Neurology and the Invention of Menstruation

Abstract

Theories of menstruation provide a fundamental site for both the expression and the development of notions of sexed being. This chapter examines various neurological accounts of menstruation produced during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to outline the origins of one of the core building blocks of the period of historical modernity: the notion that the female body is an essentially well-functioning entity. Between 1875 and 1886, a number of gynaecologists advanced the major components of our current understanding of the purpose of menstruation: it occurs at the opposite end of a monthly cycle from ovulation, and it accompanies the shedding of the epithelium (the tissue comprising the lining of most inner cavities) of the uterus, now known as the endometrium. Even this discovery, however, held that menstruation was pathological (albeit systemically so). As Robert Lawson Tait put it, summing up Wilhelm Löwenthal’s findings published in German in 1884 and 1885, “menstrual bleeding is neither a physiological function nor an accompaniment of one, but it is a consequence made habitual by innumerable repetitions of a state of things artificially produced — viz., the non-impregnation and death of the egg; it has all the peculiarities and effects of other undoubtedly pathological hæmorrhages” (322). Where most animals, it was recognized, re-absorb the cells of a denuded uterine epithelium, the occurrence of uterine bleeding to ‘flush’ the epithelium out of the body was virtually unique to humans (Tait 332).

I do not see how it is possible to advance any speculation as to the cause of menstruation other than it can exist in a nervous mechanism

Robert Lawson Tait, Diseases of Women, 1889, 322