Joseph Mortimer Granville
Joseph Mortimer Granville (4 May 1833, Devonport – 23 November 1900, London) was an English physician, author and inventor known for having first patented the electromechanical vibrator for relief of male muscle aches and female hysteria. Biography. Granville qualified M.R.C.S.Eng. in 1856 and L.R.C.P.Lond. in 1861. He attained the higher medical degree M.D. in 1876 from the University of St Andrews. In addition to his famous invention of an electric vibrator, he also invented a sphygmograph and a differential thermometer. On 1 December 1858 he married Mary Ellen Ormerud in Bristol. Electric vibrator. In the late 1880s Granville  invented the electric vibrator, a handheld electric operated device designed to relieve male muscle aches and pains. Originally called a percusser or more colloquially "Granville's hammer", the machine was manufactured and sold to physicians, many of whom used the equipment to create "hysterical paroxysm" in their patients with female hysteria. The publication of this theory has been described as representing "a failure in academic quality control" by academic researchers who, on reviewing the primary sources from Maines' book, "found no evidence in these sources that physicians ever used electromechanical vibrators to induce orgasms in female patients as a medical  treatment". As vibrators began to be used for bringing hysterical women to paroxysm, its inventor tried to disassociate himself from the device's "mis-use". In his 1883 book on his research, "Nerve-Vibration and Excitation as Agents in the Treatment of Functional Disorder and Organic Disease", he wrote, "I have never yet percussed a female patient ... I have avoided, and shall continue to avoid the treatment of women by percussion, simply because I do not wish to be hoodwinked, and help to mislead others, by the vagaries of the hysterical state ..." Granville was portrayed by actor Hugh Dancy in  the 2011 film "Hysteria".