>Actually, they used to remove the clitoris literally in Britain and
>America, as late as in the 1940s, to cure girls' and women's
>"emotional disorders."
Though according to this little paper <http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/first/duffy.html>, not very often:
CLITORIDECTOMY:
A NINETEENTH CENTURY ANSWER
TO MASTURBATION John Duffy, Ph.D.
Presented at The First International Symposium on Circumcision, Anaheim, California, March 1-2, 1989.
[...]
In 1866, an American medical journal discussed the work of a British physician, Dr. Isaac Brown Baker, who claimed success in treating epilepsy and other nervous disorders in female patients by excising the clitoris. After noting that the great mass of English medical opinion was strongly opposed to Baker's ideas and had "unqualifiedly condemned" his operation, the American editor concurred with the English medical profession, declaring that to remove the clitoris "to allay sexual irritability is about as unphilosophical as to remove the analogous organ of the male."4
While the clitoridectomy was only rarely performed in the English-speaking nations, the subject of female masturbation continued to intrigue the public and the medical profession. As the century drew on, more article on the subject began appearing in medical journals and the clitoridectomy was revived.5,6,7 In 1889, Dr. Joseph Jones, a former president of the Louisiana State Board of Health and a medical professor, stated that "hopeless insanity" was one of the many consequences of masturbation and that the child of a masturbator was liable to hereditary insanity.8
Dr. A. J. Block of New Orleans, in an article entitled "Sexual Perversion in the Female" (1894), referred to female masturbation as a "moral leprosy." In one of his cases, he described how a schoolgirl of fourteen suffering from nervousness and pallor had been cured by "liberating the clitoris from its adhesions" and by lecturing the patient on the dangers of masturbation.10
As far as can be ascertained, Dr. Block was one of the last American surgeons to report taking such drastic measures. By this date medical studies were beginning to demonstrate that masturbation caused no serious functional disturbances and that the psychological problems involved arose from the social attitude towards the practice rather than the act itself. As these ideas gained medical acceptance during the next thirty years, the subject of masturbation in normal individuals gradually disappeared from medical journals.11