Nymphomania, Anæsthesia and Psychopathia Sexualis.
The sexual impulse in women is subject to morbid changes, both in the way of increase and of diminution, exhibiting abnormal violent increase (nymphomania), or declining to the state of complete frigidity and sexual indifference, or, finally, manifesting itself in some perverse manner (psychopathia sexualis).
Psychopathically increased sexual impulse in woman is known as nymphomania or uteromania. In such women there is a dominant state of psychical hyperæthesia, principally in the genital sphere. The most indifferent perceptions give rise to erotic sensations and to lascivious impulses. All sensory perceptions obtain a sexual content, and induce stimulation of the cerebral cortex. All sensation and all activity in such unhappy beings ultimately concentrates itself in the act of copulation, or in some other form of sexual gratification, the greatest perversities of sexual practice frequently arising, masturbation, tribadism, and, for the most part, prostitution, even in the case of married women.
The nymphomaniacal woman, says von Krafft-Ebing, endeavors to allure men by means of exposure of the genital organs or indecent gestures; the sight of man produces intense sexual excitement, which is gratified by masturbation or by stimulatory movements of the pelvis. According to this author, nymphomania is not very infrequent at the climacteric period; it may even occur in old age. Abstinence in association with simultaneous excitement of the sexual sphere by mental or by peripheral stimuli (pruritus pudendi, oxyuris, etc.), may induce these states, probably, however, only in those hereditarily predisposed.
The history of antiquity contains records of the corrupt practices of nymphomaniacal empresses. Thus, Messalina furnishes a well-known historical example of the abnormal violence of a pathologically intensified sexual impulse in woman. She was given the agnomen of invicta, having received the embraces of fourteen athletes. Pliny says of her, die ac nocte superavit quinto et vicessimo concubitu; and Juvenal writes of her the verses,
... tamen ultima cellam
Clausit, adhuc ardens rigidæ tintigine vulvæ
Et resupina jacens multorum absorbuit ictus
Et lassata viris, necdum satiata, recessit.
In corrupt Rome, Messalina was not the only woman necdum satiata, ever insatiable; we need only refer to the orgies of an Aggripina, a Livia, a Mallonia, or a Poppæa; and Seneca hurls against the women of his day the reproach, adeo perversum commentæ genus impudicitiæ viros ineunt. And of Cleopatra, the beautiful Egyptian queen, Marcus Antonius writes in a letter to his physician, Soranus, that she had such violent sexual desire as to lead to her having connection in a brothel with 106 men.