UTERINE FURY, nymphomania, furor uterinus . This is a disease which is a sort of delirium attributed under the name uterine fury to persons of the female sex, which a boundless venereal appetite impels violently to be satisfied, to seek immodestly the means of achieving that end: to say the most obscene things, to do the most indecent things to excite men who approach them to extinguish the ardor that is devouring them; to talk and be preoccupied by nothing but thoughts relative to that purpose; to act only to obtain for themselves the relief the need for which presses them, to the point of trying to force those who resist the desires they manifest; and it is principally by this last symptom that this sort of delirium can be considered as a sort of fury , which has the characteristics of a mania, since it is without fever.

Thus, like hunger, that feeling that makes one feel the need to take in food, and impels one to satisfy it, can, by the too-lengthy privation of the means, degenerate into fury to the point of rage; similarly, this desire for the venereal act is a true natural need in certain circumstances, relative to the temperament or to other causes that are able to incite or increase the disposition to feel intensely the provocations of the flesh, can go as far as mania, as the greatest physical and moral excesses, all of which tend toward enjoyment of the object by means of which the ardent passion for coitus can be assuaged.

If observation had furnished examples of men affected by an uncontrollable need of this sort carried to a similar extreme, we might have called the lesion of the animal functions which would be their effect a venereal fury , a term which would have been appropriate for that sort of delirium considered in the two sexes; but men are not subject to it as women are, either because in general, morality does not require of them anywhere near the restraint, the constraint, in which modesty consists — that virtue so urged on women in almost all nations, even in those which are the least civilized, because it is a sort of attraction relative to men, which makes it a pleasure for them to overcome the obstacles opposed to their desire, and consequently contributes more to maintaining men’s penchant for women, to favor the propagation of the human species; or because men are constituted as to the reproductive organs in such a way that spontaneous movement can arise there, whence effects that can cause the feeling of need for the venereal act (a resource the means of which are in women only to a limited extent) to cease; and that, moreover, fickleness of the heart is sufficiently widespread for there to be few men who do not just anticipate this natural relief by self-abuse, for want of women, in the case where decency does not allow it to be pursued, or any other impediment. See Reproduction, Pollution, [1] Masturbation. So there may be indeed in men as in women a disposition to the venereal appetite increased beyond measure, as is experienced in priapism and satyriasis; but it is never carried so far as to degenerate into fury , because the need is satisfied one way or another before that last excess can occur. See Salaciousness, Priapism, Satyriasis.

Erotic melancholy does not in general have the venereal act as its immediate object, but the desire to proceed to it with a determined person who is desperately loved. See Erotic.

Nor must one confuse vaginal pruritus with uterine fury : the former can be a disposition for the latter, but is not always followed by it; it excites, it forces the application of the hands to the affected parts, to obtain some relief by rubbing them, as occurs with regard to itching in any other part of the body, which one scratches with the same purpose, which is to get rid of the irritating causes. But in the case in question here, touching takes place without a witness, without indecency ( see Vagina), and in that it differs from that occasioned by uterine fury ; or if it is done with affectation and by means contrary to propriety, it is the effect of moral corruption, and not a delirium.

The venereal appetite, æstrum venereum (which failed to be treated in the right place, and so will be complemented here, because the subject requires it;  [2] see moreover Reproduction), that sentiment which urges acts necessary or relative to the propagation of the species, can be excited by comparing it to that of nourishment ( see Hunger), by the impression that the reproductive organs receive, transmitted to the brain, with modifications that can affect the mind [ l’âme ] with lascivious thoughts;  [3] or by the influence of those same parts of the mind affected first by those thoughts, independently of an impression of the senses, by which influence they are put into play and react on the brain; whence it follows that the mind is more and more strongly occupied with voluptuous sensations that nevertheless cannot long subsist without fatiguing it; which urge it therefore to put a stop to that uneasiness attached to the duration of any sort of sensations too intense, to use the means which instinct teaches it to be proper for producing this ultimate effect. See Senses, Pleasure, Pain, Instinct. [4]

If the venereal appetite is moderate, one can suspend the effects of the feelings it inspires, of the designs it suggests for obtaining the means of satisfying it, just as one is not impelled to eat every time the desire is felt; as one controls oneself for some time to bear the hunger, when one cannot obtain food and has reasons to refrain, in short when the hunger is not voracious. See Animal Hunger.

But just as, according to the proverb, a hungry stomach has no ears , [5] and we no longer listen to reason exhorting us not to eat or to be patient in cases where we cannot have food at our disposal, the feeling of pressing need for food overcoming every other consideration and often developing into fury , it is likewise with the need to satisfy the venereal appetite: as sensitive, it wins out over the reasonable appetite in such a way that, as the poet says,

This is what occurs above all in women who are endowed with a more delicate and sensitive temperament, most of whose organs also are more irritable, other things being equal, than those of men, especially the genital parts.

Thus, this excess of venereal appetite which is to regulated appetite what animal hunger and bulimia are to the ordinary desire to eat, a form of real illness, immoderate salacity, of which the extreme degree in women, when it goes so far as to derange the imagination and impels to violent acts, is, as we have already said above, uterine fury .

The Ancients attributed the cause of excessive venereal appetite in the two sexes to a vapor they imagined rising in great abundance from seminal liquor which, retained too long and corrupted in the testicles, they thought was carried by the spinal column to the brain to trouble the animal spirits there, whence, according to them, must follow the disorder of thought, the delirium relative to the thoughts which are dominant.

But as for a long time it has no longer been a matter of true semen with respect to women, or at least of any liquor truly analogous to the virile seminal liquor, research has pointed elsewhere for the proximate common cause in the two sexes of the feeling that urges them to the venereal act; it appears that no one can conceive of anything but erethism, [7] the tension of all the nervous fibers of the genital parts, which makes them more susceptible to vibrations by physical or mechanical contacts; so that these vibrations, excited by whatever means, transmit to the brain proportionate impressions, to which it is attached to represent to the mind, or to make it form thoughts relative to venereal things; whence follows a sort of reaction of the brain on the reproductive organs, towards which there is a new injection of nervous fluid, as happens with respect to all the parts where some stimulating feeling is exercised, of whatever nature; in such a way that, by this emission the erethism is maintained and increased, to the point where the mind, ever more affected by the sensation that results from it, seems to be uniquely and entirely occupied by it, and to be linked only to the parts from which it experiences such strong influences.

Such is the general idea that can be had of what immediately produces the desire for venereal acts; it remains to determine the different occasional causes which establish the erethism of the genital parts which have just been mentioned; constant observation has shown that they can consist in the effect of the pleasant irritations procured for these organs and for those related to them by touching, coitus, or the stimulating action of some astringent humours which surround and moisten them, or by any other external or internal effect which can provoke an orgasm: this all combined with the usual sensitivity of those same organs.

Thus these causes can have their seat in the genital parts themselves, or they consist in the disposition of the brain fibers relative to those parts, independently of any immediate affection of them; in the dominant tension of those fibers, provoked by anything that can heat the imagination and fill it with sensuous and lascivious thoughts, such as frequentation of young, attractive, persons of the opposite sex who profess gallantry; comments, conversations, readings, obscene images, the passion of love, the caresses of the loved one; and all these things establish and increase that disposition all the more that they combine with a naturally warm, lively temperament maintained by good food and idleness at an age when the inclination to pleasures of the senses is in all its force.

All these moral causes and the consequences they furnish concern man as much as woman; they produce effects, they make impressions proportionate to the respective sensitivity of the two sexes. There can be no difference between the different procatarctic causes that have just been related, except with respect to physical causes; we must therefore now see in what way the latter are applied to producing the effects in each one. But where man is concerned, this is not the place: see Priapism, Satyriasis. With respect to woman, who is expressly addressed in this article, one can also say that most of the physical causes, touching, rubbing, and coitus, effect the impressions in the same way in the two sexes insofar as they stimulate the nervous nodes of the genital parts, causing more or less strong vibrations there, and producing tickling and delightful, more or less vivid, sensations.

Thus it is not in these sorts of causes of the venereal orgasm that we find women affected in a different way than men; it can only be in those that are proper to their anatomy [ conformation ], such as: (1) the menstrual flow, which by distending the vessels of all the genital parts consequently also gives more tension to the nervous membranes of the vagina and makes them more sensitive at the approach of the time of menstruation, which ordinarily subsists while it [menstruation] is suppressed; so all else being equal, women are more disposed to the venereal appetite in these different circumstances than in all others. (2) The great abundance of salivary humour, filtered in the glands of the vagina, which being carried in its excretory vessels, keeps them dilated and tense; whence follows the same effect as the swelling of the vessels by menstrual blood. (3) The astringent and irritating quality of that humour, which being discharged into the vaginal cavity provokes a sort of itching by its action on the nerves, which produces in the membranes of that cavity an inflammation which is also quite capable of making them susceptible and highly sensitive.

All the different causes to which production of a similar effect can be attributed can be related to one of these three, or to their various combinations with the subject’s temperament and the moral causes mentioned above, to establish the cause of the more or less intense venereal appetite in proportion to the intensity of the disposition.

Thus we may classify, among the things that can contribute to producing this disposition, drugs to which a specific property for this effect is ascribed, which for this reason are called aphrodisiacs , in other words capable of provoking a person to venereal acts. The one that has the reputation of possessing this quality the most eminently is the preparation of cantharides flies. [8] See Cantharides. Sennert [9] also much vaunts the efficacy of borax in this regard: it is so great, he asserts, that a woman who had drunk a glass of hippocras in which this drug had been dissolved was so ardent for the pleasures of love that she fell into a real uterine fury . A mixture of musk with aromatic oils introduced by any means at all into the vaginal cavity can also, according to Ettmüller, [10] product the same effects.

But these supposed aphrodisiacs are for the most part effective only to the degree that they are general stimulants, as all the subtle and penetrating acerbic medicines without any determination to have their effects more particularly in one part than in any other. Experience has taught us to make almost no exceptions except the cantharides, which seem to develop their action in the urine conduits more than elsewhere, whence by communication they make themselves felt in the reproductive organs by exciting in them a sort of erethism.

From this corporeal disposition produced by this cause, or by any other of those just described, follow sensations that can only give rise in the mind to thoughts relative to the pleasures of love, just as a certain swelling of the membranes [ tuniques ] of the stomach by blood, gastric juices, and the flow of saliva endowed with certain qualities, awakens thoughts in the mind relative to the appetite for food ( see Hunger), thoughts that can be strong if not diverted by some other thought which the fibers of the brain, of which a determinate degree of tension is the physical cause which is thought to produce these thoughts, contract, in a manner of speaking, the habit of this disposition, remain tensed and consequently possibly affecting the mind in the same manner, independently of the impression transmitted from the organs of generation. So the physical causes that give rise to that impression can cease without the state of the corresponding fibers in the brain changing; and therefore there subsists a real cause of delirium in that the mind is constantly occupied by thoughts relative to the venereal appetite without any external cause having occasioned it, and without the person thus affected having misjudged certainly while awake what is known to everyone, since she seeks to satisfy her desires without decency or discretion, consequently in a manner contrary to good morals and to the education she has received. [11] Now as it is the specificity of all passions to become more violent in proportion to the resistance they encounter, immoderate venereal appetite of women not being ordinarily easy to satisfy, either because it is sometimes insatiable or because it is not always possible or permissible to use means proper to that effect, is irritated by these obstacles and degenerates into fury , which, because it is supposed to be caused by the influences of the womb, is called uterine .

Yet not only can this violent delirium exist without that organ continuing to play any role in it, after having contributed to establishing its cause, but also without its ever having been previously affected by any vice related to it, and even any disposition proper to produce that effect. It suffices for the moral causes to have influenced the brain to establish in it the cause of uterine fury , just as the vivid thought, the pressing desire for various foods or other singular things that affect pregnant women are enough to give them strong desires which often resemble a genuine delirium, without there being any particular cause in the organs that can give rise to the thought of that appetite or those fantasies: it is then a genuine species of manic melancholy. See Desire, Melancholia, Mania.

But uterine fury does not set in at once with all the symptoms that characterize it. The women who are affected by it have always begun to feel the tingling of the flesh by degrees: although it bothers them a lot early on, modesty restrains them for a time; they try not to manifest the shameful feeling that strongly preoccupies them; then they are of somber, taciturn, sad humour, emitting sighs from time to time, or lascivious glances, especially when they encounter men or hear something having to do with the pleasures of love; they blush, their face lights up; and if at that moment you feel their pulse, you find it agitated, as happens in erotic passion. See Erotic. Galen asserts that he has never been wrong applying this method when he had to discover illnesses caused by venereal desires. After these first symptoms, when the disease increases, the persons affected seem to lose almost all their shame; they become garrulous; they no longer hide their inclination to talk or chat about the pleasures of love; they lose their temper easily with those who contradict them, who try to contain them; they also sometimes allow themselves outbursts of dangerous anger; they appear violently agitated; they make loud cries mixed with bursts of laughter, and go on suddenly to give signs of chagrin, of sadness, shedding tears, even appearing desolate, desperate; but this is of short duration, swinging to the opposite state.

Finally, these unhappy women cease to respect any restraint to ask for and seek what can satisfy them, to manifest their desire with comments, invitations, and gestures, and throwing themselves for this purpose at the first person to come along, if someone is found who is willing to lend himself to it. They do not content themselves with little; often they only stimulate their desire with what would seem able to satisfy them, which occurs especially in the case where the cause is not based in the genital parts, when, consequently, it is not of a nature to cease with the effects of venereal acts, when, in a word, it depends absolutely on the derangement of the brain, because it is not susceptible to being corrected by the ordinary remedy of love, which is its enjoyment; [12] on the contrary, this vice always becomes more considerable, given that the erethism of the nervous fibers and orgasm must necessarily increase more and more by their effect, and consequently the thought of desire which it attached to that state must be increasingly strong and violent. It was no doubt by the effect of a delirium of this kind taken to this excess that Messalina was fairly tired, fatigued rather than satisfied, by the gross pleasures to which she prostituted herself without measure with the most revolting brutality. It is not as likely that for reason of illness Semiramis, that queen of the Assyrians, after making herself worthy of the greatest praise, fell into the most shameful and excessive dissoluteness, to the point of delivering herself to a large number of soldiers, whom she afterward had put to death in the cruelest ways. Martial mentions the enormous orgies of a Coelia which also could only be, according to all appearances, the effect of a uterine fury , since she was not a professional prostitute or there would be nothing remarkable about her excesses. That poet speaks of her this way, Epigraphs, book VII :

The few examples one can cite of persons afflicted with this illness proves that it has consequently never been very common, and it has become more and more rare as morality has become stricter about commerce between the two sexes, because from that result fewer occasional causes; it does still occur sometimes. There are few authors who, having been great [medical] practitioners, do not have a few observations from examination of bodies to relate on this subject, with different circumstances: M. de Buffon, though not a physician ( Histoire naurelle, vol. IV, on puberty ) says he has had the opportunity to see an example of this in a girl of twelve, very dark, vivid and well-colored skin, small, but already developed with some bust and filling out; she was making the most indecent acts at the very sight of a man; nothing could keep her from it, neither the presence of her mother, nor remonstrances, nor punishments; nevertheless she did not totally lose her reason, and her attacks, which were striking to the point of being awful, ceased the moment she remained alone with women. Aristotle claims it is at that age that the irritation is the greatest, and that girls must be the most carefully watched. That may be true for the climate in which he lived, but it appears that in cold lands it is much later that women’s temperament begins to rise.

It is generally observed that young persons are more subject to uterine fury than women of advanced age. But brunettes in good health, of strong complexion, who are virgins, especially those who are in a position not to be able to lose their virginity; young widows who combine the first three of these qualities; likewise women whose husbands are of limited vigor, are more disposed to this illness than other persons of their sex; yet we can assure that the opposite temperament is infinitely more common among women, most of whom are naturally frigid, or at the very least are very tranquil with respect to the physical aspect of passion that tends to the union of the bodies of the two sexes.

Uterine fury is susceptible to a treatment easy to procure if the remedy is applied as soon as it begins to manifest itself, and especially before it has degenerated into a constant mania: for when it has reached that degree, it has occurred that even marriage cannot calm it. There are examples of women who died of this illness; yet even in the case where it is in all its force, there are reasons for expecting its cessation; it can even be regarded as imminent when the attacks are less long, the intervals become more considerable, and one can speak of venereal pleasures without the patient appearing to be as affected, as impelled to be preoccupied by the object of her delirium as before. One must be prompt to prevent the progress of this illness at an early stage, all the more so because it can not only have the most harmful consequences for the person affected, but also because it establishes a dishonoring prejudice with respect to the family she belongs to, a prejudice that is always unjust if there is no reproach to be made to the parents concerning the education and care they must have taken for the conduct of the patient, who moreover with all possible virtue can have fallen into the case of appearing to have completely shaken its yoke, because the mind is not always in control of itself, and because the senses sometimes nullify all of its influence, and it is reduced then to being only their slave.

The indications to fulfill in the treatment of uterine fury must be derived from the nature well understood of the proximate cause that produces this illness, combined with that of its distant causes, its occasional causes, and the temperament of the affected person.

If she is naturally intense, sensitive, and sensuous; if she can legitimately be satisfied by the use of the pleasures of love, that is commonly the surest remedy that can be applied against uterine fury according to the observation of the most famous physicians, who think the general maxim ought to be applied in this case: quo natura vergit, eo ducendum ; [14] so we find no one who does not propose this expedient as the simplest when it can be applied. See the observations on this subject of Schenckius, Bartholin, Horstius; [15] the works of Sennert, Riviere, Ettmuller, [16] etc.

Indeed, the case of this appetite, when it errs rather by excess than by depravity, is like that for foods, when it is only a violent desire for food; hunger is assuaged by eating.

But if uterine fury depends neither on the temperament alone nor on any abnormality in the genital parts; if it is indeed a real melancholic, manic delirium, coming from an abnormality in the brain, without any outside influence on that organ, we have seen in that case that venereal acts procure no relief, and are insufficient, however often they may be repeated, for bringing an end to the disposition of the nervous fibers, which constantly maintain and renew in the mind the thought of a need that does not really exist. In this case it is like hunger which eating does not stop. See Animal Hunger. Then one must have recourse to physical and moral remedies capable of destroying that disposition.

We can further conceive of cases where uterine fury , far from being calmed by the means that seem at first most suited to satisfying the unrestrained desires in which it consists, is only irritated by those same means, insofar as they increase and maintain orgasm in the genital parts, the impression of which does not cease being transmitted to the brain and making the erethism ever more violent, so in these different cases it would be more useful to employ them subsequently as preventative than as curative.

But if the patient, although clearly in the situation where coitus could be helpful to her, is not a candidate for such advice, as the illness is pressing, and must not be allowed to develop deep roots, recourse must be had to suitable means that the art proposes to put a halt to the effects of a feeling that is as importunate as it is revolting by its nature. Thus, when the illness might be attributed to bleeding, either because it is natural at the approach of menstrual evacuation, or because it comes from suppression of such evacuation, one must employ bloodletting in large doses and several times, in proportion to the intensity of that determining cause, and work following to the rules of the art. See Menses.

If the illness depends on a swelling of the salivary glands and vessels of the vagina, with warmth and high temperature in the genital parts, one can make successful use of injections, at first cooling and tempering, and after they have produced their effect, continuing to use them but of a different nature. They should be made slightly astringent, dephlegmatizing. Home baths, emollient enemas, emulsified nitrous infusions are suitable to satisfy the first of these two indications. Gentle purgatives and cathartics, suction to the thighs, leeches on the anus to obtain a hemorrhoidal flow, can be successfully placed to fulfill the second. Turning aside gradually the humours with which the membranes of the vagina are engorged, one must take care to accompany the use of these different remedies with a diet designed to change the quality of those humours, correct their acrimony, the dominant ardor, and slow the stimulating bilious part: thus abstinence from meat, especially from game, from spiced and salted food, from spirits, even from wine, and a considerable decrease in the ordinary quantity of food ( sine baccho et cerere friget venus ); [17] attention to avoiding use of anything that can favor languor and sensuality, like excessively comfortable beds, acts of coitus which, as they say, heat the loins; in a word, to prescribe a kind of life that is austere in every respect.

If the illness must be attributed principally to moral causes, one must be extremely severe about putting a stop to them; one must remove anything that can heat the patient’s imagination and present to her lascivious thoughts; not leave her any access at all to the sight of men; supply to her the company of persons of her own sex who should not talk to her in any but the most judicious, reserved way, will correct her gently and remind her of what she owes to religion, to reason, to good morals, and to her family’s honor; at the same time, one might make use of all the remedies good for resisting melancholy, mania: anti-hystericals, anti-spasmodics, anodynes, and narcotics are the most assured palliatives to use, while awaiting success at destroying entirely the cause by suitable means.

Most writers propose several medications, like specifics to extinguish the venereal cravings, such as camfer burned and plunged into the ordinary drink, or used quite differently in whatever form; it is good for adding to all the other remedies for destroying the excess of venereal appetite. Horstius, Epist. ad Bartholinum [ Letter to Bartholin ], asserts that he has never known anything but very substantial effects from camfer, having often put it to use on girls attacked by uterine fury . See Camfer. We also find the juice of agnus castus [chaste tree], tender shoots of birch, nightshade, lesser sengreene, very much recommended for giving in juleps against this illness. Successful concoctions are also made with leaves from these plants for necessary injections, fomentations, and baths. Much is made of the good effects of water lily, violets, and their syrup; especially advised very strongly is the use of preparations of lead, among others of Saturn salt [lead acetate], but only for persons who are not and must never be in the situation of bearing children, because this metal when taken internally, it is said, makes women sterile. Riviere, given his idea that uterine fury had to be attributed to heated semen, gave bowls of turpentine to evacuate it. What would be made of such a remedy by the physician who does not believe in the existence of that seminal fluid and judges its effect only by the notion this venerable practitioner gives of it?

But none of these medications is appropriate to the illness in question except insofar as it can satisfy one of the different indications presented to be fulfilled, and not for any other special property. None of them can be employed indiscriminately in all cases: it is up to the prudent physician to choose among them, in accordance with the notion he has formed of the nature of the illness, from consequences he has judiciously derived from the nature of its causes and its symptoms, combined with the constitution of the patient.

1. See also Pollution nocturne [Nocturnal pollution] which treats the same subject.

2. He means that venereal appetite should have been treated under Appétit but was overlooked.

3. L’âme : this often ambiguous term can mean “soul,” but in this article is always translated “mind” because it clearly designates a function of the brain and has no spiritual overtones.

4. In various ways this article tiptoes around the sexual issues with both a consistently euphemistic (or medically technical) vocabulary and contorted syntax owing to repeated qualifying clauses.

5. Ventre affamé n’a point d’oreilles (La Fontaine, “Le Milan et le rossignol,” Fables , IX, 17); a proverb which goes back to Latin antiquity.

6. “The charioteer is borne on by his team not heeding the reins” Vergil, Georgics , book I, v. 514.

7. “Violent irritation and tension of the fibers, which exceeds the natural movement of their oscillations,”

Dictionnaire de Trévoux , 1752 supplement. Nerves were thought to carry messages through some kind of vibratory mechanism involving “fibers.”

8. Also called Spanish fly, even in French: mouche espagnole .

9. Daniel Sennert (1572–1637), German physician from Wittenberg and author of many medical texts.

10. Michael Ettmüller (1644–1683), physician in Leipzig whose major work was his three-volume Opera medica theoretico-practica (1708).

11. The feminine gender in this sentence is determined by the word “person” [ la personne ] and could refer to either sex except that the article, as the author has previously stated, is deliberately slanted toward the female.

12. Jouissance , i.e. , climax.

13. ‘You grant your favours, Coelia, to Parthians, to Germans, to Dacians, and despise not the homage of Cilicians and Cappadocians.’ Martial, Epigraphs , VII, 30: Bohn’s Classical Library, 1897.

14. “Wherever nature leads, we must follow.” Hippocrates.

15. Johannes Schenck von Grafenberg (1530–1598), Observationum medicarum rariorum (1594, link to 1644 edition); Caspar Bartholin the younger (1655–1738), De ovariis mulierum et generationis historia epistola anatomica (1678); possibly German medical professor, Johann Daniel Horst (1616–1685).

16. Lazare Rivière (1589-1655), physician to Louis XIII. Here is an English translation of his Praxis medica : The Practice of Physick (London, 1655); Book 15 deals with women’s diseases. For Sennert and Ettmüller, see notes 9 and 10.

17. “Without Bacchus and Ceres, Venus goes cool.” This is a proverb from the Latin writer Terence.