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When Opium Was a Cure-All Remedy, and Other Unusual Historic Medical Cures

Khalid Elhassan April 10, 2025 16 min

Remedy - Flagellants thought that flogging themselves would ward off the plague — Flagellants thought that flogging themselves would ward off the plague. Pits Perilous

8. Climax as a Remedy

a victorian doctor fingering away female hysteria. pinterest — A Victorian doctor fingering a woman to cure her of “female hysteria”. Pinterest

Throughout much of history, female sexuality was so little understood that women’s climaxes were viewed as medical oddities. As such, they were the province of professional physicians who induced them in order to calm down “hysterical” women. To be fair to Victorians, 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 and into the early Modern Era. However, the late Victorians can be credited with picking it up and running away with the remedy. The late nineteenth century’s medical community believed that there was a female hysteria epidemic. Some prominent doctors estimated that up to three out of every four American women suffered from the malady.

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.