Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty

204 Pages·2003·1.97 MB·English

by  Helen King

THE DISEASE OF VIRGINS
THE DISEASE OF VIRGINS
Green sickness, chlorosis and the
problems of puberty
Helen King
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2004
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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© 2004 Helen King
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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CONTENTS
Preface vi
List of abbreviations viii
Introduction 1
1 The nature of green sickness 17
The humoral body 21
From green jaundice to green sickness 23
Green sickness and the disease of virgins 27
How green was green sickness? 29
Green sickness and love sickness 34
2 A new disease? The classical sources for the disease of virgins 41
Lange’s letter 43
Hippocratic virginity 46
The transmission of On the disease of virgins 49
What is a virgin? 51
Other possible Hippocratic sources 56
‘Some unknown monster’: the challenge of ‘new’ diseases 58
3 The menstruating virgin 64
The Galenic physiology of menstruation 65
Alternative theories of menstruation 67
Letting blood in the Hippocratic and Galenic bodies 70
‘Marriage is a sovereign cure’ 75
The problem of puberty 80
The philosophy of puberty 84
v
Town and country 86
4 Dietary factors 90
Food and the growth of the body 94
Pica 98
Green sickness as a liver disorder 103
Constipation 107
5 ‘The laboratory came to the rescue’: technology and chlorosis 111
The pulse 113
The stethoscope 114
Blood testing 116
Treatments 118
Shall we dance? 123
Rest 125
Alternatives to orthodoxy 126
Women physicians and chlorosis 129
Conclusion 133
Appendix 136
Notes 138
Bibliography 159
Index 185
PREFACE
When the late Roy Porter and George Rousseau published their history of gout,
they began by attempting to disarm potential critics of this enterprise by stating
that ‘No apology is needed for writing the history of a malady and its cultural
representation’ (Porter and Rousseau 1998: 1). Roy enthusiastically supported
my project but, unlike him, I feel I do need to apologise. First, because writing a
history of ‘a disease’ seems a methodologically dubious pursuit, particularly
when it is not clear to what extent this was a diverse collection of acute and
chronic conditions which went under a single name—a point picked up in the
title of Irvine Loudon’s article of 1984, The diseases called chlorosis’—or, as I
am suggesting here, a collection of symptoms which went under several different
names but retained its core identity through the turmoil of medical change.
Second, I would like to state now that, in following this disease from its
Renaissance origins to its twentieth-century decline, I am all too aware that, as a
historian of pre-modern medicine, I am entering the territory of those whose
right to comment on it is far greater than mine. But sometimes it is worth taking
the long view. I have been working on the disease of virgins for many years, and
have been struck by the echoes across the centuries, although, as a scholar whose
main interest hitherto has been in locating medical texts within very specific
social and cultural contexts of production, I am aware that I could have done far
more to tease out the subtle shifts beneath apparent continuities.
A preliminary attempt to understand the condition was supported by a British
Academy Leave Award in 1995, and appeared as ‘Hippocrates, Galen and the
origins of the “disease of virgins”’, International Journal of the Classical
Tradition 2 (1996): 372–87, reprinted as chapter 10 of Hippocrates’ Woman:
Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1998). Some
of the material from that essay is revisited here in parts of chapters 1 and 2. The
scope of this book expanded as a result of holding a University Award from the
Wellcome Trust. Early versions of chapters were presented to the University of
Birmingham Gender Seminar; the Leeds Historical Association; the London and
Oxford Wellcome Units; KNHG Voorjaarscongres, Den Haag; the Reading
University Early Modern Research Centre; the American Association for the
History of Medicine; and at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, as a
Landsdowne Visiting Lecturer. The bulk of the manuscript was completed in the
vii
perfect conditions provided by the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies,
during a fellowship held there in early 2001 as part of the project on medical
history organised by Manfred Horstmanshoff and Marten Stol. The final stages
have been much assisted by practical help from Janette Allottey, Leigh Hankin,
Polly Harte, Edward James, Gordon Moger, Clare O’Sullivan and John Symons.
My thanks to all who have shared my enthusiasm for this condition over the last
ten years, including Ann Hanson, Cathy Crawford, Monica Green, Lucinda
McCray Beier, Ursula Potter and Vivian Nutton, but above all to Irvine Loudon
and Elaine Hobby, for reading the complete manuscript. All errors of fact or
interpretation which remain are, of course, my own.
ABBREVIATIONS
AWP [Hippocrates], Airs Waters Places
BL British Library
BN Bibliothèque Nationale
CMG Corpus Medicorum Graecorum
CML Corpus Medicorum Latinorum
CUL Cambridge University Library
DNB Dictionary of National Biography
DW [Hippocrates], Diseases of women
GA Aristotle, De generatione animalium
Gen. [Hippocrates], On generation
Gyn. Soranos, Gynaecology; Temkin 1956
K Carl Gottlob Kühn (1821–33) Claudii Galeni opera omnia, 20
vols, Leipzig
L Emile Littré (1839–61) Oeuvres completes d’Hippocrate, 10
vols, Paris: Baillière
Loc. Aff. Galen, On the Affected Parts
Loeb Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA and London)
MRCS Member of the Royal College of Surgeons
NC [Hippocrates], On the nature of the child
NW [Hippocrates], Nature of woman
PA Aristotle, De partibus animalium
QC Plutarch, Quaestiones convivales
WMS Wellcome manuscript
INTRODUCTION
What is the ‘disease of virgins’? The simple answer to this question is that it was
a historical condition involving lack of menstruation, dietary disturbances,
altered skin colour and general weakness once thought to affect, almost
exclusively, young girls at puberty. This answer may seem to side-step other
questions which should come first: for example, what do we mean by ‘a’
disease? Were all the girls diagnosed as suffering from this disease really ill with
the same condition? Were they ill at all? When trying to understand a disease
which gripped the imaginations of people in the past, is the investigation over if
we can match up the symptoms listed in our sources to a single named disease
recognised today? Or is this when the role of the historian really begins? As
Irvine Loudon has made admirably clear, the problem of retrospective diagnosis’
consists of attempting to reconcile conflicting evidence for the sake of a single
disease hypothesis: the attempt is misguided and doomed to failure’ (1984: 32).1
This is not, therefore, a book which seeks to diagnose—to identify in twenty-
first-century terms—the ‘disease of virgins’. Like Joan Jacobs Brumberg (1982:
1469; cf. Green 2001: 65–6), I do not believe that there is any simple ‘one-to-one
equivalent’ between modern Western biomedical categories and those of the
past. Instead, my interest lies in discovering the origins and uses of the idea of a
‘disease of virgins’, and the reasons for its popularity, not only in medical
handbooks and treatises but also in popular literature, such as ballads and plays,
and recipe collections, including those kept by women. Particularly important are
physicians’ case notes, in which a university-trained physician’s understanding
of disease came into negotiation with a patient’s ideas about illness. Above all, I
am interested in the roles served by the ‘disease of virgins’ in thinking about the
body, and in regulating the sexuality of young women. As lan Maclean (1980:
46) noted in his important study of Renaissance ideas about women, medical
writings ‘produce a “natural” justification for women’s relegation to the home
and exclusion from public office’; within the larger category of gynaecology,
what was the message of discussions of the ‘disease of virgins’?
In an important essay on the nature of disease, Charles Rosenberg (1992: xiii)
noted that ‘a disease does not exist as a social phenomenon until we agree that it
does—until it is named’. For the disease of virgins, this focuses our attention on
the period when it was first given its name, and on the alternative names it