by KATE CLANSY
An image of the menotoxin flowers experiment. One vase of flowers is wilted while the other is not.
Dr. Bela Schick, a doctor in the 1920s, was a very popular doctor and received flowers from his patients all the time. One day he received one of his usual bouquets from a patient. The way the story goes, he asked one of his nurses to put the bouquet in some water. The nurse politely declined. Dr. Schick asked the nurse again, and again she refused to handle the flowers. When Dr. Schick questioned his nurse why she would not put the flowers in water, she explained that she had her period. When he asked why that mattered, she confessed that when she menstruated, she made flowers wilt at her touch.
So, rather than consider the possibility that the nurse was offended that her skills and expertise were being put to use to put someone else’s flowers in water, Dr. Schick decided to run a test. Gently place flowers in water on the one hand… and have a menstruating woman roughly handle another bunch in order to really get her dirty hands on them:
…
This story begins far before Dr. Bela Schick and his menstruating nurse. Because the kind of bias that produces a doctor who can believe that menstrual toxins exist, and launch a field of study on them based on some wilted flowers (if the story really did happen the way he tells it), did not come from one man alone. The cultural conditioning that has produced the idea that women are dirty, particularly during menses, is quite old. The Old Testament of the Bible claims that women are unclean when they menstruate, and menstrual huts exist in some cultures to separate out menstruating women from the rest of their group.
But some mark the beginning of our misunderstandings of female physiology in European-derived cultures with one book in particular written in the thirteenth century – De Secretis Mulierum, The Secrets of Women. This book was written by a man who claimed to be the monk Albertus Magnus, but was most likely an impersonator (which is why most call the author of De Secretis Mulierum pseudo-Albertus Magnus, or pseudo-Albert).
So here are some winning quotes from this book, which was considered a premier text for several centuries, even though it is likely pseudo-Albertus Magnus never treated women and based much of his work on having dissected a female pig:
“Woman is not human, but a monster.”
Menstruating women give off harmful fumes that will “poison the eyes of children lying in their cradles by a glance.”
Children conceived by menstruating women “tend to have epilepsy and leprosy because menstrual matter is extremely venemous [sic].”
SA for more