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Menotoxin:
a short, incomplete introduction to
the "poison" in the menstrual flow
Many of you have heard of the
alleged ability of a European
menstruating woman to spoil dough,
ruin wine and wreak mild havoc
because of her condition. Many of
these beliefs originated hundreds or
even thousands of years ago. The
ancient Greek physician Hippocrates
believed that menstruation
cured women of the malaise they
often had before starting their
periods and therefore
thought that sick men might benefit
from losing blood, thus justifying
bloodletting (which he did not
originate), the release of blood
with its supposed pollutants. (Sources
for this article are at the bottom
of this page.)
As far as I know, the first scientific
study of the ability of
menstruating women to cause harm
is that of Viennese Professor B.
Schick, who reported in his article
"Das Menstruationsgift" ("The Menstrual
Poison") in the Viennese
Weekly
Clinical Writings (Wiener
klinische Wochenshrift) for
May 1920. He rocked the world of
Viennese gynecology by recounting
the following (my translation of the
German source toward the bottom of
this page):
Wilted
Roses:
"On the afternoon of August 14,
1919, I received about ten long-stemmed
roses that looked very fresh;
they were dark red and had hardly
begun to open. In order to keep
them fresh, I gave them to a maid to
put into water. I was not a little
surprised to find the next morning
that all
the roses had wilted and dried
up. . . . I presumed that
this was not some sort of
deception and asked the maid. . .
. She replied that she knew
yesterday that the flowers would
die; she
shouldn't have touched them,
because she was menstruating.
Every flower that she handles
during this time dies."
(Read
an American view of this at the
bottom of the page.)
Prof. Schick
started experimenting. He
gave a menstruating woman three
flowers; within minutes their heads
were hanging and after 24 hours they
were kaput. He compared the dough made
by a group of test subjects; Frau
M's dough - she was menstruating -
was 22 percent lower than the ones
from non-menstruating women and half
the width.
Schick proposed that menstrual poison,
menotoxin, was at work, and
felt that folk beliefs supported his
explanation. A dissertation in 1975,
Gibt es ein Menotoxin? (Is There a
Menotoxin?) from E.
Weber at the University of
Göttingen described two of
these beliefs:
"In Königsberg, Prussia,
people believe that if a woman
menstruates on the day of her
engagement she will have bad luck
for the rest of her life."
"In Swabia menstrual blood is
considered poisonous: wives have
often killed
their husbands with it; no grass grows
where it drops; and a man having
intercourse with a menstruating
woman will get gonorrhea."
The professor thought that the
poison adhered
to
red blood cells and caused
the unpleasant feelings many women
feel before menstruation as well as
the deleterious effects on their
surroundings others have supposedly
observed since time immemorial.
Other researchers experimented. A
pediatrician in Prague, Dr. Frank,
thought that menstrual poison was secreted through
mother's milk and made babies sick.
To test for the poison, he put those
favorite test subjects, flowers, in
flasks of milk from menstruating and
non-menstruating women. The ones in
the menstruating women's milk wilted
much faster, especially if the women
were in their first two days of
their period.
Not every
experimenter detected the poison.
One named Sänger injected
menstrual blood into mice, who
cowered in a corner but did not die.
What animals have put up with -
those who survived, anyway - in the
name of science!
Another, Bernhard Aschner, held
the age-old belief that menstruation
"purified"
women, again cleaning them
of poisonous substances, such as the
tissue and secretions necessary for
the support of the fertilized egg.
He too thought that these substances
caused women to feel bad before the
blood started flowing, and that a lot of flowing
blood was necessary for a woman's
health. In women who bled
little or not at all, he opened a
vein or prescribed sweating therapy,
both ridding the body of alleged
poisons. (Several contributors to
the Would you
stop menstruating if you could?
section believe the same thing. And,
in a 1993 Quarterly Review of
Biology article, Margie Profet,
who later won a MacArthur
Fellowship, maintained that
menstruation functioned to rid the
body of disease
organisms brought in by men's
sperm; this found little
support in tests conducted in the
scientific community. Menstruation is a
time when the vagina is especially
susceptible to infection
because the discharge makes it less
acid and more hospitable to disease
bacteria.)
In the United States, in 1952, Harvard
University's George and Olive
Smith again proposed the
existence of menotoxin (my English
source, below, maintains he coined
the term), possibly independently of
the German efforts. They too
injected animals with menstrual
blood, but these died. In repeating
the experiment, another Bernhard,
this one Zondek of Jerusalem, mixed
antibiotics with the blood. The poor
animals did not die, thus showing
that it was harmful bacteria that
killed the Smiths' subjects, not a
poison in the blood. But the Smiths
held on to their beliefs for many
years.
Apparently a Dr. Burger, in 1958,
finally demonstrated
that
there was no such thing as
menstrual poison.
(By the way, the list
of German books on this site
includes another dissertation for
the doctor of medicine degree
dealing with menstrual poison -
German medical students must write a
dissertation for the M.D., unlike
Americans: Walter Senninger's
21-page Schwefelstoffwechsel
und Menstruation. Ein Beitr. z.
Frage d. Menstruationsgiftes [Sulfur metabolism
and menstruation. A contribution
to the question of menstruation
poison.] for the University of
Munich, in 1927. I'd love
to get my hands on it! The
University of Bochum apparently owns
a copy.)
Genital
odor, including menstrual
odor, has a terrible
reputation in America and many
other places.
Brazilian
gynecologist Dr. Nelson
Soucasaux discusses
menotoxin
My information
comes from
Die
unpäßliche Frau:
Sozialgeschichte der Menstruation
und Hygiene 1860 - 1985, by
Sabine Hering and Gudrun Maierhof.
Centaurus Verlagsgesellschaft,
Pfaffenheim, Germany, 1991 and
Is
Menstruation Obsolete? by
Elsimar M. Coutinho, with Sheldon J.
Segal. Oxford University Press,
1999. The latter book also proposes
the greatest possible elimination of
menstruation world wide because of
the greater harm than good it does,
which the ground-breaking
anthropological work of the
University of Michigan's Beverly
Strassmann supports. Read some excerpts.
I find it
interesting that in the menotoxin
discussions not one person
mentioned in the one book is found
in the other. It's as if
neither set of authors had heard
of anyone in the field outside of
their own country. Maybe that's
true.
Dr. Howard Kelly, first professor
of gynecology at Johns Hopkins
medical school, wrote the following
in his last (1928) edition of the
text Gynecology, which adds
to the list of names of people doing
research on the subject mentioned
above:
In 1920, Schick [read the
account about him towards the top
of this page] reported that the
secretions of a women during
menstruation contain some
substance unfavorable to plant
life, apparently supplying a
scientific basis for many ancient
superstitions. His studies were
confirmed by Macht who suggested
that menotoxin is related
to oxycholesterin. More recently
Labhardt as well as Schubert and
Stending discredit these notions.
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© 2001 Harry Finley. It is illegal to
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