Medicine: Woman & Womb

From earliest times, woman’s womb and its workings have been grossly misunderstood. For centuries, the uterus was supposed to have an independent life and motility of its own. It was believed to be the cause of hysteria, which was derived from the Greek word for womb (varepo.). Even today, a “host of taboos, legends and mysteries” persist. So say two Salt Lake City psychiatrists in the current issue of GP (published by the American Academy of General Practice). According to Drs. C. H. Hardin Branch and David E. Reiser, “otherwise sophisticated and intelligent” women are extremely naive in their attitude to the functioning of the womb and its psychological overtones. Some women “seem to attempt denial of its actual attachment to them.”

Problem of Adolescence. “The textbook material ‘learned’ in high school and college physiology courses makes but a feeble onslaught against the fortress of centuries-old legendary beliefs,” say Branch and Reiser. Though moderns may not believe that the presence of a menstruating woman turns milk sour, keeps bread from rising and wilts cut flowers, they betray holdovers of superstition.

Many adolescent girls who have not been adequately taught associate menstruation with injury—and this idea is perpetuated, say Drs. Branch and Reiser, by such colloquialisms as “falling off the roof.” Impressed by mothers with “the piteous state of women,” many girls still regard the onset of menstruation as “the entrance into a periodic House of Horrors, the only exit being the menopause . . .”

The evidence of maturity fills many a girl with fear and loathing. Then she complicates her physical change with emotional difficulties that may last indefinitely. Modern medicine rejects the idea that menstruation need be disabling, but impressionable women have been conditioned to believe that it is.

Maturity & Middle Age. Pregnancy may bring equally severe problems: “The pregnant woman is traditionally allowed to be emotionally unstable, subject to … capricious appetites . . . And the pregnant woman who does not show some of these vagaries is often subtly encouraged to do so by her friends . . . However sublime it may be under the proper circumstances, in sober fact the pregnancy may express hostility on the part of either husband or wife, increase the self-esteem of either, or be a mere coincidence . . . For the woman who has been trained to regard men as beasts, sexual intercourse as vile, and childbirth as a sort of vaginal Armageddon, the pregnancy may be a massing together of terrors . . .”

Drs. Branch and Reiser are not impressed by the emotional crisis that sometimes follows childbirth—the “socalled post-partum psychosis.” They have never seen it in a woman who has not had deep emotional disturbances long before.

As for the menopause, it “provides a setting for a climax of all the feelings a woman may have about her uterus . . . It is expected that at the ‘change of life’ she will become emotionally unstable, petulant, demanding, irascible . . . frigid; will ‘lose her womanhood,’ will become fat and unattractive, and in a final step in her dissolution will ‘lose her mind.’ ”

Actually, Drs. Branch and Reiser declare, many a woman’s life has to be readjusted in her 40s and 50s, but the menopause may have little or nothing to do with it. Usually, it is because her children are sufficiently grown to need little of her attention; and she may “suffer a serious loss of self-esteem.” On the other hand, if she wisely finds other outlets for her energies, this is a time of life “when the personality of the woman can emerge into full flower, no longer inhibited by her periodic reminder that she is either always pregnant or potentially so.”