Dr. Shock

Historians love us some case studies. They're snapshots of people's lives, albeit filtered through the pathologizing lenses of psychiatrists, physicians, social workers, and other professions.

It's pretty easy to find books with a ton of case studies in them. Maybe the most fascinating is Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis. Anticipating the work of Alfred Kinsey, Krafft-Ebing collected dozens of case studies of "abnormal" sexuality, many of them from people who sought his help, some of them from people who wrote to him describing themselves and asking to be cured. Jonathan Ned Katz gives a great account of Krafft-Ebing's contribution to the "invention of heterosexuality."

The case studies I'm looking for are a bit different, of course. Browsing around the website of the Kinsey Institute's Special Collections, I found the papers of a gynecologist and sex researcher named Robert Latou Dickinson, who did a lot of work during the period I'm studying. Since he seemed slightly relevant, I went to the massive (ha!) Cheeseville U. library to look up some of the work he did. I found A Thousand Marriages (1931). Case studies galore! But there was stuff in there I wish I hadn't read. In this passage he's talking about "Widows Over Sixty."

Pelvic examination indicates that memories or physical excitability give a strong reaction in the office of the gynecologist. Extreme distaste may appear or such vulvar congestion, marked mucous wetness and erotic behavior, even at seventy-five, that it is desirable to relieve the patient's embarrassment by hurting her, lest she have orgasm.

Dickinson died in 1950. You have to wonder whether really old gynecologists were trained by this guy, or people who studied his methods. Ugh.