The medical myth that still shapes misunderstandings of women's health

"Hysteria was long attributed to a wandering uterus. The earliest text blaming women's reproduction for illness was the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1900 BC. Women's wombs were blamed for things like choking, cognitive deficits and the inability to speak, and paralysis. Treatments for women were always nonsurgical: swallowing medicine or rubbing it on the body; fumigating the womb with oils or incense."

"Hippocrates, the father of medicine, birthed the concept of hysteria. Translating to "uterus," hysteria was used to theorize women's ailments - something that few male doctors of the time understood or studied. In fact, the Greeks often linked women's health and sexuality with madness: emotional volatility, hallucination, dissociative states, tics, convulsions. The obsession with the womb by male scholars has been a central curiosity in part because they perceived it as the source of women's undoing, physically and emotionally."

"Hysteria itself, according to Hippocrates, was a result of a wandering uterus that couldn't adjust to societal expectations and therefore was the source of women's social discontent. This idea of the wandering uterus held throughout the Middle Ages and was one reason men were not commonly perceived as hysteric. The womb was considered a "master switch" of all women's health and disease."

Belief in a wandering uterus began in ancient Egypt, where the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus (1900 BC) blamed women's reproduction for choking, cognitive deficits, speech loss, and paralysis, and prescribed nonsurgical treatments such as ingesting medicines, topical applications, or fumigating the womb. Hippocratic medicine coined hysteria (literally 'uterus') and linked women's health and sexuality with madness, including emotional volatility, hallucination, dissociation, tics, and convulsions. Male scholars treated the womb as the origin of women's physical and emotional problems, portraying it as a 'master switch' of women's health. The wandering-uterus idea persisted through the Middle Ages and shaped diagnostic categories that excluded men.

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