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When a modern-day woman desires a little private time with — how shall we say this? — her special vibrating friend, all she has to do is reach into a drawer or pull a small device out of her purse. In the mid-1800s, however, that same ecstatic trip to O-town required a doctor’s office, a specially designed table and the shoveling of coal.

“The female patient would lie on [the table], and there was a cutout in the middle of it with a vibrating sphere,” says Rachel P. Maines, author of “The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ The Vibrator and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction.” “It was attached to a drive mechanism that ran under the table and into the next room, where the boiler was, and you had to shovel coal into the boiler. Doctors didn’t like having to do that. ‘Just a minute, Mrs. Jones, I have to go shovel some more coal into the vibrator.’ ”

The bizarre backstory of the vibrator is also the history of how we perceive female sexuality, and reveals how we spent millenia utterly clueless about women and sex. Starting around 450 BC with Hippocrates, doctors began lumping any symptom involving a woman’s anxiousness or discomfort — basically, anything about women that men didn’t understand — into a diagnosis called “hysteria.”

“Hysteria could be defined as anything that bothered a woman or made her hard to live with,” says Maines. “Sleeplessness, anxiety, a vague feeling of heaviness in the abdomen, sexual fantasies and, my personal favorite, vaginal lubrication. That being a symptom, they found a lot of sick women.”

It was eventually decided that these symptoms stemmed from the “uterus,” then used as a catch-all to refer to female genitalia and everything around it, being knocked out of place. Hippocrates himself decided that the uterus could be repositioned by having doctors massage a woman’s genitals until they produced a “hysterical paroxysm” — today’s orgasm.

Astoundingly, from ancient Greek times up though the early 1900s, this procedure, and the explosive results it produced, were rarely equated with sex.

“Society had women so buttoned-up about their feelings that women didn’t express, ‘Oh my God, this feels wonderful!’ ” says Jonah Lisa Dyer, co-writer, along with her husband, Stephen, of an upcoming film about the vibrator’s invention, “Hysteria,” starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Hugh Dancy. “[Society] really didn’t think there could be any pleasure involved in the sexual act for women without a penis involved.”

There were occasional exceptions to this. Protestant doctors often opposed the rubbing remedy because of its similarity to sex. For this and other reasons, including the hand cramps doctors suffered after an hour of massage, creative methods were employed in hysteria cases.

“Physicians sent women out to ride horses or travel in bouncy carriages and hope that got the job done,” says Maines. “They also prescribed marriage as a remedy. A famous French surgeon actually said, ‘Women who suffer from hysteria should get married and go home and be “strongly encountered” by their husbands.’ ”

Still, the hand rub was the most effective method, and by the mid-1800s, exhausted doctors sought mechanical assistance in treating their agitated female patients. The first sign of relief arrived in 1869, when Dr. George Taylor invented a steam-powered vibrator — the one that required coal.

“There was a vibrating sphere about the size of an orange. [The patient] would lie over it with her pelvis on the sphere, and the thing would vibrate like crazy,” says Maines. “Dr. Taylor advised colleagues that women would tend to want more treatment than they really needed. They would overdo it if you let them.”

The new device cut office visits from an hour to a quick and cozy four minutes. But doctors, not wishing to shovel coal in their clean white coats, sought less cumbersome methods. Popular spas offered hydrotherapy — delicately aimed hot jets of water — but that required travel for treatment.

In the 1880s, British physician Joseph Mortimer Granville (played by Dancy in “Hysteria”) finally presented a solution. With the advent of household electricity, he invented a handheld metal device with a leather cover and a vibrating attachment. Doctors reveled in the new, easy-to-use machine — nicknamed “Granville’s Hammer” — which quickly became a coveted home appliance for those who could afford it.

“It was sold for decades, up through the 1920s, in things like McCall’s magazine and the Sears Roebuck catalogs as a ‘home use massager,’ ” says Stephen Dyer. “It was very ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink,’ like, ‘Get in the pink of health today,’ ‘Every woman’s secret.’ It was certainly known that it made you feel better in a good way.”

Some versions of the device — only the fifth household appliance to be electrified, beating the vacuum cleaner by a decade — had attachments for different uses, so women could use them to clean countertops, then take a break to relieve their “hysteria.”

“Sears had a wonderful device around 1919,” says Maines, “where you could buy a small home electric motor and attach it to a beater, a grinder, a fan, a mixer and a vibrator. The headline on the ad was, ‘Aids that every woman appreciates.’ ”

Vibrators’ reign as a medical device ended in the 1920s when they began appearing in “blue” movies, the pornography of the time. Just like that, the device’s medical usage — and, soon after, the “hysteria” diagnosis — abruptly ended.

Vibrators virtually disappeared from public view until the women’s movement of the 1960s, when they began appearing in sex shops and gradually became an acceptable sexual aid for liberated women. Now, in the past few years, vibrators have entered a new phase, being openly advertised on television.

“They’re selling them in Duane Reade now,” says Jonah Lisa Dyer. “It’s come full circle.”