10 Ridiculous Theories Doctors Used To Believe About Women’s Genitalia
And how they persist in many medical beliefs today.
Throughout history, doctors have developed some creative theories to understand women’s bodies. The female body bled, bloated, gave birth, and produced milk. That had to be witchcraft.
Much of this misinformation was born out of the ignorance that fed superstitions. If doctors couldn’t dissect female bodies, they couldn’t understand female bodies.
Unfortunately, those misunderstandings also caused fear. And when people have fear in their hearts, it plants the seed for hate and brutality.
Theory #1: A woman’s womb wanders.
In Ancient Egypt, the Kahun taught that wombs wandered around their bodies like a lost puppy.¹ One minute, her uterus was peacefully asleep, and the next minute…it was slamming into her lungs, punching her stomach, and bumping up against her liver.
The Edwin Smith Papyrus advised women to drink concoctions of grease and beer to stop their womb’s peregrinations.² This cure probably got women drunk with indigestion.
The Ebers Papyrus had another creative solution — the right smells could coax a woman’s wandering womb back into place. Noxious odors were burned near her head, while pleasant aromas were burned near her lady bits. Supposedly, this twofold approach would beckon her wayward uterus back into place. Unfortunately, the pleasing smells were a potpourri of male excrement and frankincense, so it is doubtful her wandering womb was lured home.
Surely, Plato would clear up his wandering womb malarkey. But, no. Plato believed the uterus was an animal within an animal.³ When this “animal” didn’t get sex, her uterus would pack its bags and head elsewhere. (Btw, that elsewhere was never into the arms of a man who could give her sex.)
This wandering womb theory became the basis for diagnosing “female hysteria” in the nineteenth century. Not only did a woman’s wandering womb cause mischief in her body, but it also made her incapable of reason. One nineteenth-century solution was to blast her uterus with a “water massage.” (Shown above.)
Although doctors today know that wombs don’t cause mental illness, The American Psychiatric Association did not drop the term “hysteria” as a disorder from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) until 1980.
Even today, women are diagnosed with mental illnesses such as Borderline Personality Disorder 75% more often than men.
Theory #2: Leeches inside her lady bits will balance her humors.
Hippocrates also believed the uterus was the source of female complaints, but he disagreed with Plato’s wandering womb thesis. Instead, he taught that if a woman didn’t get sex, her uterus dried up like a crusty ole’ piece of bread.
According to Hippocrates, the body consisted of four fluids — blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.⁴ These fluids could not only wreak havoc on the body but could also alter mental states. Women were “cold and wet” or phlegmatic. Men were “hot and dry” or choleric.
And if you were a sassy woman mouthing off to your man…well, you clearly had too much black bile. To release that nastiness, leeches were inserted into the vagina and rectum so that they could suck out the bad humors.
Some treatments to balance one’s humors (i.e., bloodletting, leechcraft, and purging) don’t hold up to scientific scrutiny.⁵ But the theory that an imbalanced body will lead to an imbalanced mind does have credence, especially since diet modifications can improve health and overall well-being.
Theory #3: A vagina is an inside-out penis.
Women’s health took a dangerous turn with Galen. He followed humoral medicine also but gave it a misogynistic twist. A woman’s genitals were basically trapped inside her body because it didn’t have enough heat to emerge as a man’s.
To Galen, women were merely inferior replicas of men. A uterus was an inverted scrotum. A clitoris was a wannabe penis, and a vagina was “a penis turned inside out.” It sounds painful.
But Galen did put an end to the wandering womb nonsense. Sort of. He pointed out to the other clueless doctors that a woman’s diaphragm was a roadblock to uterus wanderlust. Instead, he taught that the uterus was suffocated when a woman was denied sex.
Theory #4: Women have poisonous semen trapped in their vaginas.
Islamic physician and philosopher Avicenna taught that a woman has semen inside her body that needs to be expelled or the fluid would turn toxic. The solution was for midwives to insert a finger inside her vulva and “rub it diligently until the seminal material is expelled.”⁶
Later, physicians didn’t want midwives practicing medicine, so they faced a moral conundrum — was it ok for doctors to diddle their patients to hysterical paroxysm (orgasm)?
The consensus: It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. Doctors believed that if women didn’t shed this bad seed, they could go insane or die. The semen pollution could even destroy a woman’s virginity.
Theory #5: Only sluts get sick.
Since most ancient doctors prescribed sex and masturbation for hysterical women, the treatment was at least tolerable. Then Christianity had to wreck all the fun.
Saint Augustine taught that carnal pleasures led to unholy spirits possessing the body in men and women. Couples were allowed to procreate, but they weren’t supposed to enjoy it. And unmarried women especially must abstain and remain virgins until they wed.
But once a woman’s sexual desires were associated with evil, it brewed up a different flavor of misogyny.
Theory #6: That filthy curse upon women.
Male physicians especially feared menstruation. Pliny the Elder defined menstruation as “a fatal poison.”⁷ Pliny believed menstrual blood was so dangerous that it could sour wine, dull razors, destroy harvests, kill bees, and cause fruits to fall from trees.
Oh, and sex with a menstruating woman would make your penis fall off. So there’s that.
These theories made their way into the bible, causing men to believe that women were “unclean” for seven days of the month. Her menstrual fifth was so vile that it could contaminate anyone who touched her.
Today, women are still taught that their dirty vaginas must be cleaned with caustic douches that upset the delicate microflora.
Theory #7: Beware of the devil’s teat.
Menstruation wasn’t the only sin that afflicted those wicked Jezebels. Women also were cursed with the “devil’s teat” or “witch’s teat” — a protruding piece of flesh that the devil suckled. Sometimes it could be a mole, birthmark, or skin tag. Other times it was found under the folds of her labia.
In one witch hunter’s account, the devil’s teat is described as:
“We find, on her secret parts, growing within the lip of the same, a loose piece of skin and when pulled it is near an inch long [and] somewhat in form of the finger of a glove flattened.”
Doctors were finding an enlarged glans clitoris that can be more visible in some women. Thus, many women with a larger clitoris were accused of witchcraft and murdered.
Theory #8: All hail the penis.
After the witch hunts died down, female anatomy was still inferior to the male anatomy.
To espouse the superiority of men, Freud taught that children between the ages of three and six enter a “phallic stage” in which they become hyper-aware of their genitals.⁸ During this stage, girls experience the dreaded penis envy. And while young boys eventually outgrow their penis envy, all girls go through life wishing they had a penis.
Freud’s solution to calming women’s penis envy was penetrative sex with less outside clitoral stimulation. Freud believed there were two types of orgasms — a superior vaginal orgasm and an inferior clitoral orgasm. The vaginal orgasm reigned supreme because it required penetration, while a clitoral orgasm could be accomplished without it.
We see remnants of Freud’s divided orgasm theory today. Even though the clitoris is the only organ analogous to the penis during arousal, we still falsely insist on “different types of orgasms” in female bodies but not in male bodies.
Theory #9: Some vaginas will bite off your junk!
Freud was just getting warmed up with his penis envy nonsense. He also believed that women had such phallic envy that they secretly wished to castrate males. And some woman’s vaginas were so badass that they could slice a man’s penis off with one bite…from her vagina.
Although myths surrounding toothed vaginas were common in many cultures, Freud coined the term “vagina dentata” (Latin for “toothed vagina”) to describe vulvas equipped with sharpened teeth.
To be fair, the vagina dentata is not just a myth. Some women are born with dermoid cysts inside their vaginas. These dermoid cysts are growths containing hair, fluid, teeth, or skin glands. The cysts are usually not sharp, and they can easily be removed with surgery.
And no, vulvas are not strong enough to clamp down on a penis and…
Theory #10: Dirty hands won’t hurt her vagina.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth-century women giving birth often died of childbirth fever or puerperal sepsis — a streptococcal infection usually introduced into the vagina by a woman’s birth attendants. Puerperal sepsis caused half the total childbirth deaths until 1937.
At the time, a good doctor was a dirty doctor. The more blood and gore that covered a physician, the more heroic he was in his practice of medicine. Many doctors even went from dissecting cadavers to the maternity ward…and never washed their hands.
As a result, women in physician-staffed hospital wards were five times more likely to die than women in the poorer midwife-staffed hospital wards. Hungarian scientist and doctor Ignaz Semmelweis was determined to find the cause of these higher death rates.
Eventually, Semmelweis discovered the difference between the two wards — germs. He then asked his medical staff to clean their hands with chlorine to prevent “cadaverous particles” from getting on the women giving birth.
We can thank Semmelweis for the basis of germ theory today. But there was one tiny problem — no one believed him. It took two more decades for those manly doctors to admit that they were the cause of maternal deaths.
Women’s vaginas have fed the devil and castrated men. Our uteruses have wandered like ghosts around our bodies. Much of these superstitions persevered because science refused to investigate further. Even today, far more research dollars are spent on diseases that affect men than women. Even worse, women are often excluded from medical trials.
The medical community today is taking steps to eliminate gender disparity. However, we still have a long way to go before our wandering uteruses find a resting place.
“We didn’t stop burning witches because we invented science; we invented science because we stopped burning witches.” — Rene Girard
Sources and further reading:
(1) Thompson, Lana. The Wandering Womb: A Cultural History of Outrageous Beliefs About Women. United States, Prometheus, 2012. (2) Ibid, 31. (3) Ibid, 33. (4) Allies, Neil, et al. Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen: Selected Papers. Germany, Brill, 2012, 336. (5) Beccia, Carlyn. I Feel Better with a Frog in My Throat: History’s Strangest Cures. United States, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010, 18, 26, 48. (6) Thompson, 70. (7) Scully, Diana. Men Who Control Women’s Health: The Miseducation of Obstetrician-gynecologists. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1980, 95. (8) Freud, S. (1905). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), 195.
