Wandering Wombs in Cocaine Blues

Rewatching the pilot episode of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, Cocaine Blues (which I have talked about before here.) got me thinking. Phryne Fisher finds powder in Lydia Andrew's bathroom which her friend Elizabeth "Mac" Macmillan identifies as a nerve powder usually prescribed to women for their hysteric tendencies.

As you can see in the gif to the left, one of the maladies that Mac mentions is wandering wombs. The descriptions of this ailment made me interested and thinking of another, more modern one, but I will get to that later. First I think there is a need to talk a little about what the wandering womb was thought to be.

The term is first known from Ancient Greece, but it is by  some thought to originate in Egypt. The Ancient Greeks thought of it as the most dangerous sickness for women and famous Greek names such as Plato and Hippocrates talk about it. It also worked as a way to legitimize men's power over women.

The womb was thought of as the main reason as to why men and women were so different. It was also considered the greatest weakness of women because of its tendencies to wander, causing the women to et hysterical. Aretaeus of Cappadocia even go as far as to call it an animal inside an animal and with this revealing the Greek (mainly Athenian) view on women.

Aretaeus also says that the womb can be "lured back" into place using sents. Either nice scents applied inside the vagina or bad ones inhaled through the woman's nose. Another Greek, Soranus, on the other hand argued that the womb itself was not mobile and that the reason why the scent therapy worked was that it got the muscles to relax.

Other things that were prescribed were having sex (like Mac also says) and making women pregnant as often as possible to keep the womb occupied.

The notion of the wandering womb was spread to Rome and Byzantine and from that to the Arabs who prescribe sneezing (which I found out actually also was considered to be able to stop the heart, but that is a different story).

The womb was not longer thought of as being able to wander by the 16th century, but the thought of female hysteria was more long-lived and spread widely through society in the 19th century.

It is easy to write off things like the wandering womb from Ancient knowledge as complete nonsense in light of the knowledge of modern medicine. Female hysteria can probably be considered to be mostly a social construction.

Based strictly on the descriptions of symptoms (and not the female hysteria diagnosis) a diagnos that springs to my mind is endometriosis. The cause of this is actually tissues from the womb which can actually be said to have "wandered" outside of the womb causing terrible pain for the affected woman during menstruation. Being in terrible pain can certainly cause hysteria in anyone both male and female.