, emotional and sexual tension through external pelvic massage, culminating in orgasm.
For doctors, the routine had usually been tedious, with about as much erotic content as a Kenneth Starr document. "Most of them did it because they felt it was their duty," Dr. Maines said in an interview. "It wasn't sexual at all."
The vibrator, she argues, made that job easy, quick and clean. With a vibrator in the office, a doctor could complete in seconds or minutes what had taken up to an hour through manual means. With a vibrator, a female patient suffering from any number of symptoms labeled "hysterical" or "neurasthenic" could be given relief -- or at least be pleased enough to guarantee her habitual patronage.
"I'm sure the women felt much better afterwards, slept better, smiled more," said Dr. Maines. Besides, she added, hysteria, as it was traditionally defined, was an incurable, chronic disease. "The patient had to go to the doctor regularly," Dr. Maines said. "She didn't die. She was a cash cow."
Nowadays, it is hard to fathom doctors giving their patients what Dr. Maines calls regular "vulvular" massage, either manually or electromechanically. But the 1899 edition of the Merck Manual, a reference guide for physicians, lists massage as a treatment for hysteria (as well as sulfuric acid for nymphomania). And in a 1903 commentary on treatments for hysterical patients, Dr. Samuel Howard Monell wrote that "pelvic massage (in gynecology) has its brilliant advocates and they report wonderful results."
But he noted that many doctors had difficulty treating patients "with their own fingers," and hailed the vibrator as a godsend: "Special applicators (motor driven) give practical value and office convenience to what otherwise is impractical."
...Doctors used vibrators for many non-orgasmic purposes, including to treat constipation, arthritis, muscle fatigue, inflammation laryngitis and tumors; and men as well as women were the recipients of vibratory physic. But that a big selling point for the devices was their particular usefulness in treating "female ailments" can be gleaned from catalog copy and medical textbooks at the time.
A text from 1883 called "Health For Women" recommended the new vibrators for treating "pelvic hyperemia," or congestion of the genitalia. Vibrators were also marketed directly to women, as home appliances. In fact, the vibrator was only the fifth household device to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle and toaster, and preceding by about a decade the vacuum cleaner and electric iron -- perhaps, Dr. Maines suggests, "reflecting consumer priorities."
Advertised in such respectable periodicals as Needlecraft, Woman's Home Companion, Modern Priscilla and the Sears, Roebuck catalog, vibrators were pitched as "aids that every woman appreciates," with the delicious promise that "all the pleasures of youth ... will throb within you."
Ooh, throb.
Thank heaven for modern technology.
Deirdre B. at March 10, 2005 5:04 AM
We have come so far! That was back in Crid's golden time, when people were fixated on externals, and the internal life was completely unknown.
John O at March 10, 2005 9:01 AM
I was so inspired by my vibrator that I wrote a song about it...
Goddyss at March 10, 2005 12:55 PM
Can you hum a few bars?? Lyrics?
Eric wants the buzz... at March 10, 2005 3:16 PM
Chorus:
- Doctor Doctor,
- Gimme the News....
(circa '83)
I haven't looked up the precise total yet, but the twentieth century did some other great things for American women's health (besides subverting the town doctor as sex toy), adding something like 30 years to life expectancy. And only 25 to their husband's....
John O, I don't know who you are, but it's important for you to know that hazardous people like me think conservatism's finest hour is still to come.
Cridland at March 10, 2005 8:26 PM
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