page_title: Dr. Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators
section_title: Early claims and criticism
hierarchical_section_title: Dr. Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators / Early claims and criticism
caption_attribution_description: Advertisement for Dr. Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators, Detroit Medical Journal
context_page_description: Dr. Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators were medical devices sold in the United States from the late nineteenth century until at least the 1940s, part of the burgeoning market for patent and proprietary medicines and devices at the time.
  They came in sets of four "torpedolike" hard-rubber instruments varying in diameter from ​¹⁄₂ to 1 inch and in length from 3 to 4 inches,
  and according to a retrospective article in The American Journal of Gastroenterology, were no different from modern rectal dilators.
context_section_description: An 1893 Medical News editorial noted that "Dr. Young" himself, writing in another journal of which he was the editor, praised rectal dilation as a cure for insanity, claiming that at least "three-fourths of all the howling maniacs of the world" were curable "in a few weeks' time by the application of orificial methods". The Medical News asked, 
  Why, then, in the name of pity and kindness, do these men not apply the dilators each to himself or to each other? We very much fear all this imbecility may rest upon a semi-pathologic basis, and that Krafft-Ebing may have a new chapter to write concerning sodomic perversion in his work upon sexual psychopathy. 
  A 1905 advertisement by F. E. Young and Co. of Chicago promised that "The best results may be obtained by the use of Young's self-retaining rectal dilators", the use of which "accomplishes for the invalid just what nature does daily for the healthy individual". Doctors were advised that "If you will prescribe a set of these dilators in some of your obstinate cases of Chronic Constipation you will find them necessary in every case of this kind". The price of a set "to the profession" was $2.50 (equivalent to $70 in 2019).
  Young admitted that some patients panicked at the sight of the devices.
caption: Detroit Medical Journal, August 1905
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