The Technology of Orgasm

Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. First edition (stated). Octavo in black DJ, color illus to front DJ, xviii, 181 pages, b&w illustrations, 22 cm. Extremely gentle rubbing to spine foot and corners, faint soiling to fore-edges and DJ, exceedingly mild rubbing to DJ corners, else near fine(+) in near fine(+) DJ. in near fine dust-jacket. Hardcover. ISBN: 0801859417

Movie card for same book included. From the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s, massaging female patients to orgasm was a staple of medical practice among Western physicians in the treatment of "hysteria," an ailment once considered both common and chronic in women. Contents: The Job Nobody Wanted -- The Androcentric Model of Sexuality -- Hysteria as a Disease Paradigm -- The Evolution of the Technology -- Female Sexuality as Hysterical Pathology -- Hysteria in Antiquity and the Middle Ages -- Hysteria in Renaissance Medicine -- The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries -- The Freudian Revolution and Its Aftermath -- My God, What Does She Want? -- Physicians and the Female Orgasm -- Masturbation -- Frigidity and Anorgasmia -- Female Orgasm in the Post-Freudian World -- What Ought to Be, and What We'd Like to Believe -- Inviting the Juices Downward -- Hydropathy and Hydrotherapy -- Electrotherapeutics -- Mechanical Massagers and Vibrators -- Instrumental Prestige in the Vibratory Operating Room -- Consumer Purchase of Vibrators after 1900 -- Revising the Androcentric Model -- Orgasmic Treatment in the Practice of Western Medicine -- The Androcentric Model in Heterosexual Relationships -- The Vibrator as Technology and Totem. Series: Johns Hopkins studies in the history of technology, [new series, no. 24]. Women -- Sexual behavior -- History.