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Menotoxin: a short, incomplete introduction
to the "poison" in the menstrual flow
Many people have heard of the alleged ability of a European menstruating
woman to spoil dough, ruin wine and wreak mild havoc because of her condition.
Many of these beliefs originated hundreds or even thousands of years ago.
The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates believed that menstruation
cured women of the malaise they often had before starting their periods
and therefore thought that sick men might benefit from losing blood, thus
justifying bloodletting (which he did not originate), the release of blood
with its supposed pollutants.
As far as I know, the first scientific study of
the ability of menstruating women to cause harm is that of Viennese
Professor B. Schick, who reported in his article "Das Menstruationsgift"
("The Menstrual Poison") in the Viennese
Weekly Clinical Writings (Wiener klinische Wochenshrift) for
May 1920. He rocked the world of Viennese gynecology by recounting the following
(my translation of the German source toward the bottom of this page):
On the afternoon of August 14, 1919, I received about ten long-stemmed
roses that looked very fresh; they were dark red and had hardly begun to
open. In order to keep them fresh, I gave them to a maid
to put into water. I was not a little surprised to find the next morning
that all the roses had wilted and dried up.
. . . I presumed that this was not some sort of deception and asked the
maid. . . . She replied that she knew yesterday that the flowers would
die; she shouldn't have touched them, because she
was menstruating. Every flower that she handles during this time
dies.
Prof. Schick started experimenting. He
gave a menstruating woman three flowers; within minutes their heads were
hanging and after 24 hours they were kaput. He compared the dough
made by a group of test subjects; Frau M's dough - she was menstruating
- was 22 percent lower than the ones from non-menstruating women and half
the width.
Schick proposed that menstrual poison, menotoxin,
was at work, and felt that folk beliefs supported his explanation.
A dissertation in 1975, Gibt es ein Menotoxin? (Is
There a Menotoxin?) from E. Weber at the University of Göttingen
described two of these beliefs:
In Königsberg, Prussia, people believe that if a woman menstruates
on the day of her engagement she will have bad luck for the rest of her
life.
In Swabia menstrual blood is considered poisonous: wives have often
killed their husbands with it; no
grass grows where it drops; and a man having intercourse with a
menstruating woman will get gonorrhea.
The professor thought that the poison adhered
to red blood cells and caused the unpleasant feelings many women
feel before menstruation as well as the deleterious effects on their surroundings
others have supposedly observed since time immemorial.
Other researchers experimented. A pediatrician in Prague, Dr. Frank,
thought that menstrual poison was secreted through
mother's milk and made babies sick. To test for the poison, he put
those favorite test subjects, flowers, in flasks of milk from menstruating
and non-menstruating women. The ones in the menstruating women's milk wilted
much faster, especially if the women were in their first two days of their
period.
Not every experimenter detected the poison.
One named Sänger injected menstrual blood into mice, who cowered in
a corner but did not die. What animals have put up with - those who survived,
anyway - in the name of science!
Another, Bernhard Aschner, held the age-old belief that menstruation
"purified" women, again cleaning
them of poisonous substances, such as the tissue and secretions necessary
for the support of the fertilized egg. He too thought that these substances
caused women to feel bad before the blood started flowing, and that a lot of flowing blood was necessary for a woman's health.
In women who bled little or not at all, he opened a vein or prescribed sweating
therapy, both ridding the body of alleged poisons. (Several contributors
to the Would you stop menstruating if you could?
section believe the same thing. And, in a 1993 Quarterly Review of Biology
article, Margie Profet, who later won a MacArthur
Fellowship, maintained that menstruation functioned to rid the body of disease organisms brought in by men's sperm; this
found little support in tests conducted in the scientific community. Menstruation is a time when the vagina is especially susceptible
to infection because the discharge makes it less acid and more hospitable
to disease bacteria.)
In the United States, in 1952, Harvard University's
George and Olive Smith again proposed the existence of menotoxin
(my English source, below, maintains he coined the term), possibly independently
of the German efforts. They too injected animals with menstrual blood, but
these died. In repeating the experiment, another Bernhard, this one Zondek
of Jerusalem, mixed antibiotics with the blood. The poor animals did not
die, thus showing that it was harmful bacteria that killed the Smiths' subjects,
not a poison in the blood. But the Smiths held on to their beliefs for many
years.
Apparently a Dr. Burger, in 1958, finally demonstrated
that there was no such thing as menstrual poison.
(By the way, the list of German
books on this site includes another dissertation for the doctor of medicine
degree dealing with menstrual poison - German medical students must write
a dissertation for the M.D., unlike Americans: Walter Senninger's 21-page
Schwefelstoffwechsel und Menstruation. Ein Beitr.
z. Frage d. Menstruationsgiftes [Sulfur metabolism
and menstruation. A contribution to the question of menstruation poison.]
for the University of Munich, in 1927. I'd love to get my hands on
it! The University of Bochum apparently owns a copy.)
Brazilian gynecologist Dr. Nelson Soucasaux
discusses menotoxin
My information comes from
Die unpäßliche Frau: Sozialgeschichte der
Menstruation und Hygiene 1860 - 1985, by Sabine Hering and Gudrun
Maierhof. Centaurus Verlagsgesellschaft, Pfaffenheim, Germany, 1991 and
Is Menstruation Obsolete? by Elsimar M.
Coutinho, with Sheldon J. Segal. Oxford University Press, 1999. The latter
book also proposes the greatest possible elimination of menstruation world
wide because of the greater harm than good it does, which the ground-breaking
anthropological work of the University of Michigan's Beverly Strassmann
supports. Read some excerpts.
I find it interesting that in the menotoxin discussions
not one person mentioned in the one book is
found in the other. It's as if neither set
of authors had heard of anyone in the field outside of their own country.
Maybe that's true.
Dr. Howard Kelly, first professor of gynecology at Johns Hopkins medical
school, wrote the following in his last (1928) edition of the text Gynecology,
which adds to the list of names of people doing research on the subject
mentioned above:
In 1920, Schick [read the account about him towards the top of this
page] reported that the secretions of a women during menstruation contain
some substance unfavorable to plant life, apparently supplying a scientific
basis for many ancient superstitions. His studies were confirmed by Macht
who suggested that menotoxin is related to oxycholesterin. More
recently Labhardt as well as Schubert and Stending discredit these notions.
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© 2001 Harry Finley. It is illegal to reproduce or distribute any of
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