Aha! It’s “a chancre on the penis!” not “a chamber on the lines”, it’s “a chancre on the penis!” This is the joyous thought process I had while decoding the terrible handwriting of a Victorian doctor from a huge leather-bound book in the Dunedin medical archives last year. If you can’t imagine the delight in working out the ailments of a syphilitic pianist from Port Chalmers in 1889, medical history may not be for you.
Appalling ideas and diseases from our past still influence our thinking and remind us of how lucky we are to live when and where we do, as well as how batty humans can be. Especially when they involve the hilarious sex lives of old-timey people. Here are four of my favourite, funniest and saddest stories from the Western history of sexual medicine. They are not very sexy, sorry.
I’ll begin with my favourite historical figure, the fabulous John Hunter …
Surgeon holds back medical knowledge using only his syphilitic knob.
John Hunter, a pioneering eighteenth-century surgeon, took his passion for venereal disease seriously. He wanted to prove his theory that gonorrhoea and syphilis were the same disease presenting different symptoms. To make his case, he took the pus from a gonorrific sore and, using a scalpel, poked it into an anonymous man’s penis and testicles. He does not say whose junk he used for the experiment, but as he recorded frequent and intimate detail on the progression of the patient’s sexual health, including their mood and exact sensations of pain and discomfort over many decades, historians assume that the cock and balls heroically sacrificed in the name of science were Hunter’s own.
Hunter gleefully observed his testicles becoming painful and swollen, his penis discharging a greenish yellow liquid, and an awful burning sensation when he urinated. He had successfully given himself gonorrhoea! But, even better, after his initial symptoms cleared up, Hunter awoke one day to find a single, firm, painless, non-itchy skin ulceration at the site of his gonorrhoea infection — a tell-tale chancre of primary-stage syphilis. Hunter’s experiment was a success. He happily wrote that gonorrhoea and syphilis were the same disease.
Except, of course, they aren’t. What had happened was that Hunter had selected a pus sample from a person who had both gonorrhoea and syphilis. Unfortunately this idea stuck for another sixty years. Gonorrhoea is very unpleasant, but even before we had antibiotics it would usually clear up on its own within about a month. Sadly, due to Hunter’s mistake, gonorrhoea continued to be treated the same way syphilis was, with highly toxic mercury.
Hunter’s self-experimentation was noble, even if it was revolting and horribly misinformed.
Man invents electro-orgasm, pleasures himself to death.
Johann Wilhelm Rittler made radical progress in the technology of electricity with the invention of the Voltaic pile — the world’s first electric battery that allowed for a continuous, steady and strong flow of electric current. In around 1800, he began experimenting with how the electricity felt on his body — on his eyes, his tongue, up his nose and, predictably, on his dick.
Rittler soaked a cloth in milk and wrapped it around his penis. When he put the electric wire on it, he achieved an erection and orgasm. He then wrote down his findings and left the thing alone.
Just kidding! He declared his love for the machine, delightedly writing to his publisher “Tomorrow I marry — i.e. my battery!” He then repeated his “experiment” with higher and higher levels of current, until he had to take opium to dull the pain. Repeated electrocution meant he endured frequent headaches, muscle spasms, numbness and stomach cramps. His eyes became infected. His lungs filled with mucous. He lost the sensation in his tongue and often collapsed from terrible dizzy spells. At one point, the current paralysed his arm for a week, and he often couldn’t get out of bed for months at a time. But then why would he want to, when the love of his life was there to electrocute his balls all day long?
Ritter died at age 33 due to complications from tuberculosis. These complications were almost certainly the kind you get from fucking a robot until your body doesn’t work anymore.
As most historic doctors were, like Rittler, male, and were, like Rittler, obsessed with their penises, women’s bodies were long regarded as mysterious and terrifying things. Because men didn’t seem to think that actually asking women how they were feeling was a sensible idea, they pretty much just made up female anatomy and health advice for about two millennia. For example …
Women are untrustworthy flibbertigibbets with animals for organs.
Watch out, ladies! You have an animal walking around inside you that is making you crazy and feeble! Ancient Greek doctor Aretaeus explains: “It moves hither and thither in the flanks […]to the right or the left, either to the liver or the spleen […] in a word, it is altogether erratic.” GET AWAY FROM MY SPLEEN, FOUL BEAST!
Don’t worry, the animal inside you is only your womb. Or, actually, do worry, because it is going to cause you and the rest of Western womankind misery for the next 2000 years or so. Greek doctors thought the wombs of lonely women broke free of the belly and headed upward, toward the head. This condition was called “hysteria”, or “wandering womb”. Once it escaped, the womb could be hard to find and could sometimes suffocate a woman.
The best cure for hysteria was hot, steamy sex, which put widows and spinsters at particular risk of developing the disease. Luckily, wombs were said to have very sensitive noses and could be coaxed back to their proper place by rubbing a tasty treat or sweet-smelling unguent over the vulva and upper thighs. Or you could do what Roman poet Martial reported one woman doing:
Leda told her old husband that she was hysterical and complained that being fucked is a necessity for her […] what he no longer does, should be done. Right away the male doctors come forward and the female doctors step back, and her feet are lifted. What severe medicine!
Sadly the idea of hysteria didn’t disappear until the goddamned twentieth century. Women could be diagnosed with hysteria for a wide array of symptoms, including faintness, nervousness, sexual desire, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and “a tendency to cause trouble”. You will notice that both sexual desire and lack of sexual desire are listed. The criteria were so messed up that a woman could do basically anything her husband or family didn’t like and be diagnosed as hysterical. Many “hysterical” women were forced to enter an insane asylum or to undergo surgical hysterectomy.
The only possibly nice thing about hysteria is that treatment for it continued to be sexual stimulation. Greek doctors recommended manual stimulation of the private parts to induce a “spasm”. Nineteenth-century doctors continued this treatment, rubbing their patients’ genitals with warm oil. Many doctors found the process tiring (it can take a while, amirite?). Some used well-aimed jets of water on their patients, and in the 1860s an American doctor designed a steam-powered pulsating device with a vibrating sphere to relieve his colleagues of the tedious chore. The first vibrator had been invented. The women liked it so much he advised use of the “pelvic manipulator” should be closely supervised by a (male) doctor or the woman’s husband to prevent “overindulgence”. Come on, doctor, give the ladies a break!
It is strange that the treatment for hysteria was assisted manual orgasm, as for the most part the thought of people enjoying sexual sensations outside of marriage with the aim of reproducing was not advised. Quite the opposite, in fact …
The doomed war against masturbation.
Victorians were obsessed with stopping people masturbating. The American doctor John Harvey Kellogg suggested small boys be circumcised “without administering an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind”. For young girls, he “found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement”. Kellogg also believed a diet of tasteless, dry food could curb the urge to abuse oneself, and lo, cornflakes were invented. Before you write him off as an evil pervert, take into account that at the time masturbation was thought to cause problems such as shortness, blindness, epilepsy, madness, hairiness, weakness, acne and cancer, to name a few. Women who masturbated were said to be prone to nervous exhaustion and emaciation, as well flat-chestedness, memory loss, fickleness and an irritable disposition. They were restricted from riding horses or bicycles, sewing and squatting down to do laundry because these activities could arouse unwanted sexual feelings. Some women even had a clitoridectomy to stop them from touching themselves.
In the early 1800s, a French medical professor called Claude Lallemand dominated the field of masturbation. He was bothered by what he called “spermatorrhea”, or wet dreams, as even the most restrained man could not help the erections and orgasms that plagued him at night. Claude hunted out spattered sperm on his patients’ bodies and clothing with a microscope. If he found any stray soldiers, the man would be treated with crushed ice, lead girdles, electric shocks and hot needles inserted into the scrotum, perineum and anus. Lallemand also recommended a slim metal cylinder covered in a caustic substance be inserted into the urethra, causing the patient “visible agony” and occasional death. Lallemand was happy with his procedure, noting that the pain it caused resulted in “the most marked and lasting effects”. Injure your dick badly enough and it will stop working for a while. Amazing.
Doctors poking their noses into other people’s sex lives and telling them what they should and shouldn’t be doing has caused immeasurable misery. It’s with a heavy heart that I proceed to …
The terrible “treatment” of non-heterosexuals.
Horrible things from history can be kind of funny if they were a few generations ago and didn’t affect anybody alive today. The medicalisation of homosexuality is far too recent to fall into this category. Non-hetero and non-cis people are still having a rough time. Homosexuality was only legalised in New Zealand in 1986. And less than two decades before that, doctors were still “treating” homosexuality with electric shock therapy.
I only have room for one man’s story. Alan Turing was a brilliant computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, mathematical biologist, and marathon and ultra-distance runner. In World War Two, he was part of a group that intercepted and cracked coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis; it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by as many as two to four years. He arguably made a greater contribution to defeating the Nazis than Eisenhower or Churchill. But this man, who should have been lavishly rewarded and idolised for saving probably hundreds of thousands of lives, was discovered to be homosexual. He was offered the choice of two years in prison (you can imagine how the other prisoners would have treated him) or a course of hormone injections that would have resulted in his chemical castration, and would have caused him to grow breasts. In 1954, Turing committed suicide. The gentle, eccentric, introverted genius made the private decision to lace an apple with cyanide and eat it.
The history of medicine can remind us of how bad things have been, how far we have come, how grateful we should be for the privacy, freedom and healthcare we have, and how much we can still improve our health system. If you are feeling sad about your sex life or lack of it, be happy that you can at least masturbate without worrying that you’re going to give yourself cancer.