Hysteria (2011) on Netflix
In 1880, Dr. Mortimer Granville takes a post treating women diagnosed with hysteria. He meets the Dalrymple daughters, Emily and Charlotte, a suffragette whose work her father opposes.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.7/1034,269 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes59%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1880, Dr. Mortimer Granville loses hospital posts for arguing that medicine should abandon its older methods. He finds work assisting Dr. Dalrymple, whose practice treats women diagnosed with hysteria by massaging the genital area beneath a curtain. The young doctor proves adept, and a large female clientele follows. Dr. Dalrymple suggests that he might one day take over the practice and marry his younger daughter, Emily. Charlotte, Emily's older sister, is a feminist who keeps a settlement house in a poor quarter of the East End. When Charlotte brings a friend with a broken ankle to the practice, Dr. Dalrymple forbids Granville from helping her again, hoping to draw her away from that work.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Hysteria (2011)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film is based on historian Rachel Maines' 1999 book The Technology of Orgasm, which claims manual genital massage of women had been a common medical remedy since antiquity; Maines' thesis was rebutted by Helen King in 2010, and a 2018 paper by Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg dismisses it as false.
- Hysteria was a recognized malady until the American Psychiatric Association discontinued the term in 1952; Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville did file the first patent for an electromechanical vibrator, termed Granville's Hammer, in about 1883, but he used it to treat muscular disorders, not hysteria.
- Lieberman and Schatzberg challenged the premise behind the film directly, writing that Maines "fails to cite a single source that openly describes use of the vibrator to massage the clitoral area".
