Extreme Veteran
Posts: 322
| KGNU Radio, "Hotshots," June 21, 2012
"HYSTERIA"
("Singular Most Popular Sex Toy")
"Hotshots" looks at a movie!
HYSTERIA is about the invention of a device that is widely used, but not
commonly discussed, and when it is, usually there are snickers and Monty
Python nudges of "Know what I mean? Know what I mean?"
And I am not talking about the candy bar.
The word "hysteria" comes from the Greek word meaning a woman's womb, and
in the 1800s when it was used to mean a psychoneurosis marked by emotional
excitability and disturbances of the psychic, sensory, and visceral functions
leading to behavior exhibiting overwhelming or unimaginable fear or emotional
excess, doctors in England believed that behavior in women was caused by their
uterus, and the way to treat them and to cure that behavior was to apply
stimulation to the woman's organ.
What I don't understand is why any woman paid a doctor to treat her that
way for the all-purpose catchword of hysteria would go back to him and pay him
again for treatment when she could just treat herself at home for free.
All puns intended.
The story begins in 1880 in London, and Hugh Dancy plays Dr. Mortimer
Granville.
Dr. Granville interviews for the job as assistant to Dr. Robert Dalrymple,
who asks Dr Granville, "But tell me, Doctor, what do you know of hysteria?"
Dr. Dalrymple says that the work of treating women for hysteria is tedious
and boring, but Dalrymple is London's leading specialist in women's medicine,
and his waiting room is always full of women waiting to be treated by him.
Know what I mean? Know what I mean?
Dr. Dalrymple has two daughters, Emily and Charlotte, who is played by
Maggie Gyllenhaal, and they, too, are doctors. Emily lives at home and is a
phrenologist, or a scientist who feels the bumps on someone's head, which
determines the person's mental faculties and character.
Charlotte, however, is at odds with her father, because she is always
borrowing money to keep her Settlement House in the East End open, where she
treats poor people and many women and children. When we first meet Charlotte,
she is having an argument with her father and storms out of his office, slamming
every door behind her.
HYSTERIA takes too long to get started, could use some good editing, but
eventually gets around to the discovery of the singular most popular sex
toy.
I'm Dan Culberson and this is "Hotshots."
END |
Hyde Park Forums by www.darkendeavors.com
Hysteria
