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People Tried Unworkable Methods to Ward off Illness Outbreaks in History

Khalid Elhassan March 31, 2020 33 min

Physician - Goat gland — Brinkley's hospital operating room. Imgur

21. The Long History of Fingering Females to Rid Them of “Hysteria”

Throughout much of recorded history, female sexuality was so little understood that women’s orgasms were viewed as medical oddities. As such, they were the province of professional physicians who induced them in order to calm down “hysterical” women.

Thus, to be fair to Victorians, it should be noted that they did not invent such treatments to combat “female hysteria”. That diagnosis dates all the way back to Hippocrates, circa 450 BC, and it persisted throughout the Middle Ages. However, the late Victorians can be credited with picking it up and running away with it.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.