Nymphomania: A History

Recent studies of cancer, tuberculosis, anorexia nervosa, and other maladies have richly illustrated the now commonplace notion that bodily afflictions are fashioned into diseases not only by science and medicine but also by culture. In many instances, scientists and doctors have been shown to be simultaneously powerful cultural theorists and policers of the boundaries of social order. Carol Groneman's Nymphomania is a commendable attempt to chart the social construction of an enigmatic disease. The history of nymphomania as a socio medical idea is deeply embedded in two larger analytical narratives: the first, changes in sexual ideology and practice, the second, transformations in conceptions of femininity and women's status. Groneman uses nymphoma nia to get at this more general subject matter, but, although the study is occasionally revealing and often engrossing, it does not further our understanding of social construction. Nor do we learn much more than we already knew about nymphomania, perhaps because there is something about its representation that is almost too protean to pin down. The author's contextualization is competent, but the book is too short and too preoccupied with the worst medical and legal abuses (the case studies of which, admittedly, are sometimes riveting) to probe systematically the question of what cultural work nymphomania performed. Had that analysis been more central to the project, Groneman might have been better able to explain why it was that women shared constricting notions of their own sexuality and often participated in treatment and social control experiments that still make modern observers cringe. Groneman gives women some agency in her discussion of the physicianpatient encounter, but readers are still left with the overwhelming impression that the Victorians were simply idiosyncratic and aberrant about sexual matters. Moreover, the use of nymphomania as the only analytical lens occasionally risks overstating the disease's formative centrality in medical theory. The invention of nymphomania was a logical extension of broader approaches to women's health and sexuality, and it remained mostly on the fringes of medical practice and theory.