iv: Anthroposophical Views
A temporary shelter Dora Wagner
Everything is seed. (Novalis, 1798)
The origin of life is an enigma that has preoccupied us since ancient times. The womb— the nurturing nest in which our own lives begin —is a powerful metaphor for new life. Yet, for a long time, the female body and its functions were tainted with myths and taboos. According to theories of ancient Egyptian medicine, the womb was permeated by a system of blood vessels that connected it to the entire body. It was believed not only that ‘excess’ menstrual blood accumulated in the body and caused abscesses, but also that the uterus was free to change its position, travelling throughout the female body. This view was also held by Hippocrates, Paracelsus, Galenos, and even Leonardo da Vinci. In the Corpus Hippocraticum, we read that ‘the uterus is to blame for all diseases [in women]’ (Buse, 2003). Plato wrote in his treatise, Timaeus: The uterus is an animal that ardently desires children. If the same remains barren for a long time after puberty, it becomes enraged, pervades the whole body, obstructs the airways, inhibits breathing and...produces all kinds of diseases (in Kollesch, 1979). The womb was described in more detail by Galenos, although still not anatomically correctly. He saw it as divided into two parts— warmer on the right than on the left —which thus provided a humoral-pathological explanation for the development of male
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offspring in the right uterine chamber (Nickel, 1971). Galenos also believed that the absence of menstruation, or suppressed vaginal secretions, led to hysteria (Mentzos, 2003)— this is an umbrella term for various mental disorders which today we might know as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, or psychosis. The healer and mystic Hildegard von Bingen was one of the first scholars to separate gynaecology from superstition and to declare ‘female disorders’ a medical specialty for which curative treatments existed. In the eighteenth century, a new theory on the cause of female ailments emerged, and with it a new description: ‘vapeurs’, or vapours. Meyer’s Konversationslexikon (1909) explains this was ‘formerly the name of a fashionable disease of ladies, complaints supposedly caused by flatulence rising to the brain and hysterical moods based thereon’. These ideas are reproduced in the Oeconomische Encyclopädie (Krünitz,1850): Vapeurs appear in women at the onset or absence of the menstrual period, but also in addition when sitting a lot, eating flatulent food, and when the digestive powers of the stomach are not appropriate...they proceed from the nerve plexuses of the abdomen.
