The wandering womb; the history of Hysteria, Sex toys, and Pornography

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The wandering womb; the history of Hysteria, Sex toys, and Pornography

Hysteria is an old-fashioned medical diagnosis that was popular in the nineteenth century. The symptoms of hysteria include unconventional emotional conditions in women (and men in recent history). This means that women who revealed extreme emotions for a certain situation were considered “Hysterical.”

Even though hysteria became a common diagnosis in 19th-century Europe, it has been a medical condition for many centuries. This medical condition dates back to ancient Egypt as well as Greece. The word hysteria stems from the greek word hystera, which translates to “uterus,” aka womb. Ancient Egyptians believed that this condition was caused due to movements in the womb, or in other words, a wandering womb. 

Hysteria was believed to be a psychological condition that only women suffered from till 1600. When anatomists in the 15th century discovered that hysteria is linked to the brain rather than the womb, they came to the conclusion that men could suffer from hysteria after all. 

The symptoms of Hysteria 

A woman with hysteria

Even though hysteria bid goodbye from the medical books as a diagnosis in 1980, till then, anyone with the following symptoms was diagnosed as hysterical. 

  • Emotional outbursts 
  • Being overly dramatic 
  • Hallucinations 
  • Loss of sensation 
  • Amnesia 
  • Seizures 
  • Spasming muscles 
  • Fainting or passing out
  • Paralysis 
  • Blindness

Women and even men with one or more of the above symptoms were often diagnosed with hysteria. However, it is important to note that hysteria is an outdated medical condition.

The link between Hysteria and Pornography 

Now that you know what hysteria is, it’s time to look into what pornography is. If you don’t know what it is already, pornography,  also known as the adult industry in today’s world, stands for the printed or visual material of sexual activity/organs that creates sexual excitement in the viewer. In simple words, it’s the intangible stuff that gets you horny.

What’s the connection between hysteria and pornography, you ask? Well, these seemingly two different things actually share a few similarities. One of the ways hysteria relates to sex and today’s pornography is the treatment methods Victorian doctors used in order to cure hysteria. 

Since medical professionals believed that hysteria was the cause of sexual repression or frustration, the cure was to achieve female orgasms in the patients. This meant that doctors participated in manually stimulating the patients to reach paroxysms. While this sounds insanely unethical and unconventional in today’s day and age, this way of treating patients was quite common a few hundred years ago. 

The women believed they were ill, whereas the doctors treated these patients with sexual activities that were not considered back in the day. Manually stimulating a patient, basically sexually arousing a woman to reach orgasm was tiresome for the doctors of the day, so they passed on this task to the midwives. 

Medical porn

If this situation doesn’t alter your wonderful imagination to connect hysteria to today’s pornography, let us explain! There’s a victorian doctor, obviously a male, and a midwife trying to stimulate a female patient sexually. Yes, the sexy doctor, the innocent patient, and the hot nurse that you see in a plethora of medical porn videos today is actually a passage to the reality of the Victorian era! 

Hysteria and sex toys

Now that you know how hysteria links to porn today, it’s time to learn about the invention of sex toys and hysteria, more specifically, the vibrator that many women adore in the bedroom. Remember us talking about doctors and midwives manually stimulating patients? Well, it didn’t take long for the medical community to realize the need for an invention for this tedious job. 

Treatment with the help of a vibrator

So, in the 1880s, English physician and inventor Joseph Mortimer Granville invented the electromechanical vibrator to make things easier with treating patients suffering from hysteria. Can you imagine going to the hospital for a simple headache and getting a vibrator session from the doctor instead of painkillers!? 

Well, this treatment method continued within the medical community till Sigmund Freud came along and stated the sexual nature of the activity. Yikes. Freud took a different approach to treat hysteria, such as talking therapy, where the patient got a chance to share their stories with medical professionals. 

The popularity of the Vibrators

If you think vibrators are only popular in the techno age of the 2000s, you are utterly mistaken. In the 1800s, the vibrator was so popular to the point where many newspapers and magazines marketed it immensely. These adverts often included illustrations of doctors and female patients with vibrators. Some leaflets were even published with only the female patient holding the vibrator. Talk about porno content in your daily newspaper!

Vibrator advert

Jokes aside, the real question is to see how the vibrator became a sex toy. Invented as a medical instrument, the manufacturing industry was booming with this device. But when the medical community came to the realization that vibrators are sexual and not so medical, the industry was losing its grasp of making that stash. So, one brave company rebranded these vibrators as “Hygeia sexual appliance for men and women” in 1903. This was the first step towards marketing the vibrators you see today. 

Bottomline 

It’s kind of weird and cool at the same time to see how a mere medical condition led to being the muse of today’s medical porno as well as the invention of vibrators women go gaga over. Hysteria, also known as the wandering womb, was always linked to sexuality in the history of humankind. While hysteria still stands as an important aspect of today’s gender studies, medical studies, and so on, it is also an essential aspect of the history of sex toys and pornography.

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