{"id":1490,"date":"2016-11-28T15:21:39","date_gmt":"2016-11-28T15:21:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/?p=1490"},"modified":"2016-12-30T04:41:40","modified_gmt":"2016-12-30T04:41:40","slug":"archive-project-hysteria-and-isaac-baker-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2016\/11\/28\/archive-project-hysteria-and-isaac-baker-brown\/","title":{"rendered":"Archive Project: Hysteria and Isaac Baker Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"

Link to the VQA<\/a><\/p>\n

My contribution to the VQA is centered on the topic of \u201chysteria\u201d and how Isaac Baker Brown, a Victorian doctor, dealt with patients\u2019 \u201cwandering wombs.\u201d The concept of hysteria is inherently sexist and Brown\u2019s cliterectomy treatment is inhumane; however, most typical Victorian remedies for hysteria consisted of assisted masturbation and (later on) the use of vibrators. In his book On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females <\/em>from 1866, Brown discusses his \u201cremoval of the cause of excitement\u201d and he mentions the fact that he cannot discuss \u201call the numerous varieties of insanity and other nervous disorders to which females are liable, but only those which [he] believes to be curable by surgical means \u201d (Brown, 2).<\/p>\n

The section that I chose to analyze originates from Chapter One of his book where he compares other doctors’ assisted masturbation techniques to \u201csuperficial sore[s that] will not destroy deep-seated nerve irritation\u201d (Brown, 10). \u00a0Isaac Baker Brown\u2019s terrible treatments and his records of female genital mutilation belong in the Victorian Queer Archive because they represent the typical heterosexual male\u2019s response to female pleasure and sexual enlightenment within the 19th<\/sup> century. Brown\u2019s fear of sexual liberation is thinly veiled under his \u201cresearch\u201d and his anxieties remind me of a William Rathbone Greg\u2019s article called \u201cWhy are Women Redundant\u201d that was written in 1862 and published in the National Review<\/em>. In the article, Rathbone Greg is startled by the \u201cabnormal extent of female celibacy\u201d and he fears that women are \u201credundant\u201d because they are choosing to remain unmarried, which is essentially code for independent (of men) and chaste (Rathbone Greg, 162).<\/p>\n

Since female masturbation matches Holly Ferneaux\u2019s idea of something that differs from a \u201clife-script of opposite-sex marriage and reproduction,\u201d I believe that these accounts are valuable and that they display the growing fear of female pleasure without the presence of men. This dramatic shift from the marriage-plot format to a narrowed focus on alternative sexual methods implies that men (and their genitals) are irrelevant and replaceable by the other women, by stimulation of the clitoris from vibrators, or by solo-stimulation. Furthermore, since Brown\u2019s novel discusses the dangers of the \u201ccontinual abnormal irritation of a nerve centre (the stimulation of the clitoris),\u201d I suspect that he is nervous about female liberation and the potential “redundancy of men.”<\/p>\n

Indeed, Brown\u2019s choice to remove the clitoris in order to cure \u201chysteria\u201d provides a concrete visual representation of Victorian anxieties spanning from the existence of lesbian relationships, the ability to achieve pleasure without a penis, and the evolution and potential eradication of the marriage-plot. Brown\u2019s language of \u201csuperficial sore\u201d articulates his disdain for the female sex organ and his negative word associations with the \u201csource of evil\u201d are the perfect display of the Victorian patriarchy in its frantic attempts to suppress women\u2019s social and economic mobility through sexual control.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Favorite excerpt from page 11 of Brown’s book: “Experience seems to teach that in those patients whose brains have been so weakened by long continued peripheral excitement, [clitoral stimulation] causing frequent and increasing losses of nerve force, there is not sufficient mental power to enable them to control any less powerful irritation of smaller branches of the pudic nerve, than that removed by operation.”<\/p>\n

Victorian men, most notably Isaac Baker Brown, do not seem to approve of the fact that women are taking matters into their own hands. \u00a0In fact, they despise it so much that the only alternative method is either to “cure” these “irritations”\u00a0by operating upon them or by assisting their stimulation in doctor’s offices. \u00a0How queer!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Baker Brown, Isaac. “Chapter I:\u00a0Introductory.” On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females.<\/em>\u00a0Hardwicke. 1866.\u00a0Pp. 2 & 8-10.<\/p>\n

Rathbone Greg, William. \u201cWhy are Women Redundant.\u201d The National Review.<\/em> 1862.: available through Columbia University Press<\/em>. 1999. Pp. 157-163.<\/p>\n

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Link to the VQA My contribution to the VQA is centered on the topic of \u201chysteria\u201d and how Isaac Baker Brown, a Victorian doctor, dealt with patients\u2019 \u201cwandering wombs.\u201d The concept of hysteria is inherently sexist and Brown\u2019s cliterectomy treatment is inhumane; however, most typical Victorian remedies for hysteria consisted of assisted masturbation and (later … Continue reading Archive Project: Hysteria and Isaac Baker Brown<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3046,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111423],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3046"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}