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"Ahem" again....

A little known side of old-time doctoring, this being all I care to dwell on the matter, in fact I ain't even gonna provide the link...

As Forestus suggests here, in the Western medical tradition genital massage to orgasm by a physician or midwife was a standard treatment for hysteria, an ailment considered common and chronic in women.

Descriptions of this treatment appear in the Hippocratic corpus, the works of Celsus in the first century A.D., those of Aretaeus, Soranus, and Galen in the second century, that of �etius and Moschion in the sixth century, the anonymous eighth- or ninth-century work Liber de Muliebria, the writings of Rhazes and Avicenna in the following century, of Ferrari da Gradi in the fifteenth century, of Paracelsus and Par� in the sixteenth, of Burton, Claudini, Harvey, Highmore, Rodrigues de Castro, Zacuto, and Horst in the seventeenth, of Mandeville, Boerhaave, and Cullen in the eighteenth, and in the works of numerous nineteenth-century authors including Pinel, Gall, Tripier, and Briquet.

Given the ubiquity of these descriptions in the medical literature, it is surprising that the character and purpose of these massage treatments for hysteria and related disorders have received little attention from historians.

Maybe really missing a dip of snuff qualified as one of them "related disorders" I dunno.

Historians doubtless give the matter little attention on account of, like me, they'd much rather dwell on the specifics of shootings, stabbings, war and general mayhem.

Far less excrutiating

Birdwatcher