Hysteria Treatment
Although being used extensively for more than 40 years, an automobile could hardly do anything to protect a child. It wasn't until the 1950s that seatbelt development really got going. Also, there have been child car seats in the past, but not ones that were meant to keep children safe. The child could sit still and gaze out the windows in the early versions of car seats, which were essentially boosters.
More than 600,000 children under the age of 12 are still thought to travel without vehicle restraints each year, according to the CDC. When compared to that, consider the circumstances that must have existed in the past, before anything existed.
Even if this is highly sexual to us in modern times, it may not have been perceived that way in the past. Evidence from the era also suggests that medical professionals believed a woman would not experience any sexual pleasure from external stimulation. Hence, vibrating was solely for therapeutic purposes. Maybe they merely stated it to avoid sounding licentious at the moment.
We now understand that the majority of these women who were labeled as hysterical likely had a wide range of other illnesses. The only thing that made hysteria a single diagnosis was the profoundly absurd notion that practically every illness affecting a woman might be the same thing.
