Free Trials of Passion by Lisa Appignanesi Page A

travelled abroad and had an experience of other cultures, would probably have read it and might silently have shared its stress on the importance of unrestricted sex for the physical health and mental balance of both men and women, who were more usually idealized in Victorian England as desire-free. The Elements , after all, sold some ninety thousand copies and was translated into eleven languages.
    The Victorians, increasing work on the period has made clear, were not uniformly the dutiful, sexually repressed and rampantly moral exemplars they often aspired to be and preferred to portray themselves as. There would have been no treatises against masturbation if self-pleasuring didn’t exist. Many men, from chief justices such as Alexander Cockburn to prime ministers such as Palmerston, kept mistresses, often perfectly respectable ones. These were women worldly enough to ascribe sexuality a place, which wives, worn out by repeated pregnancies, may not have been. What is not publicly spoken about may still be privately lived. Christiana Edmunds, grappling with the tensions and inner conflicts in which her social place enmeshed her as a young woman destined to become one of Victorian England’s redundant spinsters, was evidently tempted by other possibilities, one of which was the mantle of mistress – which might even be a stopping point on the way to wife, if only the existing sposa could be made to vanish.

    6. Fashions in Treatment
    Short of the extreme recourse to a uterine operation, which could include a form of clitoridectomy, the treatment Christiana Edmunds would have undergone for hysteria would not have differed all that much, whatever understanding of hysteria the doctors she saw held. Althaus speaks of three different categories of treatment. The first is emotional and consists of removing the causes of the hysteria, ‘viz., painful emotions’. This, he notes altogether reasonably, is the most difficult feat of all and often fails to work despite the doctor’s best efforts, since it entails rousing the will of the patient To reconcile her to her position in life, and obtain for her the best possible conditions from those who surround her’. Returning lost fathers or lost suitors is not within the doctor’s usual range. Tact and perspicuity are necessary in treating the patient; and sometimes the recommendation of a total change of air and scene – ‘a voyage to the Cape or Australia does wonders’.
    The uterine theorists would not have bothered with the first of Althaus’s headings for treatment, but would instead have replaced it with a physical intervention, such as pressure on the uterine area, a dose of nitrate of silver to the cervix, the use of a vaginal pump syringe or douche, perhaps even the sedative potassium bromide, so much of which was used later in the century at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris for both hysterics and epileptics. Or they might have leapt straight to the second and third of Althaus’s facets of treatment: modifying the constitution and relieving the symptoms. Modifying the constitution is basic to much Victorian medicine and indeed our own, though we would probably replace the term ‘constitution’ with ‘lifestyle’. This usually entailed a type-specific regime which included diet (bland or nutritious), baths (hot or cold), and taking the waters in a variety ofrecommended spas from Malvern to ‘St Moritz in the Engadin where the highly rarified Alpine air, the carbonated baths, and the chalybeate mineral springs combined often produce marvelous results’.
    As for the direct relief of hysterical symptoms, faradization – the conveying of a powerful current to the affected area – was as the century moved on the most common treatment, alongside its galvanic kin. Althaus was a great champion of the electrotherapies (not shock therapies, like the later ECT). The popularity of such treatments – not