Today, the Victorians have something of a prudish reputation. We enjoy sniggering at the idea they found table legs offensive and bashfully called trousers ‘sit down upons’. Another story that has dogged the Victorians for the last twenty years or so is that doctors invented the vibrator in the nineteenth century to masturbate their female patients to orgasm to cure them of the mysterious disease called ‘hysteria’. Except they didn’t. Join Dr Kate Lister as she busts this persistent myth about Victorian sexuality and find out just what doctors were doing to their patients in the name of science.
Dr Kate Lister is a lecturer in the School of Arts and Communication at Leeds Trinity University. Kate primarily researches the literary history of sex work and curates the online research project, Whores of Yore, an interdisciplinary digital archive for the study of historical sexuality. Kate has also published in the medical humanities, material culture, Victorian studies and Neo-Medievalism. She regularly writes about the history of sexuality for inews, Vice, and the Wellcome Trust. Kate won the Sexual Freedom Publicist of the Year Award in 2017.