The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (5 page)

THE EVOLUTION OF THE TECHNOLOGY

The electromechanical vibrator, invented in the 1880s by a British physician, represented the last of a long series of solutions to a problem that had plagued medical practitioners since antiquity: effective therapeutic massage that neither fatigued the therapist nor demanded skills that were difficult and time-consuming to acquire. Mechanized speed and efficiency improved clinical productivity, especially in the treatment of chronic patients like hysterics, who usually received a series of treatments over time. Among conditions for which massage was indicated in Western medical traditions, one of the most persistent challenges to physicians’ skills and patience as physical therapists was hysteria in women. This was one of the most frequently diagnosed diseases in history until the American Psychiatric Association officially removed the hysteroneurasthenic disorders from the canon of modern disease paradigms in 1952.
⁴⁵

Mechanized treatments for hysteria offered a number of benefits to users of the technology—doctors, patients, and patients’ husbands. Not only did the clinical production of the “hysterical paroxysm” provide a palliative for female complaints and make patients feel better, at least temporarily, it resolved the dissonance of reality with the androcentric sexual model. And since mechanical and electromechanical devices could produce multiple orgasms in women in a relatively short period, innovations in the instrumentation of massage permitted women a richer exploration of their physiological powers.
⁴⁶
Although manual, hydriatic, and steam-powered mechanical massage offered some of these advantages, the electromechanical vibrator was less fatiguing and required less skill than manual massage, was less capital intensive than either hydriatic or steam-powered technologies, and was more reliable, portable, and decentralizing than any previous physical therapy for hysteria. Within fifteen years of the introduction of the first Weiss model in the late 1880s, more than a dozen manufacturers were producing both battery-powered vibrators and models operated with line electricity.
⁴⁷
Some physicians even had vibratory “operating theaters” (see
fig. 7
).

Although manufacturers and users of massage technologies have called the instruments by a variety of names, here I use a relatively consistent nomenclature designed to emphasize the differences among various types of massage apparatus. First, a true vibrator is a mechanical
or electromechanical device imparting a rapid and rhythmic pressure through a contoured working surface, which is generally mounted at a right angle to the handle. The applicators usually take the form of a set of interchangeable rubber vibratodes contoured to the anatomical surfaces they are intended to address. Vibrating dildos, a variant of the vibrator, are usually straight-shafted and are designed for vaginal or anal insertion.
⁴⁸
A massager, as the term is used here, is a device with flat or dished working surfaces designed mainly for manipulating the skeletal muscles. All of these are distinct from the electrodes used in electrotherapy, which imparted a mild electrical shock to the tissues they were applied to and thus are technologically related to the vibrator only in a collateral way.

As we have seen, manual massage of the vulva as a treatment for hysteria or “suffocation of the mother” is continually attested in Western medicine from antiquity through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation and well into the modern era. I have already quoted Forestus’s 1653 description of the basic manual technique, which seems to have varied little over time except in the types of lubricating oils. Medical descriptions of this procedure were more or less explicit in their instructions to doctors, according to the temperament of the author. A few, like Forestus and his contemporary Abraham Zacuto (1575–1642), expressed reservations about the propriety of massaging the female genitalia and proposed delegating the job to a midwife.
⁴⁹
The main difficulties for physicians, however, were the skills required to properly locate the intensity of massage for each patient and the stamina to sustain the treatment long enough to produce results.
⁵⁰
Technological solutions to both problems seem to have been attempted fairly early in the form of hydrotherapeutic approaches and crude instruments like rocking chairs, swings, and vehicles that bounced the patient rhythmically on her pelvis.

We know very little about the ancient use of hydrotherapy in hysteria. Baths, however, particularly those built over hot springs, have a long history of association with sensuality and sexuality. Saint Jerome (340?-420), for example, admonished women, especially young women, to avoid bathing, since it “stirred up passions better left alone.”
⁵¹
Female masturbation in this context typically requires that the water be in motion, preferably under some kind of pressure or gravitational force, so still bathing of the type depicted in medieval scenes of “stews” (see
fig. 8
, in
chapter 4
)
would probably not have been effective.
⁵²
Roman bath configurations usually included piped water that could have been used in this way, but evidence is lacking.
⁵³
It is probable that many women in history independently discovered that water in motion had a stimulating effect, but these discoveries are unlikely to be documented except in the form of the vague prohibitions on sensual indulgence in the bath by medical and religious writers. By the late eighteenth century, specialized hydrotherapeutic appliances had been developed for female disorders and were in use in some European and British spas. There are few detailed descriptions or illustrations of these devices. Tobias Smollett remarked in 1752 on the number of hydriatic devices at Bath that were specially designed for women.
⁵⁴
Women represented a majority of the market for hydriatic massage in Britain from at least Smollett’s time. Many spas had special “female departments,” and at least in America, women were often the owners, co-owners, or resident physicians of hydriatic establishments.
⁵⁵

The “social lion” of water cure establishments was the douche, or high-pressure shower, which was widely used in women’s disorders as a local stimulant to the pelvic region (
fig. 1
). Henri Scoutetten, a French physician writing in 1843, described the popularity of the cold-water douche with his female patients as follows:

The first impression produced by the jet of water is painful, but soon the effect of the pressure
[percussion]
, the reaction of the organism to the cold, which causes the skin to flush, and the reestablishment of equilibrium all create for many persons so agreeable a sensation that it is necessary to take precautions that they
[elles]
do not go beyond the prescribed time, which is usually four or five minutes. After the douche, the patient dries herself off, refastens her corset, and returns with a brisk step to her room.
⁵⁶

The chief drawbacks of hydriatic massage for physicians, other than its apparently excessive allure for patients, were its capital intensiveness and its centralizing character: the equipment was expensive and required a semipermanent installation with a source of water, preferably heated.
⁵⁷
Although some American manufacturers made efforts to popularize hydrotherapeutic equipment for clinics and even affluent private homes, the apparatus was prohibitively expensive and could not easily be retrofitted to existing plumbing.
⁵⁸
Patient and doctor thus had to travel to hydrotherapeutic treatment sites, where transportation, spa fees, lodging, and meals restricted the market to the upper middle class and above.
⁵⁹

F
IG
. 2. Butler’s Electro-massage Machine, from
Dr. John Butler’s Electro-massage Machine
(New York: Butler Electro-massage, 1888).

Spas also represented the market for many early efforts to mechanize massage. Most had manual physical therapy equipment, such as muscle beaters, in their clinical arsenals, and when Gustaf Zander’s (1835–1920) “Swedish Movement” machinery became available in the mid-nineteenth century, prosperous hydriatic establishments added this technology as well.
⁶⁰
A clockwork “percuteur,” essentially a wind-up vibrator, was also available to both spas and physicians before 1870 (see
fig. 18
,
chapter 4
). The percuteur, however, was underpowered for massage purposes and had a distressing tendency to run down before treatment was complete. Roller-type devices were sold in the popular market (
fig. 2
) that combined massage with electrotherapy; these were sold to both sexes and were touted as especially effective for renewing sexual vigor in men.
⁶¹

In 1869 and 1872 an American physician, George Taylor, patented steam-powered massage and vibratory apparatus, some of it designed for female disorders. His principal markets were spas and physicians with a
sufficiently large physical therapy practice to justify the expense of a large, heavy, and cumbersome instrument. Taylor warns physicians that treatment of female pelvic complaints with the “Manipulator” should be supervised to prevent overindulgence. One of his devices (
fig. 3
) featured a padded table with a cutout for the lower abdomen, in which a vibrating sphere, driven by a steam engine, massaged the pelvic area.
⁶²

Swedish efforts to produce a mechanical massage device on the principles of Zander’s movement machinery produced results by the late 1870s, but the first electromechanical vibrator to be internationally marketed to physicians was the British model built by Weiss. Designed by the physician Joseph Mortimer Granville, the device patented in the early 1880s was battery powered and, like the modern version, equipped with several interchangeable vibratodes. Mortimer Granville, however, was firmly opposed to the use of his device for treating women, especially hysterics, and advised its application only to the male skeletal muscles.
⁶³
Few physicians in the United States or elsewhere seem to have shared his compunction on this point, except for those who noted with concern that the devices induced uterine contractions in pregnant women.
⁶⁴

By 1900 a wide range of vibratory apparatus was available to physicians, from low-priced foot-powered models to the Cadillac of vibrators, the Chattanooga (
fig. 4
), which cost $200 plus freight charges in 1904.
⁶⁵
Monell reported in 1902 that more than a dozen medical vibratory devices were available for examination at the Paris Exposition of 1900.
⁶⁶

Mary L. H. Arnold Snow, writing for a readership of physicians in 1904, discusses in some detail about twice this number, including musical vibro-massage, counterweighted types, tissue oscillators, vibratory forks, hand-or foot-powered massage devices, simple concussors and muscle beaters, vibrátiles (vibrating wire apparatus), combination cautery and pneumatic equipment with vibratory massage attachments, and vibrators powered by air pressure, water turbines, gas engines, batteries, and street current through lamp-socket plugs.
⁶⁷
These models, starting at $15 and ranging to the top of the line mentioned above, delivered vibrations to the patient at rates of one to seven thousand pulses per minute. Some were floor-standing machines on rollers, some were portable, and others could be suspended from the ceiling of the clinic like impact wrenches in a modern garage (
fig. 5
).