See Dr. Grace Feder Thompson's letter
appealing for patients, Lydia E. Pinkham's
Vegetable Compound, and Orange Blossom
medicine, Dr. E. C. Abbey's The Sexual System and
Its Derangements, which emphasises
masturbation, as doe Dr. Pierce, and several
small boxes of old
American patent medicine for women.
And, of course, the first Tampax AND -
special for you! - the American fax
tampon, from the early 1930s, which also
came in bags.
See a Modess True
or False? ad in The American Girl
magazine, January 1947, and actress Carol Lynley in
"How Shall I Tell My Daughter" booklet ad
(1955) - Modess . . .
. because ads (many dates).
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Dr. R. V.
Pierce's patent medicine empire and
hospital, often
concerned with women's diseases, cancer,
digestive illness, fatigue,
headache, hysteria, female weakness,
gynecology, obstetrics,
childbirth, and menstruation
"The People's Common
Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English;
or,
Medicine Simplified," 1895, Buffalo, New
York
Introduction
I show parts from the
"Spermatorrhea" section in the
famous Dr. Pierce's The People's
Common Sense Medical Adviser
(63rd edition, 1895; on the title
page he claims he has sold over two million
copies of the then over
1000-page book) to let
you see the outlandish
attitude towards masturbation
some doctors held in America 100
years ago, and necessarily many
Americans - even today. (See and
read more about Dr. R. V.
Pierce's medical empire and
others' writings on masturbation
in the links above this story.)
Beliefs such as athletes
avoiding sex the day before a
competition date from at
least Dr. Pierce's era and are
explicitly based on what you are
about to read.
And even the British comedy
group Monty
Python had a chorus in
their movie The Meaning of
Life warning listeners to
save every sperm - meant
humorously, of course; Dr. Pierce
warned exactly the same thing,
seriously.
As far as women's health
is concerned, compare the 30
pages Pierce devotes to mostly
masturbation to the TWO pages to
"The Turn of Life" (menopause).
Remember Dr.
Joycelyn Elders, the
woman President Clinton nominated
for Surgeon General of the United
States? Conservatives hated her
liberal views on masturbation,
among other things, and rejected
her.
Dr. Pierce preaches to men,
although he does fleetingly say
that women
should not masturbate.
But he wanes eloquent over the
fact that men lose the vital fluid,
semen,
through masturbation and nocturnal
ejaculations. "Its waste is a
wanton expenditure,"
whereas women lose what, just an
egg every month, whether they
masturbate or not? Frequent
nocturnal emissions, beyond
men's conscious control, must be
treated; ovulation, beyond
women's control - so what?
Another
writer, whose name you'll
recognize, operated on an
11-year-old girl to stop her
masturbation and wrote about it.
But just a
couple decades later, in order
to avoid venereal disease, the
U.S. Army told its enlisted
soldiers in World War I to avoid
sex with prostitutes - and to
masturbate! (I read this in John
Barry's "The Great Influenza.")
How times change.
Doctors and midwives masturbated
patients
By the way, in America (and
elswhere) in the late nineteenth
century, some mainstream
doctors masturbated patients, men and
women, as a treatment for certain
illnesses, in spite of Pierce's
and probably most Americans'
views. And midwives and doctors
throughout European history have
masturbated patients. Rachel
Maines wrote an eye-opening book
about this: The
Technology of Orgasm:
"Hysteria," the Vibrator, and
Women's Sexual Satisfaction
(Johns Hopkins Press, 1999). The
New York Times published a special
book review on its science page
when the book appeared. The
Pulitzer-Prize winning reviewer,
Natalie Angier, seemed as amazed
as any of her readers.
Go to the first
page!
Below:
To show this gender difference
in discussing male masturbation
and women's problems, Dr.
Pierce's satisfied women
patients chatter on in their
testimonials about their wombs
and periods next to their pictures in
his Medical Adviser, whereas not one of the
74 no-longer-masturbating men,
but ashamed, dares show his
face! ("Seminal
weakness", below, means
masturbation and/or unwilled,
mostly nocturnal, seminal
ejaculations.) The man writes
from Lynn, Massachusetts, home
of Lydia E.
Pinkham's patent
medicines.
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© 1999 Harry Finley. It is illegal to
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