Wandering Womb

Has your doctor ever prescribed sex to cure a headache?  Well, that's what most doctors during ancient through the 19th century thought was the cure for female diseases.  Women with any kind of pain, tiredness, or imbalance would visit a doctor and he would say her womb wandered around her body.  Then he would suggest sex, pregnancy, and fumigating the vagina with nice smells to bring the womb back to its rightful place.  They seriously believed the womb traveled around the body like an animal.  No seriously.  This theory is even better than the dancing babies in the womb.

From MS 399 in Bodleian Library from 1292.  Woman suffering from wandering womb.

The ancient Greek doctor Hippocrates, known for founding medicine, said the womb was like an animal.  Another ancient doctor Aretaeus said, 

“It [the womb] delights also in fragrant smells, and advances towards them; and it has an aversion to fetid smells, and flees from them; and, on the whole, the womb is like an animal within an animal.”

The Doctor's Visit by Jan Steen from 1600.  This woman is ill because her womb is moving about her body. The wooden box in the lower left is for fumigating her vagina.  It goes under her skirts.  

Since the womb was like an animal, it had needs and wants just like any another being.  The womb needed food and entertainment and if it didn’t have these things, it would move around searching for them.  Wandering wombs ate semen and their favorite forms of entertainment were sex and nurturing fetuses.  And additionally, like Aretaeus said the womb liked nice smells.  So if the woman was religious and wanted to preserve her chastity, the doctor may burn something that smells nice near her vagina or make her smell something really bad to chase the womb back to its proper place.  The most effective treatments were sex and pregnancy, though.  Doctors took this ailment seriously because if the womb did not return within six months, the woman would die.  

Hysterical women under hypnosis. 

This belief made it all the way to the 19th century where it became known as hysteria.  So all those images of women fainting and being revived with smelling salts come from this medical belief.  Other treatments included hypnosis, vibrating devices, and jets of water aimed at the stomach.  During the 18th century and the age of the corset, the symptoms probably came from the tight corsets women wore.  Before this time, it was basically any sickness a female suffered.  

Illustration of water treatment for wandering womb. 

Up until Freud, most doctors believed the womb wandered.   Freud said even men get hysteria and claimed the problem was all in the mind, not in an animal-like womb.  

This theory kept women in check and absolutely dependent on men for their health.  Not only were all doctors men but the women needed sex and semen in order to be healthy.  Just another example of the misogyny that held women down.  

Women today can at least be thankful they do not have to worry about their wombs wandering around their bodies and causing all kinds of illnesses.  That’s one less thing we have to worry about.