It stars Hugh Dancy and Maggie Gyllenhaal, with Felicity Jones, Jonathan Pryce, and Rupert Everett appearing in key supporting roles.

Medical practitioners like Dr. Dalrymple tried to manage hysteria by massaging the genital area, decently covered under a curtain, to elicit "paroxysmal convulsions", without recognizing that they were inducing orgasms.

Granville meets Dr. Dalrymple's daughters, Emily, and her older sister Charlotte – a premodern feminist who runs a settlement house in a poor section of East London.

As Mortimer speaks, he explains that the symptoms of hysteria are too common to be regarded as a mental illness and that he himself believes that Charlotte is the most generous and caring person he knows.

The vibrator now enters the stage as a medical device for to treat the condition, reducing treatment time while greatly increasing customer satisfaction.

The film is based on historian Rachel Maines' 1999 book The Technology of Orgasm, which includes the claim that manual genital massage of women had been a common medical remedy since antiquity.

[2] In 2010, however, Maines' thesis was rebutted by Helen King,[3] and a 2018 paper by Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg dismisses this idea as false, with no more than "circumstantial evidence that a few physicians and midwives may have practiced genital massage before the 20th century".