Mrs. R., described as a short, stout, recently widowed twenty-year-old woman with a lively disposition, came to Dr. Bostwick out of desperation. She explained, "If I can't be relieved of this agonizing condition, I am certain that the struggle between my moral sense and lascivious longings must soon send me to the grave." She blamed reading novels and attending gay parties in her youth as the cause of "my imagination [being] wrought up to the highest point." She appeared to be familiar with the assumption that women's reason was thought to be inferior to men's. As a result, she understood that stimulating the imagination in these ways was very dangerous. Her passions were so strong, she told Dr. Bostwick, that "it was with the greatest difficulty that I could conduct myself in a decorous and ladylike manner in the presence of the other sex." Even after her marriage, her "inordinate desire" was not entirely subdued and she continued to practice "self-abuse" (masturbation). Since her husband's death, "my passion has been more inflamed than ever, and I fear that, unless something can be done to relieve me, I shall go crazy."
This case, presented in Mrs. R.'s words, reads like one of the cases Bienville described in his classic study of nymphomania. It contains all the elements that shaped the eighteenth-century understanding of the disease: inflamed imagination, uncontrollable desire, novel reading, moral struggle, and an inevitable downward slide into madness. Mrs. R.'s assertion that" I am sure my lascivious feelings cannot be natural—they must be the effect of disease," suggests the influence of "medicalized" notions about female sexual desire and women's sense of proper conduct. It is unlikely that Mrs. R. read Bienville or other medical texts, and yet she was obviously affected by the ideas they contained, including the notion that sexual improprieties required a doctor's help.
Dr. Bostwick used a speculum to examine the "irritated" and "inflamed" genitals, including an elongated clitoris. He treated Mrs. R. with various remedies: hip baths, spare diet, douches, bags of pounded ice applied to the genital region, and leeches to the uterus, presumably to draw off the noxious blood. After several weeks, Dr. Bostwick declared that he had completely cured this "highly respectable" Boston widow. She even married again.
Here, as in several other cases Dr. Bostwick described, defining nymphomania was not simply the physician's prerogative. Patients shared similar ideas about the body and the passions. They, too, were highly suspicious and fearful of "unnatural" feelings and interpreted them to mean sexual disease.
Full article:
Nymphomania
A History
By CAROL GRONEMAN
W. W. Norton & Company
Įvertinkite straipsnį