What is Reddit's opinion of The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Untrue. Allow me to cite a comprehensive comment /u/jetpacksforall made about this:

Hate to break up all the fun, but the notion that pre-20th century doctors gave female patients "paroxysms" or "pelvic massage" orgasms as a common practice sounds farfetched and hard to believe... because it is far-fetched and probably not true.

ALL modern claims that this was a common practice are derived from a single source: Rachel Maines' The Technology of Orgasm. But there are some serious problems with Maines' scholarship, some of which are detailed on the histsex discussion list compiled here, and there are a lot of other reasons to think that this practice, if it occurred, was anything but widespread (pun not intended):

• Ideas about and treatment of hysteria that form the basis for the argument are based on outdated secondary literature, leading to misreadings. A nuanced and sophisticated analysis of the meanings of hysteria in different historical contexts can be found in the work of Professor Helen King, who has now provided an extensive analysis of the problematic nature of Maines' (and others using Maines as their source) invocation of classical sources: Galen and the widow. Towards a history of therapeutic masturbation in ancient gynaecology (pdf).
• There was enormously pervasive horror around masturbation in Victorian Britain - see above under Baker Brown and his clitoridectomies. If the general opinion was that Baker Brown exaggerated the extent of female masturbation and that his methods were crude and brutal, masturbation in women was still seen as either causative of or symptomatic of some kind of pathology, physical, mental, or moral.
• This is borne out by diatribes against contraception as 'Conjugal Onanism', which claimed that sexual stimulation of women without its culmination in (at least potentially) reproductive marital sex led to all sorts of ailments, including 'Malthusian uterus'.
• Doctors had major concerns about being accused of sexual impropriety with female patients, which could lead to serious professional consequences including being struck off the Medical Register. Textbooks cautioned medics who were administering anaesthesia in their consulting rooms to female patients to ensure that a nurse was always present, because under the influence of the anaesthetic women might hallucinate incidents of sexual molestation.
• During the latter decades of the nineteenth century there was the rise of a separate profession to undertake the work of massage and physical treatments, and that this was seen as an inferior and handmaidenly skill rather than anything doctors themselves would be doing.
• Quacks of the day were purveying vast numbers of devices which deployed the notion of electricity as a magical curative agent. In most cases, these devices did nothing very much but, presumably, evoke a placebo reaction. The recent book Shocking Bodies: Life, Death and Electricity in Victorian England (2011) by Iwan Rhys Morus provides useful insights into legitimate and fringe medical uses of electricity.
• I am also given to understand that the 'Victorian vibrator' rather surprisingly, if it existed, does not feature in pornographic texts of the period (relying here on the evidence of someone who has given this much closer study than I have).
• Do we have any idea how effective in inducing female orgasm any of the supposed 'Victorian vibrators' would have been?
• It is true that some kind of 'electrical treatment' featured among the more specialised services being offered for men in the covert and coded prostitution advertisements to be found in the racier periodicals of the day.
• Robert Latou Dickinson and other sex therapists advocating the use of vibratory massagers in cases of 'female frigidity' from the early 1930s appear to have considered this a new and modern innovation.
• In spite of this technological advance, as late as the 1940s Alfred Kinsey did not find vibrator use common enough to be separately quantified in Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953).
• A search kindly undertaken in the British patent records found, in the medical equipment section, patents for 'a number of vibratory massage devices, but mostly in the form of rollers or vibrating pads to be attached to the hand' but that none were granted for explictly sexual aids until around 1970 (though of course this may just be the date at which such explictness became possible).
  
• It is impossible to say with any definiteness that something never occurred, but it is possible to argue that this particular treatment for 'hysteria' was rare and fell outside mainstream accepted medical practice in Victorian England. Things may have been different in North America.

https://www.amazon.com/Technology-Orgasm-Hysteria-Vibrator-Satisfaction/dp/0801866464/ref=nodl_