Nathaniel Hymore wrote in 1660 about how the treatment caused violent muscle contractions, flushed skin, and profound relief from symptoms. Here’s how it was typically carried out. Women visited their physician regularly, often weekly. They would lie on the examination table partially undressed but modestly covered with a sheet.
The doctor would use perfumed oils, commonly lavender or rose and massage the vulva in circular motions until the patient experienced paroxism described as sudden muscular contractions, flushed cheeks, heavy lubrication, and deep relaxation afterward. In 1903, Dr. Russell Troll admitted that achieving this state could take over an hour and complained it was one of the most exhausting and tedious procedures in medicine.
Physicians genuinely considered it nothing more than hard repetitive work. In their eyes, it was as clinical as setting a bone. One doctor even wrote that treating hysteria required 1 to 1 and 1/2 hours of a physician’s time. The treatment became incredibly widespread. By the late 19th century, doctors estimated that as many as 75% of American women were afflicted with hysteria.
In big cities, some physicians built entire practices around it, treating dozens of patients daily. Dr. Taylor’s clinic in New York advertisedrelief from female troubles and nervous exhaustion, employing multiple doctors just to handle the demand. Records from that period show women booking weekly or bi-weekly sessions for years.
And it wasn’t limited to doctor’s offices. Wealthier women often paid for physicians to make discreet house calls. Others sought hydrotherapy at specialized clinics. The water cure involved sitting in chairs designed with openings while attendants directed high-press jets of water at the genitals.
European spars like Bath in England and Bonbarden in Germany became famous for such treatments. Patients would often spend weeks at these retreats undergoing multiple sessions each day. Historian Rachel Mains in her book, The Technology of Orgasm, described how these hydrotherapy treatments worked. French physicians even had a name for it, Ladouch Pelven, or the pelvic shower.
One 1875 advertisement from Bonbarden promised a complete restoration of feminine vitality through the scientific use of thermal waters. Many women reported feeling renewed and restored to health afterward. By the 1880s, physician Joseph Mortimer Granville was facing a problem. His hands were cramping from performing so many hysteria treatments.
Manual massage was physically exhausting, especially when some patients required over an hour. His solution would transform hysteria treatment forever. The first electric vibrator. Granville’s percussor was an electrically powered device designed to produce rapid vibrations, dramatically cutting treatment time from over an hour to just minutes.
Though Granville claimed it was only meant for treating male muscular disorders, other physicians quickly repurposed it for hysteria patients. Within 10 years, dozens of vibrator models appeared on the medical market. The Weiss Company’s 1906 catalog alone listed more than 20 types. Medical journal ads boasted their efficiency.
One device, the Chattanooga vibrator, claimed to relieve hysteria symptoms in under 10 minutes. By 1900, vibrators had become the fifth most popular electrical appliance in American homes. Sold right alongside sewing machines and toasters. Sears cataloges from 1908 featured home vibrators marketed as very useful and satisfactory for home service.
The ads were strikingly explicit while maintaining a veneer of medical respectability. A 1910 advertisement depicted a woman using a vibrator on her face with the caption, “Vibration is life. The secret of the ages has been unlocked by vibration.” Great scientists tell us that we owe not only our health, but even our vitality to this marvelous force.
The White Cross electric vibrator brings life’s very essence to your door. And here’s the most shocking part. None of the physicians, manufacturers, or patients seem to grasp the sexual reality of what was happening. Doctors published lengthy clinical papers about inducing hysterical paroxism, yet never once connected it to sexual climax.
Why? Because Victorian medical education deliberately erased female sexuality. Medical textbooks claimed women’s reproductive organs existed only for childbirth. The clitoris was either ignored entirely or dismissed as a useless remnant with no real function. The willful blindness was astonishing. Dr.
John Harvey Kellogg, the same man who invented cornflakes, ran a sanitarium where he treated hysteria with vibrators while at the same time waging a moral crusade against masturbation, which he labeled a dangerous vice. Yet he never saw the contradiction. Physicians would spend hours each day bringing women to orgasm as treatment, then return home to wives they insisted had no sexual desires whatsoever.
The mental gymnastics required for such denial are hard to fathom. Some women, however, clearly realized what was happening, even if they couldn’t voice it openly. Private diaries reveal their awareness. One unnamed woman wrote in 1892, “My weekly appointments with Dr. Harrison have fully restored my spirits. I find myself awaiting Thursday afternoons with eager anticipation.
Another recorded, “The treatment, though unusual, provides relief unmatched by any tonic or medicine. Women even recommended their doctors to friends, creating entire circles of patients all receiving the same therapy. The medical profession’s refusal to acknowledge female sexuality had consequences far darker than pelvic massage.
Doctors performed clitoridectomies to cure masturbation. Some burned the clitoris with acid to prevent so-called self- abuse. Isaac Baker Brown, president of the London Medical Society, went so far as to surgically remove the clitorises of girls as young as 10, claiming it would treat hysteria. He was eventually expelled from the society, not because of the barbaric procedure itself, but only because he operated without permission.
Meanwhile, the hysteria business flourished. By 195, American physicians were earning an estimated $18 million a year from hysteria treatments, equivalent to over 450 million today.Manufacturers competed with increasingly elaborate machines. The vibrileile patented in 1908 came with multiple attachments to target different female complaints.
The Pulsocon, a hand crank model from 1890, promised similar relief without electricity. Some devices were even built directly into furniture treatment chairs with mechanical vibrating parts. The beginning of the end came with Sigman Freud. While many of his ideas were deeply flawed, he at least acknowledged that women had genuine sexual desires and that hysteria often stemmed from psychological, not physical, causes.
By the 1920s, the American Psychiatric Association began moving away from hysteria as a valid diagnosis. But the true death blow came from an unlikely source, early pornography. In the 1920s, stag films started depicting women using vibrators for openly sexual purposes. Almost overnight, the respectable medical device featured in mainstream cataloges became tainted by association with sexuality.
Sears dropped vibrators from its catalog by 1925, and doctors quietly abandoned the practice. Vibrators gathering dust in medical cabinets were discreetly discarded. By 1952, hysteria disappeared from official medical texts altogether. Yet, its legacy lingered. Women continued to have their health complaints dismissed as emotional or hysterical.
The label had simply shifted into a broader cultural tool for invalidating women’s experiences. It wasn’t until the 1960s with the groundbreaking research of Masters and Johnson that female sexuality was finally studied seriously. Their work confirmed what Victorian patients already knew but couldn’t say aloud. That the so-called hysterical paroxism was nothing more than orgasm.
Looking back, it’s nearly unbelievable. How could educated physicians fail to recognize an orgasm? How could they perform blatantly sexual acts while believing them purely medical? The answer lies in cultural blindness. Victorian society’s absolute denial of women’s sexual realities created a world where doctors could provide orgasmic release day after day without admitting to themselves what it truly was.
Historian Rachel Mains, who spent years documenting this bizarre medical chapter, highlighted the irony Victorian doctors, while convinced they were curing disease, were in fact delivering the only sexual satisfaction many women ever received. The numbers are staggering. Between 1850 and 1920, the peak years of hysteria treatment, millions of women in major cities underwent regular pelvic massage.
Some visited their doctors weekly for decades. Even if only 10% of adult women sought treatment, an average 20 sessions each, that still amounts to tens of millions of medically induced orgasms administered by physicians who genuinely believed they were treating an illness. This history matters because it reveals just how deeply cultural assumptions can warp medical science.
These weren’t fringe healers. They were the most respected doctors of their time, trained at elite medical schools, following accepted protocols. And yet, they were so blinded by Victorian repression that they failed to recognize the obvious truth literally in their hands. So the next time someone dismisses women’s health complaints as hysteria, remember this.
For centuries, the medical establishment was so ignorant of women’s bodies that they unintentionally invented vibrators while treating a fake disease. They were so convinced women lacked sexual desire that they didn’t even recognize an orgasm when they caused one. The treatment of hysteria remains one of the strangest episodes in medical history.
A time when doctors prescribed exactly what women needed while having absolutely no idea what they were doing. What shocks you most about this story? The ignorance, the cultural denial, or the fact that vibrators were once as common in doctor’s offices as stethoscopes? Let me know in the comments. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and be thankful for modern medicine that actually understands the human body.
