Read The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction Online
Authors: Rachel P. Maines
Tags: #Medical, #History, #Psychology, #Human Sexuality, #Science, #Social Science, #Women's Studies, #Technology & Engineering, #Electronics, #General
24
. “Changing Sexuality in a Changing Society: The Hite Reports,” in Organization of American Historians and National Council on Public History, 1986
Program
(New York: OAH, 1986), 50.
25
. This seems to be true even in visual representations of my research. See, for example, John Orentlicher’s video,
Misaligned Shafts
(Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Art Department, 1989).
26
. Edward Kelly, “A New Image for the Naughty Dildo?”
Journal of Popular Culture
7, no. 4 (1974): 808.
27
. A version of this appears in Roz Warren’s
Glibquips: Funny Words by Funny Women
(Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1994), 103.
28
. Michael Adas,
Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).
29
. Dianne Grosskopf,
Sex and the Married Woman
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 119.
30
. Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’”
Technology and Culture
27, no. 3 (1986): 545.
NOTE ON SOURCES
In preparing this book I consulted over five hundred works. Readers will be relieved to learn that I do not propose to describe them all but only intend to sketch the outlines of my own journey through the various literatures that bear on the histories of medicine, technology, and sexuality. I am often asked if I did not have great difficulty locating material. It is certainly true that the secondary literature of vibrators is very small, but I was virtually buried in primary material on medicine and sexuality. After more than ten years dedicated to tracking down and reading obscure (and not so obscure) references, I still feel that I have barely chipped the surface of the vast iceberg of Western medical literature. The pre-1750 strata of this imposing mass are submerged in untranslated medical Latin, a language for which even a former classics major like me is unprepared. Arnaldus of Villanova (d. 1311) and Hermann Boerhaave (1668–1738) certainly wrote in Latin, but theirs is not the language of Virgil and Cicero.
In selecting from this vast body of work, I have attempted to survey the Who’s Whos of hysteria included in major modern works on the subject, particularly Ilsa Veith’s
Hysteria: The History of a Disease
(1965), George Wesley’s
History of Hysteria
(1979), and Phillip Slavney’s
Perspectives on “Hysteria”
(1990), plus a few items mentioned by Havelock Ellis. Audrey Eccles provides valuable background on some of the gynecological sources in her
Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England
(1982). Most of the medical luminaries in the hysteria-gynecology galaxy are better known for other contributions: Aretaeus Cappodox, Soranus, Celsus, Avicenna, Rhazes, Rivière, Boerhaave, Harvey, Cullen, Galen, Haller, Zacuto, Paré, Mandeville, Paracelsus, Pinel, Rodrigues de Castro, and Sydenham are all names to
reckon with in medical history. There are, however, a great many lesser lights who wrote on hysteria and other disorders of women but whose works are available only in large libraries and only in Latin.
Caveat lector
: only the unabridged
Oxford Latin Dictionary
will avail with the vocabulary, and even this resource is sometimes found wanting.
As recently as fifteen years ago it was difficult to find secondary sources on the history of sexuality, but now there is a large and growing literature to guide the scholar. I found John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
(1988) and Thomas Laqueur’s
Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(1990) particularly useful. John S. Haller and Robin Haller’s
The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America
(1973) provides an overview of many of the issues I have addressed in detail here. Most historians will have seen Peter Gay’s monumental
The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud
(1984) and Michel Foucault’s
History of Sexuality
(1978). Earlier European history is ably addressed in Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset’s
Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages
(1988). For medical advice literature and gynecological works in the United States, I can warmly recommend Nancy Sahli’s
Women and Sexuality in America: A Bibliography
(1984).
The subject of masturbation is mentioned in book-length secondary sources on the history of sexuality, but serious scholars of the subject will want to start with a few important articles (one dare not call them “seminal”): Vern Bullough’s article on technology for preventing masturbation in the October 1987 issue of
Technology and Culture
; Donald Greydanus’s “Masturbation: Historic Perspective,” in the
New York State Journal of Medicine
for November 1980; E. H. Hare’s “Masturbatory Insanity: The History of an Idea,” in the
Journal of Mental Science
, vol. 108 (1962); and Robert H. Mac-Donald’s “The Frightful Consequences of Onanism: Notes on the History of a Delusion,” in the
Journal of the History of Ideas
, July-September 1967.
Hydrotherapy is addressed in an eclectic combination of primary and secondary sources. Henri Scoutetten (1799–1871), for example, wrote a book called
De l’eau
(1843), which contains nothing particularly original about hydriatic treatments but includes a bibliography of all works on the subject before his time so comprehensive that I could locate fewer than half of them in modern union lists such the Library of Congress’s
Pre-1956 Imprints
. Hundreds of books were written on hydrotherapy between ancient times and the mid-nineteenth century. Much of this material is scattered through European
libraries. There are a few good secondary sources on hydrotherapy and a great many popular histories. I recommend Susan Cayleff’s dissertation “Wash and Be Healed: The Nineteenth-Century Water-Cure Movement, 1840–1900” (1983); Jane Donegan’s
Hydropathic Highway to Health: Women and Water-Cure in Antebellum America
(1986); and Patricia Spain Ward’s
Simon Baruch: Rebel in the Ranks of Medicine, 1840–1921
(1994) for readers who wish to gain an overview of the personalities and institutions of the hydropathic and hydrotherapeutic world. I found many of the primary sources I was looking for on this subject in the Saratoga Room collection of the Saratoga (New York) Public Library and at the Saratoga County Historical Society in nearby Ballston Spa.
As I explained in the preface, this book could not have been written without the resources of the Bakken Library in Minneapolis, which holds artifact and document collections on every conceivable (and inconceivable) aspect of electricity in the life sciences, including disreputable and usually ephemeral advertising material for long-vanished medical devices. I found many of the more general medical and scientific works at the National Library of Medicine and in the Kroch Library and Archives of Cornell University, both well-known repositories. The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University has important and comprehensive print, motion picture, and photographic documentation of the history of sexuality, including popular works rarely to be found in other libraries, even very large ones. Historians of medicine seeking an excuse to spend time in Paris could hardly do better than to plan a research trip to the Charcot Library of the Salpêtrière. The collections and the environment are both rich and fascinating.
Bibliographic access to the popular periodicals I have cited here is very difficult. The magazines themselves are hard to find and, when found, are often brittle, discolored, and crumbling because they were originally produced on pulp paper, the problem conservators call “inherent vice.” They are rarely or never indexed; the further downmarket one explores in household magazines, the less likely the publication is to be listed in a respectable index like the
Reader’s Guide
. The New York Public Library and the Library of Congress both have excellent but crumbling collections of such periodicals as the
American Magazine, National Home Journal, Men and Women, Woman’s Home Companion, Cosmopolitan, Bohemian, Hearst’s, Modern Woman, Home Needlework, Modern Priscilla
, and
Good Stories
. Some have been microfilmed.
INDEX
Adas, Michael,
122
Adler, Alfred,
56
advertisements
for electrotherapeutic devices,
87
–89
for vibrators,
viii
,
x
,
19
,
100
–108
Albertus Magnus,
137
n
Alexander, Stephanie,
119
amenorrhea,
37
,
83
,
94
.
See also
dysmenorrhea; menstruation
American Psychiatric Association,
2
,
11
American Vibrator Co.,
103
anemia,
35
anesthesia, sexual,
51
,
60
–61,
83
–84
anorgasmia,
59
–60
Anthony, Susan B.,
136
n
arthritis,
94
asthma,
53
Baker, Smith,
55
–56
Bakken Library and Museum,
xi
–xiii,
132
n,
155
n,
161
n,
173
baths and bathing.
See
hydrotherapy; masturbation, with water
battery-powered vibrators.
See
vibrator models, battery-powered
Bebout vibrator.
See
vibrator models, hand-powered
Beecher, Catherine,
38
ben-wa balls,
84
Bergler and Kroger,
62
Bigelow, C.,
38
Bigelow, Horatio,
83
Blackstone Manufacturing Co.,
102
Blackwell, Elizabeth,
61
Blake, Roger,
108
Bohlen, Joseph,
63
Boudet, Felix Henri,
94
Bourneville, Désiré Magloire,
40
Brinton, Daniel,
35
Brouardel, P. Paul,
43
Bullough, Vern,
172
Burton, Robert,
2
Caelius Aurelianus,
23
–24
Caprio, Frank,
117