Mrs. B.s Lascivious Dreams

In 1856, Mrs. B., a twenty-four-year-old, middle-class married woman, went to the Boston office of gynecologist Dr. Horatio R. Storer, future vice president of the American Medical Association. Described by Dr. Storer in his published case notes as small and pale, Mrs. B. sought the doctor's help for decidedly un-Victorian feelings. Excessively lascivious images of sexual intercourse with men not her husband, she told Dr. Storer, filled her dreams. Recently, whenever she met and talked to a man, she dreamed about having intercourse with him. Even during the daytime, if she conversed with a man, erotic feelings overwhelmed her. Up to that moment, she had resisted any actual sexual encounters, but she greatly feared that if the malady increased, she might not be able to restrain herself in the future.

We can only surmise how difficult it must have been for a mid-Victorian woman to speak of these very private matters to a male physician. What we do know is that she understood these feelings to be a medical issue, which should be discussed with a gynecologist, not a clergyman. Whether or not she knew what nymphomania was, she interpreted her dreams as dangerous, laden with sexuality, and a warning that she was losing control.

Encouraged by the doctor to tell her story, Mrs. B. revealed that although she had never masturbated, from a young age she had felt strong, undefined desire. She assumed that she had inherited these feelings from her mother, who had experienced similar, intense desire as a young woman. This strong sexual need had driven Mrs. B. to marry at a relatively youthful seventeen years of age. She was happily married, she assured Storer, and greatly enjoyed intercourse with her husband, a wine merchant and much older man. In fact, during the seven years of their marriage, she and her husband had engaged in intercourse every night. She admitted that even when her husband restrained himself, she could not keep away from him. Recently, however, her husband complained that she had an obstruction that made intercourse difficult. She disagreed; the problem, she believed, was that her husband was having difficulty sustaining an erection.

Mrs. B. came to Dr. Storer not because she was concerned about the strong sexual desire she felt for her husband, the frequency of their marital intercourse, or her husband's possible impotence, but because she was afraid she was not going to be able to limit her sexual desire solely to her husband in the future. At a time when women were supposed to be innately less passionate than men, and during a period when Victorian modesty prevented many women from speaking about sexual matters to their physicians, Mrs. B.'s revelations to Dr. Storer suggest just how worried she must have been by her potentially adulterous feelings.

Interestingly, in this pre-Freudian time, Dr. Storer probed further into the meaning of her erotic dreams: Mrs. B. thought they arose because she and her husband longed for but had not yet conceived a child. Of all the possible explanations for her nymphomania—including the timing of her husband's presumed impotence—Mrs. B. chose the one which reflected her understanding of her role as a woman in the mid-nineteenth century. At least in what she reported to Dr. Storer, Mrs. B. determined that barrenness, not lack of sexual satisfaction, had caused her sexual dreams and daytime desires. For a Victorian middle-class woman, this conclusion is not surprising. It reflected prevalent assumptions that having children was not only a woman's major function in life but also the focus of her sexuality.

Dr. Storer, like most nineteenth-century doctors, looked to Mrs. B.'s body to explain her disorder and interpreted her libidinous dreams about a man other than her husband as a symptom of nymphomania. After a general physical examination, the physician pronounced her in tolerably good health: normal heart and lungs; regular but scanty menstrual flow; daily bowel movement; and good appetite.

He then turned his attention to her genitals. Like most gynecologists of the time, he undoubtedly was extremely careful in examining Mrs. B. Deciding that a speculum was unnecessary in this case, Storer reported on his examination: Mrs. B.'s clitoris was normal-sized, her vagina slightly overheated, and her uterus somewhat enlarged. According to Mrs. B., her clitoris constantly itched. In order to determine the seriousness of her condition, Dr. Storer gently touched it, at which point she shrieked, not with pain, but with excitement. Shocked and concerned about the extent of her disorder, Storer warned her that if she continued without treatment, she would most likely end up in an asylum.

The recommended course of therapy involved her whole family. First, Mrs. B. must totally abstain from intercourse with her husband. Because she was "unable to restrain herself," her husband was required to leave home temporarily. Her sister moved in and oversaw that Mrs. B. restricted her intake of meat, brandy, and all other stimulants that might excite her animal desire. The patient was ordered to replace her feather mattress and pillows with ones made of hair to limit the sensual quality of her sleep. To cool her passions, she was to take a cold sponge bath morning and night, a cold enema once a day, and swab her vagina with borax solution. Finally, she had to give up working on the novel she was writing. We learn nothing more about Mrs. B.'s literary output, but Dr. Storer was obviously concerned that dwelling on romance and passion was dangerous to her highly excitable mind.

Because medical cases—this one included—are usually published to illustrate a diagnosis and treatment, the narrative abruptly ends after the prescription is determined. We have no way of knowing whether Mrs. B.'s lascivious desires subsided, whether she and her husband had a child, or whether her husband's erection returned. Dr. Storer had only a brief, but hopeful, final comment about the case: Mr. B. remained absent and Mrs. B.'s lewd dreams had not reappeared.

Full article:
Nymphomania
A History
By CAROL GRONEMAN
W. W. Norton & Company