Many doctors tried to treat diseases with vibrators, but found them ineffective. The Pulsocon was marketed as a Blood Circulator, which could “stop pain quickly and cure chronic sufferers.” 1900s: Vibrators as a cure for male impotence? Macaura’s “Pulsocon” were popular, due to their low cost and lack of need for a power source. Lieberman points out that Granville knew the vibrator could have sexual uses, and even used it to treat male sexual dysfunction, but he never used it on women (8).Īt this time, hand crank models like Dr. It was designed to treat pain, headaches, irritability, indigestion, and constipation-in men. After extensive research, Lieberman has never found any proof of a doctor using a vibrator to stimulate a patient’s clitoris to “paroxysm” or orgasm. Hallie Lieberman, author of “Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy,” told me that even if it did exist, clitoral massage was not a common medical procedure. Historian Helen King has found no evidence that doctors ever masturbated their patients as a hysteria treatment in ancient or classical times (6). And I’m like, ‘It’s a hypothesis! It’s a hypothesis!' Well, people just thought this was such a cool idea that people believe it, that it’s like a fact. People just loved my hypothesis and that’s all it is really, it’s a hypothesis, that women were treated with massage for this disease, hysteria… and that the vibrator was invented to treat this disease.
Unfortunately the movie-based on Rachel Maines 1998 book, “The Technology of Orgasm”-is somewhat inventive with the facts (7). If Granville sounds familiar, you probably know him as the sexy doctor from the 2011 film “Hysteria”. George Taylor’s steam-powered “Manipulator” table massager were already in use in France and the US. English physician Joseph Mortimer Granville invented an electric vibrator in 1883, although similar machines like Dr. In the 1800s, industrialization transformed many aspects of life, including medicine. Jumping ahead a thousand years (and some) brings us to a popular idea in the history of vibrators: that they were invented by western doctors in the 19th century, and used to masturbate hysterical women. 1800s: “Manipulators,” “circulators” and the myth of medical masturbation