Menstruation: curse or blessing?

By Lesley Smith

Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, Vol.32:3 (2006)

Introduction: Menstruation in our lifetime has been commonly called ‘The Curse’. Our sisters in the 16th century, however, welcomed this cleansing as a fertility sign from God, through the moon that determined the tides of all that flowed on the earth. These tides included the four humorous fluids that made up each of us and determined, by balance, the health of an individual.

Ancient medical philosophers for over 1000 years understood by observation that if a woman did not bleed each month she was unlikely to conceive. In the 16th century, women were considered to be very different creatures medically from men. Women were born with more blood in their bodies, and were colder by nature than the hotter, stronger, intellectual male. Men were also considered of higher moral character than women, being stronger in every sense.


Understanding how the female body worked was subject to considerable confusion. Despite the uteric sections of the body being quite accurately described by Soranus, for some reason it was later believed that the womb was divided into seven cells. The male cells were the three on the right and the female the three on the left. The middle cell was for a wasted egg or to grow a hermaphrodite child.

By 1545, the widely read publication, The Birth of Mankind (believed to be published initially in Germany), clearly denied the seven-cell principle, which shortly after this time was fully accepted as a notorious mistake. The Hippocratic teachings that the male eggs lay on the right and the female on the left of the womb remained long after the 16th century. Even in these modern times, home-spun medical myths are often rooted in thinking dating back to the ancients, but still persist, over the centuries.

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