They were powered by electric current, battery, foot pedal, water turbine, gas engine or air pressure, and they shimmied at speeds ranging from 1,000 to 7,000 pulses per minute. They were priced to move, ranging from a low of $15 to what Dr. Maines calls the ''Cadillac of vibrators,'' the Chattanooga, which cost $200 plus freight charges in 1904 and which, in its aggressive multi-cantilevered design, is more evocative of the Tower of London than the Pink Pussycat boutique.

Doctors used vibrators for many nonorgasmic purposes, including to treat constipation, arthritis, muscle fatigue, inflammation laryngitis and tumors; men as well as women were the recipients of vibratory physic. But that a big selling point for the devices was their usefulness in treating female distress can be gleaned from catalogue copy and medical textbooks at the time, which spoke of the vibrator's particular effectiveness against ''pelvic hyperemia,'' or congestion of the genitalia.

Vibrators were also marketed to women, as home appliances. In fact, the vibrator was only the fifth household device to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, teakettle and toaster, and preceding by about a decade the vacuum cleaner and electric iron -- perhaps, Dr. Maines suggests, ''reflecting consumer priorities.''

Advertised in such respectable periodicals as Needlecraft, Woman's Home Companion, Modern Priscilla and the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, vibrators were pitched as ''aids that every woman appreciates,'' with the delicious promise that ''all the pleasures of youth . . . will throb within you.''

Significantly, the vibrators were almost always designed to be used externally. As a result, medically indicated massage therapy could be pitched as upstanding and asexual -- and less risque than the gynecologist's speculum, which came under heavy ethical fire when it was first introduced in the late 19th century.

Dr. Maines, head of Maines and Associates, a firm that offers cataloguing and research services to museums and archives, first stumbled on her piquant subject while researching the history of needlework. Thumbing through a 1906 needlepoint magazine, she found, to her astonishment, an advertisement for a vibrator. When she realized there was no scholarly history of the device, she decided to take on the topic.

Her investigations led her to conclude that doctors became the keepers of the female orgasm for several related reasons. To begin with, women have been presumed since Hippocrates' day, if not earlier, to suffer from some sort of ''womb furie'' -- the word ''hysteria,'' after all, derives from uterus. The result was thought to be a spectacular assortment of symptoms, including lassitude, irritability, depression, confusion, palpitations of the heart, headaches, forgetfulness, insomnia, muscle spasms, stomach upsets, writing cramps, ticklishness and weepiness.