How Cultural Anxieties Around Girls Bodies Led to Sexist Medicine

“Medicine was used to control women because the idea was that they needed to be controlled”, Dr. Helen King aptly summarized the gist of cultural anxieties associated with women’s bodies, especially adolescents, and the driving biased medical diagnosis in the 16th century and onwards for so-called gendered diseases like Virgin’s disease and Hysteria.

Put yourself in the shoes of Anna, a young unmarried girl, in early modern England who falls sick with symptoms of greenish pallor, weakness, difficulty in breathing, odd eating habits and failure to menstruate. The cure suggested is

“Either bloodletting, which is incising and draining some of the blood from your body, or getting married, getting pregnant and bleeding in the process”.

What would you have done in such feminine dilemma? Either way, the woman would have had to bleed.

Medicine back then was widely practiced on the dominant theory of ‘Hippocrates four humors’. According to it, a body’s physical and emotional health was dependent on the balance of four humors: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood in the human body. Contrarily, the imbalance caused maladies. Yet the conservative mind as well as the cultural concerns around the female body, led to the medical myth that blood was the only humor related to the health or sickness in a woman’s body. Moreover, blood and womb were assumed to be interdependent for this balance. Furthermore, the womb was considered as a highly unstable organ wandering through the body, hence, women were assumed to be some highly unstable creatures, which again is another debate to put history on trial for. The same belief re-refined a disease which came into notice in the 16th century, most likely Anorexia or a condition associated to the liver or stomach as per the modern physicians, to a gendered disease known as Virgin’s disease or Green sickness.

Historians traced back the first case of Virgin’s disease in Europe from the letter published by Johannes Lange in 1554, which he had written to the father of Anna diagnosing her of Virgin’s disease owing to the symptoms listed above. Lange, having been influenced by the manuscripts indicating prevalence of Virgin’s disease in ancient Greece and Rome, had the same medical reasoning that it was caused because the virgins weren’t open at the bottom to allow the blood to flow out of the body, hence, unable to restore the healthy balance. So, the cure lies in making them bleed either by cutting or by marital interaction. Contemplating over the physical and mental torture a young girl must had to go through in 16th century, I can only think of Dr. King’s statement at TED Talks Daily podcast,

“Being a woman was a very dangerous thing to be”.

The crucial evidence against this misogynist medical oppression is that even the credibility of its existence was under question by the nineteenth century as a physician, Andrew Fogo, called it ‘an imaginary disease’. Later on, it completely vanished from the face of history in the following centuries, leaving modern physicians with so many open-ended questions and suspicions against medical practices in early centuries.

As terribly unbelievable as it is, physicians even began to associate mental illness to the female gender, based on the medical myths that female reproductive organs were supposedly a sign of instability and fragility, hence, prone to physical and mental instabilities. Hysteria, precisely meaning womb in Greek, a medical condition to describe emotionally charged behavior that seems excessive and out of control, that permeated through a significant population in the 18th century is one of the many examples. A French physician, Joseph Rulin, reinforced the myth stating that women were predisposed to it because of their lazy and irritable nature. Another one, Francois Boissier de Sauvanges de Lacroix, even went as far as to suggest sexual deprivation as the cause by presenting the case study of a nun having hysteria who got healthy only after having a sexual encounter with a barber.

Ironically, men were equally depicting hysteria, or emotional outbursts in layman terms, especially after wars which is broadly recognized today as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Yet, it wasn’t being recognized back then due to social and political constraints, as the generally accepted notion had always been that men are stronger and steadier than their female counterparts. As luck would have it, a major medical revolution came through in the 1880s when a French Neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, published his findings of 60 male hysteria patients, referring to the weak neurological system as the cause of Hysteria rather than the female reproductive organs. It disputed the set medical prejudice, gave way for further studies, and eventually prompted debates addressing the cultural anxieties around female bodies in the centuries to come.

Years have gone by, many generations have strived to erase the stigmas around the female biological structure and the labeled roles in society, culture as well as in medicine by providing research-based findings. With contemporary progress in healthcare coinciding with ever-increasing feminism, we see a sufficient degree of change in perspectives, where the new normal is having open talks around female health, appreciating their reproductive strength and regulations to protect those. Most importantly, we witness men being vocal about their mental health. Mardy Fish, the U.S. Davis Cup team head coach, issuing public statements on feeling ‘crazy anxiety’ and ‘sobbing’, and actors like Ryan Reynolds opening up about getting help are breaking the traditional taboos. Despite the ever-changing medicine moving away from prejudiced practices and society coming forth to have open discourse around feminine topics, there’s still a long way to go before we reach a point of impartial and equal social status for women. Till then, every member of the society has to continue to stay determined to never let the cruel history repeat itself.