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The Vibrating History of Female Hysteria

This isn't to cast aspersion on vibrators; they're great.

Our ideas about gender, race, and countless other unconsciously held beliefs affect the way we frame diseases and disorders. But sometimes they create those diseases too.

In 1859, it was believed that a quarter of women suffered from hysteria. Many required constant care from physicians—pelvic massage, water massage, bed rest, and expensive spa treatments—in order to “manage” their symptoms. Hysteria was considered a legitimate disease by the medical community and was studied the world over by preeminent psychologists, including Freud.

How did this disease, which purportedly affected so many women and was studied extensively by some of the greatest medical minds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is now the focus of a new Hollywood movie, manage to disappear?

Read the rest at Motherboard.