Surgery

“ . . . both neurologists and gynecologists believed heredity was the root cause of insanity, although both treated nervous and insane women as if their female bodies were defective. The most dramatic examples of this treatment philosophy were ‘local’ treatments and sexual surgery. If the symptoms of nervous and mental illness were unwomanly behavior and feelings, and if the causes were rooted in the female body, then the cures must produce some change in the woman patient’s reproductive organs to change the woman’s behavior. Women patients and their families and friends were vocal advocates of this line of reasoning (Theriot II, 21). . . . More common than family and friends influencing treatment, countless women patients also demanded or requested surgery to relieve their nervous symptoms. . . . Whether to relieve emotional or behavioral symptoms or to end their childbearing potential, many women sought operations. Physicians reported that these operations cured many cases of nervous and mental illness, even among women in asylums” (22).