Delightful companions

No sooner did Stephen Fry come out with his ignorant Victorian pronouncement about women and sex than a whole new dimension on the sexual experience of Victorian women is about to emerge. For those not already aware of this London is currently being used for a spot of location shooting on Hysteria, a movie that’s bound to create something of a buzz. Buzz and buzzing, I expect people are going to hear these words ad nauseum; for, you see, it centres on the invention of a certain female sex aid: Hysteria brings the vibrator to the world!

It’s the 1880s, a time when a great many of the medical problems suffered by women were put down loosely to ‘hysteria.’ This condition, which comes down essentially to one thing, sexual frustration, has a long history in medicine, going all the way back to Galen and the ancients. It comes from hysteros, the Greek word for the womb, since a whole variety of symptoms, anything from anxiety to erotic fantasy, were believed to be the result of a blocked reproductive system. What was the remedy, you may wonder? A spot of stimulation, that’s what, although not to be self-administered, and that’s on the best medical advice available. Avicenna, the Muslim founder of early modern medicine, wrote that it was “a man’s job, suitable only for husbands and doctors.” Hmmm.

There are records of ‘stimulation’ being carried out by doctors at least since 1653, with the final stages, the ‘pelvic massage’, most often being undertaken by mid-wives. We can go back still further, to the sixteenth century, when unmarried women, lacking in marital consolation, were urged to take “vigorous horseback exercise” or make use of a rocking horse or a swing. Horseback riding, yes, I can personally recommend that: there is no better source of natural massage or, ahem, stimulation!

Now we are in the nineteenth century, the high noon of medical professionalization and sexual prudery. The doctors are offering female patients release from their pent up frustration (presumably brought on by the sexual inadequacies of most Victorian men) in a course of treatment that would climax in something described as “hysterical paroxysm”; it would climax in, well, a climax! But in the absence of mid-wives, and reluctant to carry out the task themselves, for the best professional reasons, of course, a little buzzing friend made its way into history.

According to the movie, Doctor Joseph Mortimer Granville, played by Hugh Dancy, was the first to create the electromagnetic vibrator, or the ‘manipulator’ as it was known at the time. The idea was taken up by Hamilton Beach, and American company, and by the end of the century the manipulator was being mass marketed, appearing in shops and catalogues even before the plug-in version of the vacuum cleaner or the iron! Of course the whole thing had to be covered in lashings of Victorian hypocrisy, everyone pretending that it was about an identifiable medical condition when it was so obviously just about sexual release.

I’m off to London’s Science Museum next weekend because it apparently has a collection of more than forty early vibrators, something I did not know, something I simply must see. I was just so amused to discover this, so amused to discover that they were widely advertised at the time. I read in the Sunday press that Good Housekeeping, of all publications, ran a ‘tried and tested’ feature in 1909. Was the editorial office was full of smiling women? Yes, I expect it was. In 1918 Sears and Roebuck offered a vibrator attachment for a home motor, one that would also drive a churn, a mixer and a sewing machine! Who says that women are not versatile? A few years later portable vibrators were being promoted as “delightful companions.”

Now, Mr Fry, you were saying? :-)

The Path to Hell

Not so long ago I read Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor Medicine and Power in the Third Reich by Professor Ulf Schmidt. Schmidt has 'reconstructed' the life of Brandt from bottom to top, reaching some surprising and disturbing conclusions in the process. His chief conclusion is that Brandt's actions were formed and conditioned by events, rather than by any deeply held beliefs.

Brandt's road from a follower of Albert Schweitzer's 'reverence for life' school to a mass killer was caused, in Schmidt's analysis, by a succession of key life events.
First of all, while he was working as a young doctor in the mining town of Bochum he had to deal with patients horrendously injured in accidents, many of whom pleaded for death. There was nothing he could do, for mercy killing was illegal under the Weimar Republic. When the restriction was set aside during the Third Reich, he was already predisposed towards the euthanasia programme, which he took part in from 1939 to 1941.

Second, horrified by his experience at Stalingrad, where he saw many of the soldiers die as a result of diseases exacerbated by malnutrition, he conceived a plan to develop high calorie, low volume artificial foods. These were to be tested on concentration camp inmates.

The third factor was his experience of the Allied fire-bombing bombing of Hamburg in 1943, which left many people terribly burned. Disturbed that many of these people were denied hospital treatment because of bed shortages, Brandt reacted by secretly re-launching the euthanasia programme, abandoned in 1941 under public pressure.

The final stage was his mustard gas experiments in concentration camps, a response to rumours that the allies were planning to use this form of attack on German cities, and intended to find a cure for inhalation.

From beginning to end there were acute forms of moral abdication. Brandt's personal road to hell was one paved with a perverted sense of good intentions

Take a Measure of Corpse, or a Cup of Blood

Corpse medicine was widely practiced in Europe until well into the eighteenth century; yes, it was!. Doctors were in the habit of using all sorts of substances from recently-dead bodies, anything from blood to fat, treated and dried before use, as well as powders from ground-up Egyptian mummies. It was a tradition inherited from Classical and Arab texts, and recommended by such enlightened figures as Francis Bacon, the philosopher, and John Donne, the poet.

But the usage did not stop with the dried and the desiccated, oh no. Renaissance thinkers believed that corpse medicine was the best way if imbibing the spiritual life-force of another; and there was no better way of doing this than drinking fresh blood. In the late seventeenth century Edward Taylor, a puritan minister, wrote that “…human blood, drunk warm and new is held good for the falling sickness.” Drinking hot blood was still being recommended as a treatment for epilepsy by English physicians in the mid-eighteenth century. They were all vampires then. :))