Yesterday. I tooted a news story from RNZ about how a nineteenth century vibrator had turned up in charity shop in Nelson.

Now when anyone mentions vibrators, one does tend to think of sex and sexual stimulation, but this wasn’t necessarily the case for nineteenth century vibrators.

Some were used by doctors to massage torn or damaged muscles, and some were for home use, again usually to relieve aches and pains.

And whatever the official purpose of the device, it might be that some may have been used as aids to masturbation, even if the idea of using a glorified eggbeater seems ever so slightly ridiculous.

We do tend to think of nineteenth century people as being rather uptight and prurient, but equally we know that dildos were used, and that the Victorians were users of pornography, and there was definitely a street in London famed for the sale of erotica.

(Francis Kilvert in his diary from some time around 1870 does mention going to London to buy photographs of the Holy Land, and that in the case of one of the shops he visited, the owner had been fined for selling obscene material.)

So, whatever the public virtues on display, there were certainly private vices as well.

Equally, in the nineteenth century there was a complaint known as ‘female hysteria’, which was really a catch all diagnosis for women who appeared to be overly emotional, moody, highly strung, or just plain ‘difficult’.

Some doctors at the time tended to ascribe it to sexual frustration, and there is an urban myth about doctors masturbating their patients to bring relief, with the suggestion that these eggbeater devices may have been used for such purposes.

This is almost certainly not true.

Of course, there may have been isolated cases where this happened, but that’s probably all they are, isolated cases.

There is a more serious side to this – some doctors used a diagnosis of female hysteria as an excuse to have difficult women incarcerated in private lunatic asylums.

Sigmund Freud, despite sometimes having some silly ideas, did have the rather more sensible idea of ascribing female hysteria to emotional disturbance and in trying to find the psychological cause of the disturbance.

It’s also worth noting that female hysteria was a disease that affected the wealthy classes – those who could afford expensive doctors. The poor managed their stresses and psychological problems as best they could, self medicating with alcohol and patent medicines.

These stresses may also explain some of the truly horrible instances of domestic violence reported in nineteenth century newspapers.

And while some of the early devices were machanical, there was a move towards the use of electrical devices to relieve nervous complaints. Some of the early electrical devices were therapeutic, rather than sexual, and best thought of as early version of a TENS machine.

(while considerably later than the period I’m writing about George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, describes receiving electrical stimulation treatment to restore the use of his injured arm after he had been shot.)

So, bottom line, just because a device is a vibrator, it doesn’t mean that it’s a Vibrator …