The wandering womb: how ancient Greek philosophers viewed women's bodies

To the ancient Greek mind, the interior of the human body was a mystery. A strong cultural taboo prevented human dissections, and the result was deep confusion about our internal anatomy. This goes for both the male and female body, but the list of misunderstandings of the female body is much longer than the list for the male body, and it contains arguably the most notorious and infamous misunderstanding of all: namely, that the womb can move freely around the woman’s body.

The phrase ‘wandering womb’ comes from the Timaeus of Plato (428 - 348 BC), in which he characterized the womb as “a living thing inside her [i.e., the woman] that is desirous of childbearing” (91b).

He explains:

“The womb, whenever it has gone a long time without bearing fruit, becomes violently irritated and wanders all throughout the body. It blocks her breathing passages, and since it does not allow her to breathe, it throws her into extreme difficulties and causes all sorts of other illnesses, until such time as the desire and love of both the man and the woman bring them together” (91b-c).

The idea is that the womb wanders throughout the body, causing the woman to have respiratory problems because it gets lodged somewhere in the respiratory tract, and the only way to fix this problem is to conceive a child.

The child acts as an anchor, fixing the womb in place and preventing its wandering.

Plus, Plato thinks that the womb is literally a living thing: it is an animal with a life of its own. What does it want? A child! So, by conceiving a child, you both anchor the womb in place and you give it what it wants.

This condition has been called ‘hysteria’, which comes from the ancient Greek word hustera, which meant ‘womb’ or ‘uterus’. English words ‘hysterectomy’ and ‘hysterical’ come from the same Greek root. However, the ancient Greeks didn’t call this condition ‘hysteria’: the name came much later.

The belief in a wandering womb lasted for centuries in Europe, and descriptions of women as hysterical are parts of this legacy today. But right now, we’ll talk about the earliest beliefs about the wandering womb.

We owe belief in the wandering womb to two sets of thinkers. One, as I’ve said, is Plato, who, in fact, is the first person to put the phrase together: wandering womb.

The second are the so-called Hippocratic authors. These are people who authored texts anonymously mostly in the 5th and 4th centuries BC (with perhaps a small few being written in the 3rd century BC); their texts were incorrectly attributed to Hippocrates (ca. 460 - 370 BC), who probably actually wrote nothing at all.

Apart from what intellectuals thought and wrote, we don’t know much about whatever laypeople thought about gynecology in the ancient world. From much later in antiquity (3rd or 4th century AD in Egypt), we have this papyrus:

“I conjure you, O womb, [by the] one established over the Abyss, before earth, heaven, sea, light or darkness came to be, […] that you return again to your own seat, and that you do not turn [to one side] into the right part of ribs, or into the left part of the ribs, and that you do not gnaw into the heart like a dog, but remain indeed in your own intended and proper place, not chewing [as long as I] conjure you by the one who, in the beginning, made the heaven and earth and all that is therein.”

This spell was supposed to be written on a tin tablet, and its purpose was to command the womb to go back into place. This spell testified to the fact that laypeople, not just thinkers, evidently believed that the womb could move. In fact, we have plenty of tablets and amulets like this!

But Plato and the various Hippocratic thinkers seem to have invented this theory.

We saw what Plato thought. Now let’s talk about the Hippocratic thinkers.

From The Nature of Woman:

“If a woman’s uterus moves against her liver, she will suddenly lose her speech, grind her teeth, and take on a livid coloring—these things befall her suddenly while she is in a healthy state” (3.1-3).

From Diseases of Woman II:

“If the uterus moves close to a woman’s heart and provokes suffocation, and her breath rushes upward under force, she will be restless and convulsed” (15.12).

The idea is that the womb can move and cause all sorts of problems in a woman: speechlessness, restlessness, etc. The effect is determined by where the womb has moved. We could survey tons of such passages and see all the different symptoms, but we have put together a pretty good list so far. From Plato: respiratory problems are caused when the womb enters into the respiratory tract. From the Hippocratic authors: contact with either the liver or the heart will yield different problems.

How could this be treated?

Well, different authors have different suggestions.

For instance, Plato makes only one suggestion: pregnancy. Conception of a child will anchor the womb in place.

The Hippocratic authors invented other treatment options.

First, there were scent therapies. Here is a passage from The Nature of Woman:

“Open her mouth and pour in very fragrant wine, and hold evil-smelling fumigants under her nostrils and fragrant ones below her uterus. When the woman comes to her senses, have her drink a purgative medication and after that ass’s milk, and then fumigate her uterus with fragrant substances; apply a preparation of buprestis, and on the next day oil of bitter almonds; leave two days free, and then flush her uterus with fragrant substances; on the next day apply pennyroyal; leave one day free and then fumigate with aromatic herbs” (314.23-316.5).

Since the womb is thought of as an animal, it is appropriate to treat it with what is effectively a fumigation tactic: the doctor should manipulate its position using foul- and nice-smelling fragrances.

The most startling proposal comes from On Barrenness:

“scrape the outside surface of the uterus all around and wash it off with boiled pine. Then tie the woman’s feet to a ladder, suspending her with her head down, and press the uterus back inside with your hand. Then tie her legs together and leave her at rest for a day and a night. Give her a little barley gruel, but nothing cold. On the next day turn her on her hip, apply a very large cupping instrument, and leave it to draw for a long time; when you remove it, lay the woman back down and have her lie still. Administer nothing except gruel until seven days have passed. As foods have her employ the softest and scantiest. If she desires to pass stools, have her do so in the reclining position for the first fourteen days” (36.12-26).

The author is suggesting suspending a woman upside down for days. The idea is that the womb will have to move back in place if the woman is just turned upside-down for days. As a scientific idea, it is eccentric. As a medical treatment option, it is obscene. But that is how Greek doctors approached this problem.

We don’t know how women felt about this sort of thing. If ancient Greek thinkers ever consulted women about their own bodies, or midwives about anything related to gynecology or obstetrics, we simply don’t know about it. Certainly, no surviving work from this period of intellectual history gives us the impression that they did consult them.

The tradition of the wandering womb lasted for centuries, well into the Medieval Period (5th century to 15th century AD). There are many interesting and important questions for us to ask about this tradition, such as what Aristotle (384 - 322 BC) thought about it, and how on Earth the Greeks could have justified such an odd view of the interior of a woman’s body! We’ll discuss these questions in future posts.