The Technology of Orgasm  

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The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (1998) is a book by Rachel P. Maines on the history of female sexuality as seen through the problem of the female orgasm and female masturbation. The thesis of the book, that doctors routinely cured female hysteria by pelvic massage, has largely been discredited by Helen King in "Galen and the widow. Towards a history of therapeutic masturbation in ancient gynaecology."

Pelvic massage

Maines puts forward that in the Western medical tradition pelvic massage or a genital massage was a method to cure women from the once-common medical diagnosis of furor uterinus or female hysteria.

The orgasm was called "hysterical paroxysm" and was administered by a physician or midwife. Female hysteria, an ailment considered common and chronic in women. In 1653, Pieter van Foreest (In a medical compendium titled Observationem et Curationem Medicinalium ac Chirurgicarum Opera Omnia) advised the technique of genital massage for a disease called "womb disease" to bring the woman into "hysterical paroxysm".

Such cases were quite profitable for physicians, since the patients were at no risk of death, but needed constant treatment. However, the vaginal massage procedure (generally referred to as 'pelvic massage') was tedious and time consuming for physicians. The technique was difficult for a physician to master and could take hours to achieve "hysterical paroxysm." Referral to midwives, which had been common practice, meant a loss of business for the physician, and at times husbands were asked to assist.

Pelvic douche machine

The book reproduces a French pelvic douche[1] of about 1860 supposedly used to cure "furor uterinus". The illustration is from an uncertain origin but is said to depict a hydrotherapeutic device described by Louis Fleury, author of Traité pratique et raisonné d'hydrothérapie (although it is not depicted there in this edition[2]), and was perhaps first reproduced in Siegfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command (1948).

Criticism by Helen King

Maines cannot be held responsible for all the errors made by those who have taken what she has defined as speculation and hypothesis into the realm of supposed reality. However, her neglect of the hysteria scholarship of the 1990s and her very casual attitude to the ancient sources have not helped. Maines’ claims for ancient women’s sexual practices are without foundation, and often based on taking all the sources – medical texts, satire, case histories, philosophical discussions – at the same level. In her wish to provide an ancient pedigree for therapeutic masturbation, she has merged texts on menstrual suppression and excess flow of seed with those of hysterical suffocation, ignoring the complexities of ancient diagnostic categories. She has selected texts that can be made to fit her hypothesis, glossing over the finer points. Her one-sided account has made it more difficult to understand the complex lines of transmission within the ancient sources, and in their later reception." --"Galen and the widow. Towards a history of therapeutic masturbation in ancient gynaecology", Helen King

See also

• History of sexuality
• Victorian sexuality
• Female orgasm
• Female sexuality
• Erotic massage
• Furor uterinus
• Fainting room