The AFU and Urban Legend Archive
Sex
 history of the vibrator




Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Friggin' Doctors
Date: 7 Nov 1994 23:13:40 GMT

In conjunction with some forgotten (by me) thread a few months back, a statement was made along the lines of: "It is my opinion that doctors did more harm than good before 1900 or so". I recently located an electrifying article which addresses this and many other issues of great and abiding interest to the AFU community at large.

The article is "Socially Camouflaged Technologies: The Case of the Electromechanical Vibrator" by Rachel Maines in _IEEE Technology and Society Magazine_ Vol 8, #2, Jume 1989.

I reprint below the abstract and a few choice quotes. Many discussable issues are raised. The article includes some illustrations and 2 1/2 pages of annotated bibliography for further reading.

The electromechanical vibrator emerged in the 1880s as a medical instrument designed to mechanize massage techniques used by physicians since antiquity. Among these was vulvular massage to orgasm as a treatment for hysteria in women. The sexual character of the therapy was camouflaged in medical rhetoric which characterized female arousal as a pathological syndrome from which relief was obtained in "hysterical paroxysm". Manual massage was fatiguing and slow, however, and water and steam-powered methods capital-intensive; when portable vibrators powered by line electricity became available at the turn of this century they quickly became the dominant medical massage technology until the appearance of vibrators in erotic films in the 1920s eroded the instrument's social camouflage.

Interesting and pithy throughout, Maines points out that the sexual characteristic of the massage was occasionally acknowledged:

"God-fearing physicians," as Zacuto expressed it in the seventeenth century, were expected to induce the paroxysm with their own fingers only when absolutely necessary, as in the case of very young single women, widows and nuns.

John Harvey Kellog, subject of the book and movie _The Road to Wellville_, is mentioned as seeming not to have "perceived the sexual character of patient response."

A lot of good stuff on early vibrators included as well. (advertised in Sears, Roebuck as late as 1918.)

I encourage everybody to locate and read the article itself. The only weakness I found in it was that it did not really support the conclusion that porno film use of vibrators in the '20s changed their perception.

D "slowed and fatigued" S


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