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Authors: Lisa Appignanesi
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After the opening of the new divorce courts in 1858 and its examples of sexually desiring women, he revised his views slightly:
What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally. It is too true, I admit, as the divorce courts show, that there are some few women who have sexual desires so strong that they surpass those of men, and shock public feeling by their consequences. I admit, of course, the existence of sexual excitement terminating even in nymphomania, a form of insanity that those accustomed to visit lunatic asylums must be fully conversant with; but, with these sad exceptions there can be no doubt that sexual feeling in the female is in the majority of cases in abeyance, and that it requires positive and considerable excitement to be roused at all...
In his footnote on nymphomania, Acton discusses the excision of the clitoris, which has been recommended as a cure, only to say that hedoesnât consider it effective, since there is also âspecial sensibilityâ in several portions of the vaginal canal.
Not all the mid-nineteenth-century mind doctors in Britain bought into the uterine or ovarian theory of hysteria and presumed it had a physiological base. Argument was rife, and continued at least until the end of the century. Nor did all of them agree with the guiding Victorian notion that the existence of female desire was itself an indication of a classifiable condition, such as nymphomania, calling for confinement in an asylum. But many shared a sense of the precarious nature of being woman. Women are both endangered and dangerous.
Julius Althaus (1833â1900), a cultivated German-born and -trained neurologist, prolific writer and eventual founder of the Maida Vale Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London, for instance, is keen to leave the uterus to one side and focus on hysteriaâs emotional character alone. Althaus had briefly worked with the young Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris, and at times sounds more radical than that French Napoleon of the Neuroses himself â certainly in his conception of hysteria. All symptoms of hysteria, Althaus writes in 1866, âhave their prototype in those vital actions by which grief, terror, disappointment and other painful emotions and affections are manifested under ordinary circumstances, and which become signs of hysteria as soon as they attain a certain degree of intensityâ. Women whose âsensibility is bluntâ, Althaus argues, ânever become hysterical; while those who are readily accessible to impressions coming from without, who feel acutely and are liable to strong emotions, are certain to become hysterical and made to suffer mental agony or prolonged painâ.
The Protean range of symptoms they may then manifest can include any or several of the following: convulsive attacks, fainting fits, pain, cough, difficulty in swallowing, vomiting, asthma, hiccups, palpitations of the heart, general and partial loss of power, paralysis, anaesthesia and hyperaesthesia. These are extreme symptoms, and yet this is an ordinary enough condition, one that âimpressionableâ women who are not particularly âstrong-mindedâ are prone to sufferfrom in an age that requires a âlong and laborious trainingâ in âself-controlâ.
George Drysdale, in his Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion, by a graduate of Medicine (1857), a book that was soon renamed The Elements of Social Science (1861), was more outspoken in his analysis of hysteria. He had a reformerâs zeal and it was clear to him that hysteria was a mentally and emotionally occasioned condition linked to the sexual abstinence the age demanded, particularly of women. âA morbid sexual state both physical and mental lies at the root of hysteria,â he writes. He emphasizes that the disease is particularly prevalent amongst women of the upper classes, âamong whom the sexual feelings are much more prominently developed, from the want of a
What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally. It is too true, I admit, as the divorce courts show, that there are some few women who have sexual desires so strong that they surpass those of men, and shock public feeling by their consequences. I admit, of course, the existence of sexual excitement terminating even in nymphomania, a form of insanity that those accustomed to visit lunatic asylums must be fully conversant with; but, with these sad exceptions there can be no doubt that sexual feeling in the female is in the majority of cases in abeyance, and that it requires positive and considerable excitement to be roused at all...
In his footnote on nymphomania, Acton discusses the excision of the clitoris, which has been recommended as a cure, only to say that hedoesnât consider it effective, since there is also âspecial sensibilityâ in several portions of the vaginal canal.
Not all the mid-nineteenth-century mind doctors in Britain bought into the uterine or ovarian theory of hysteria and presumed it had a physiological base. Argument was rife, and continued at least until the end of the century. Nor did all of them agree with the guiding Victorian notion that the existence of female desire was itself an indication of a classifiable condition, such as nymphomania, calling for confinement in an asylum. But many shared a sense of the precarious nature of being woman. Women are both endangered and dangerous.
Julius Althaus (1833â1900), a cultivated German-born and -trained neurologist, prolific writer and eventual founder of the Maida Vale Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London, for instance, is keen to leave the uterus to one side and focus on hysteriaâs emotional character alone. Althaus had briefly worked with the young Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris, and at times sounds more radical than that French Napoleon of the Neuroses himself â certainly in his conception of hysteria. All symptoms of hysteria, Althaus writes in 1866, âhave their prototype in those vital actions by which grief, terror, disappointment and other painful emotions and affections are manifested under ordinary circumstances, and which become signs of hysteria as soon as they attain a certain degree of intensityâ. Women whose âsensibility is bluntâ, Althaus argues, ânever become hysterical; while those who are readily accessible to impressions coming from without, who feel acutely and are liable to strong emotions, are certain to become hysterical and made to suffer mental agony or prolonged painâ.
The Protean range of symptoms they may then manifest can include any or several of the following: convulsive attacks, fainting fits, pain, cough, difficulty in swallowing, vomiting, asthma, hiccups, palpitations of the heart, general and partial loss of power, paralysis, anaesthesia and hyperaesthesia. These are extreme symptoms, and yet this is an ordinary enough condition, one that âimpressionableâ women who are not particularly âstrong-mindedâ are prone to sufferfrom in an age that requires a âlong and laborious trainingâ in âself-controlâ.
George Drysdale, in his Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion, by a graduate of Medicine (1857), a book that was soon renamed The Elements of Social Science (1861), was more outspoken in his analysis of hysteria. He had a reformerâs zeal and it was clear to him that hysteria was a mentally and emotionally occasioned condition linked to the sexual abstinence the age demanded, particularly of women. âA morbid sexual state both physical and mental lies at the root of hysteria,â he writes. He emphasizes that the disease is particularly prevalent amongst women of the upper classes, âamong whom the sexual feelings are much more prominently developed, from the want of a
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