Hysteria's Long Afterlife: Scent Therapy, Galen and the Mary Glover Trial

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For roughly two thousand years, mainstream medicine taught that a woman's womb could roam her body. This episode traces the idea to Greek gynecological texts credited to Hippocrates and to Plato's Timaeus, which described an unfruitful womb growing angry and blocking the breath. In the second century CE Aretaeus of Cappadocia called it an animal within an animal, and doctors tried to herd it home with scent: perfumes and myrrh below, burning hair or sulfur under the nose. Soranus of Ephesus mocked the theory, and Galen held the uterus was stationary, blaming retained substances that released harmful fumes.

Galen's correction changed the theory but not the treatments. In 1603 English physician Edward Jorden published The Suffocation of the Mother, the first English text on the subject, tying the condition to fits, laughing and crying. He testified in the 1602 bewitching case of 14 year old Mary Glover, who accused Elizabeth Jackson of witchcraft, arguing her symptoms were natural. The episode follows the idea into Freud's conversion disorder and its removal from the DSM-III in 1980.

Older scholars placed the theory's origin in ancient Egypt, a claim modern analysis rejects
Soranus used the Greek word for wild beast to ridicule the idea that the womb flees bad smells
Jorden was brought in by the Bishop of London amid a fight over Puritan exorcisms
Aristotle's view of women as emotionally variable helped justify limits on education and public life
The episode links the history to modern findings that women's pain is more often dismissed as psychosomatic

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