Victorian-Era Orgasms and the Crisis of Peer Review

Posted September 6, 2018

External Article: The Atlantic

School of History and Sociology Chair Eric Schatzberg and Georgia Tech instructor Hallie Lieberman published a paper that was featured by The Atlantic. In addition, the two were also quoted in the story about the myth of Victorian era doctors treating female patients by stimulating them to orgasm with a vibrator.

Here's an excerpt: 

There is absolutely no evidence that Victorian doctors used vibrators to stimulate orgasm in women as a medical technique, asserts the paper, written by two historians at Georgia Tech. “Manual massage of female genitals,” they write, “was never a routine medical treatment for hysteria.”

“There’s no evidence for it,” says Hallie Lieberman, an author of both the new paper and Buzz, a popular history of sex toys. “It’s inaccurate.”

Read the full story here.