I don’t have a womb, but I know women who do. All the time, they say to me, “Sorry that I’m out of sorts, my womb just started moving around my torso yesterday!” I tell them that they should probably see a doctor–or at least a sorcerer–immediately.

Fantastically WrongIt's OK to be wrong, even fantastically so. Because when it comes to understanding our world, mistakes mean progress. From folklore to pure science, these are history’s most bizarre theories.Sounds crazy, but in Ancient Greece, this conversation would have actually come up frequently, only it would have been in Greek instead of English. You see, for the Greeks, there was no ailment more dangerous for a woman than her womb spontaneously wandering around her abdominal cavity. It was an ailment that none other than the great philosopher Plato, as well as Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, described at length.

Greek physicians were positively obsessed with the womb. For them, it was the key to explaining why women were so different from men, both physically and mentally. For Hippocrates and his followers, these differences could be explained by a “wandering womb.” The physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia went so far as to consider the womb “an animal within an animal,” an organ that “moved of itself hither and thither in the flanks.”

The womb could head upward and downward, and left and right to collide with the liver or spleen–movements, argued Aretaeus, that manifest as various maladies in women. If it moved up, for instance, the womb caused sluggishness, lack of strength, and vertigo, “and the woman is pained in the veins on each side of the head.” Should the womb descend, there would be a “strong sense of choking, loss of speech and sensibility” and, most dramatically, “a very sudden incredible death.”

Image: National Library of Medicine

Luckily, the womb had a weakness. “It delights also in fragrant smells,” Aretaeus added, “and advances towards them; and it has an aversion to foetid smells, and flees from them.” And yeah, you guessed it: To cure a wandering womb, physicians could lure it back into position with pleasant scents applied to the vagina, or drive it away from the upper body and back down where it belongs by having the afflicted sniff foul scents.

There was a Greek dissenter, though, by the name of Soranus. This physician, writes Helen King in her essay "Once Upon a Text: Hysteria From Hippocrates," argued that the womb was not mobile, and that the success of scent therapies was not due to an animalistic organ reacting violently to odors, but to such aromas causing relaxation or constriction of muscles.

How men could get all of the symptoms of a wandering womb–the headaches and vertigo and, of course, very sudden incredible death–without owning an actual womb, is quite problematic for the theory. But for the Greeks, the womb was clearly the seat of a woman’s wily ways, and very much a weakness (Aristotle held that a woman was a “deformed” or “mutilated” male). The womb was a rather more intimate version of the Achilles’ heel, if you will.

And how’s this for a shocker: The looming threat of a wandering womb was used to assert power over women, argues King. One prescription, for example, was for women to be pregnant as often as possible to keep the ostensibly bored womb occupied, and therefore in its rightful place. Physicians would also prescribe consistent sex.

Image: Wikimedia

The Romans, thankfully, distanced themselves from the notion of a truly wandering womb, with the physician Galen noting that while it may seem to be moving, it’s actually the tension of the membranes that hold it in place that pull it up slightly. The problem, he claimed, was the “suffocation” of the womb by a buildup of menstrual blood or, even worse, the female version of “seed” that mixed with male sperm. Retained seed would proceed to rot and produce vapors that corrupt the other organs.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, a Byzantine physician by the name of Paul of Aegina proposed an imaginative cure: Make the lady sneeze and, no joke, shout at her. And when the original Greek writings on womb movement, the Gynaikeia, eventually trickled into the Islamic world, physicians there adopted both Aretaeus’ concept of a wandering organ and also rolled in Galen’s idea of suffocation, greatly expanding on the causes of, and cures for, malignant womb vapors.

All of this knowledge, and I use that term loosely, arrived in Italy in the 12th century, and for the next several hundred years, much emphasis was put on scent therapy and sneezing (hey, sneezing may stop your heart, but it does wonders for the womb–OK, sneezing doesn’t actually stop your heart, and it does nothing for the womb). And by the 1500s, argues King, “the hysteria tradition was complete.” While wombs were no longer thought to wander, they were very much to blame for the ostensible irrationality of women. Over the course of several thousand years, the womb had become less and less of a way to explain physical ailments, and more and more of a way to explain psychological dysfunction.

/ Source

In the 1700s, the theorized cause of hysteria began to shift from the womb to the brain. But this didn’t stop the emergence of the widespread female hysteria commotion in the 19th century, in which countless cures for haywire wombs were peddled on the population, including hypnosis and vibrating devices (not a joke) and blasting a woman’s abdomen with jets of water (sadly, also not a joke). And consider those women of Victorian literature, who were so overcome with emotion–and not at all the suffocating corsets–that they collapsed after announcing they had “a touch of the vapors.” Yes, those same vapors. And how to awaken these women? Smelling salts. Yes, those same foul odors of Hippocratic medicine.

Then along comes Sigmund Freud, who says, Whoa, let’s everyone just settle down. Men get so-called hysteria as well. Freud, in fact, attested to experiencing as much himself, and his study of male hysteria indeed eventually informed his famous Oedipus complex. Most importantly, Freud made it abundantly clear that psychological disorders come from the brain, not from a malfunctioning womb.

Today, what the ancient Greeks or Romans or Arabs would consider to be hysteria is in fact a wide range of psychological disorders, from schizophrenia to panic attacks. (The theory lingers in the word “hysteria” itself: It’s derived from the Greek for “womb.”) And the womb, that organ that so befuddled the physicians of yesteryear, is now much more widely appreciated as that thing that, you know, gave birth to all of us. Unless you're Zeus, and you give birth out of your head. Such are the mysteries of male childbirth, I suppose.

References:

King, H., et al. (1993) Hysteria Beyond Freud. "Once Upon a Text: Hysteria From Hippocrates." University of California Press

Tasca, C., et al. (2012) Women and Hysteria in the History of Mental Health. Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health. 2012; 8: 110–119.