Academic research on the vibrator

Vibrators were initially created to cure female hysteria. Their usage has been studied by numerous researches and reports.

Decline of hysteria
In our research, we encountered two main explanations for the decline of hysteria:
 * 1) Throughout the early 20th century, people were gradually gaining more insight into the nature of psychological ailments. As such, hysteria was slowly fading away in favor of more precise diagnoses such as schizophrenia.
 * 2) As vibrators began being associated with sexual pleasure and/or satisfaction and featured less and less in mainstream magazines while more in taboo shopper's manuals, stores, and publications. Furthermore, the vibrator had been marketed so thoroughly that it was widely seen as a sexual aid. As such, vibrators quickly had a changing role, leading to the loss of credibility of hysteria as a true medical condition.

It was very interesting to see a divide amongst these two explanations between academic communities. Specifically, literature from the medical and academic research communities favored the first explanation. However, the museum guides we spoke to at the Good Vibrations museum seemed to prefer the second explanation. This speaks significantly to the divide between two worlds of medicine and pleasure since the decline of hysteria.

Kinsey Report
The Kinsey Reports are two books on human sexual behavior: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female published in 1948 and 1953 respectively. A complete chapter in the latter illustrates the application of the vibrator for sexual usage.