Victorian Doctors Thought Aroused Women Suffered from a Health Ailment
The cliché “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” is an admittedly tired shortcut to express the notion that men and women are incomprehensible to one another. However, if there was any period in history when reality actually matched the cliché, it was probably during the Victorian Era. Back then, people – particularly men – understood very little about female sexuality. In the second half of the nineteenth century, women who exhibited a variety of symptoms such as depression, fatigue anxiety, or loss of libido were diagnosed with “female hysteria”. The prescribed medical treatment for their poor health was a pelvic massage to bring about a “female paroxysm”. That was Victorian speak for “orgasm”.
A doctor would take it upon himself to stimulate a woman to climax. Though this was labeled as a medical treatment. That would supposedly cure whatever ailed her. 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 picked it up, and ran away with it.
