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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.
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):
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.
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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