Picture this. A 24-year-old middle class married woman visits a gynaecologist saying that she is troubled by her fantasies, which involve lustful images of sexual intercourse with men other than her husband. And that whenever she talks to men erotic feelings overwhelms her mind.

What do you think her doctor’s advice would be? If her gyane is Dr Horatio R Storer, former vice president of American Medical Association, he would have diagnosed her with nymphomania, excessive female desire or sex addiction.

He would have also suggested, after a physical examination of her clitoris,
that if she continued entertaining such desires without treatment, then she would most certainly end up in an asylum.

Many reading this might wonder why a woman would even want to approach a doctor for something like this. But many did, once upon a time, and that’s how doctors like Storer responded to their excessive, “unladylike” desires, even prescribing treatments that included, removing clitoris and ovaries to enforced bed rest, as cure.

Medical science has a long and controversial history of pathologising human sexuality, especially female sexuality.

Behaviours and inclinations like nymphomania, masturbation and homosexuality which are now regarded as healthy and normal by the
medical fraternity, were looked upon as abnormalities and diseases to be treated/cured by several “venerable” doctors (some continue do so even
now), as recently as the 1980s, when they were officially removed from the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders, relied on by psychiatrists everywhere, including India, for diagnosis.

The destigmatisation happened mainly due to better science and research, over the last fifty years that has helped us in understanding the social, religious and moralistic biases that come naturally to people, including doctors, when the topic at hand is sex.

For instance, in the West, nymphomania was not just a medical problem,but also a moral one, at least till the mid 20 th century.

(Continues)