What is Hysteria and Why do Women Suffer from it?

Hysteria is an illness that no longer exists, it afflicted women throughout history until the early to mid 1900's.  But why were women the only ones susceptible to this sickness?  And why did doctors start providing pelvic massages and prescribing vibrators to cure it?

The answer lies in a part of the female anatomy, the uterus.  The ancient Greeks had a word for the uterus, it was 'hystera'.

So the uterus is the center of this disease, its origins if you will.  But why the uterus?  The uterus has a long and unhappy history of being thought of as evil, as being the area of the woman's body that causes sickness, mental instability and craziness.

But what about Hysteria?  What makes this illness so special?  There were a lot of mental and physical disorders that were attributed to Hysteria, all of which eventually were found to be caused by real problems.  Doctors loved Hysteria as it was pretty much a catch-all for all unknown illnesses.

During the mid to late 1800's, a time when Hysteria was at its peak, many doctors noted a trend in women who suffered from this illness.  Many of those women turned out to be virgins, nuns, widows and even some housewives.  But what is it that connects all these women?

No sex, and no sex led to a severe shortage of "hysterical paroxysm", what we now know as an orgasm.

But because of the fact that masturbation was an unclean and generally horrible act, women had to seek professional help to treat and prevent Hysteria.  Doctors would usually treat women with a manual pelvic massage, thus inducing hysterical paroxysm.

But there was one problem with this method of treatment, sometimes it could take hours to achieve the desired result. And with such a long treatment time doctors were unable to treat many patients in a day, creating a lack of income.  One way doctors tried to speed things along in the mid to late 1800's was through the use of water hoses, creating a water massage.

But technology being such a wondrous thing found a way to help those poor doctors.  In 1873 a new product was used in an asylum in France, this product was then known as an electromechanical vibrator.  Vibrators could do in just a few minutes the same thing the doctor took hours to do manually.

Around the early 1900's many people started getting electricity in their houses.  This allowed women to treat themselves in the safety and privacy of their very own homes.  Vibrators started to become much more common around the country.  Sears printed an ad in one of their catalogues in 1918 where the touted their vibrator as being ”Very useful and satisfactory for home service.”

And so vibrators became much more common place, women could use vibrators at home, which was not masturbating, since it was all in the name of keeping them healthy and sane.

These days women would have a tough time convincing anybody they have Hysteria so they need to keep their vibrators such as bullet vibrators around.  But thankfully they don't have to.