Portal:Medicine/Selected article/52, 2006



Female hysteria was an incorrectly diagnosed medical condition in western medicine that is not currently acknowledged by the medical community. It was a popular diagnosis in the Victorian era for a wide array of symptoms including faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and a "tendency to cause trouble".

Patients diagnosed with female hysteria would undergo "pelvic massage" &mdash; manual stimulation of the woman's genitals by the doctor to "hysterical paroxysm", which is now recognized as orgasm.

(More...)

Nominations • Archive