Green Sickness and the Cultural Construction of Women’s Health – Kyra Cornelius Kramer
www.kyrackramer.com
For millennia, Western medicine was in thrall to the
humoral theoryof ancient Greece. It wasn’t until the scientific revolution of the Victorian era that germs were understood to cause illness, but even then medical ideas about a woman’s body had more in common with those espoused by Helenic doctors than modern ones.
Germs there may be, thought the medical establishment, but the womb still wandered and women who didn’t get good sex could still come down with hysteria.

Women, according to humoral theory, needed sex because unless the mouth of the womb was “bathed” in semen, they could become very ill. Until well into the 20th century, doctors and laymen still believed the womb could become unhinged, and start wandering around the body wrecking havoc. Women were, by nature, ‘cold’ and ‘wet’ and ruled by emotion, so they needed the hot, dry seminal fluid of men to keep them balanced. That’s why women had to be kept under such close social control – their internal cravings for man-juice would drive them slutty if they were left to their own devices. Moreover, husbands had to be careful about having coitus, or voracious wives would ‘drain’ them of so much vital essence they could die.
Unmarried women were at dreadful risk because of the lack of regular rumpy pumpy. Adolescent girls in particular could suffer from the lack of a husband to inseminate them. Young women could go so pale they took on a faintly green tinge, couldn’t eat properly, had no energy, felt short of breath, and suffered headaches … because they were virgins.
The populace embraced this belief as much as the medical establishment, and there were several colloquial names for this condition, including “
morbus virgineus” (virgin’s disease), “white fever”, and “love fever”. If your daughter started drooping and getting malaise, she needed a husband ASAP.
The ideology behind the disease of virgins was poppycock – but the illness itself was (and is) real. It’s true name is
hypochromic anemia and it often occurs when a girl or young woman has such heavy menses that she becomes anemic from blood loss, or from the more common anemic causes of
iron deficiency,
vitamin B6deficiency, and
thalassemia. It has nothing to do with virginity, of course, but it does strike adolescent girls more often than adult women, so you can see why the ancient physicians associated it with unmarried women, who were axiomatically thought to be virgins.

In 1554, German physician
Johannes Lange called this illness by the term “green sickness”. By the end of the Tudor period and through the Regency era green sickness was the go-to colloquial term in Britain for virgin’s disease. The
medical term for this illness, however, from 1615 onward was the more official sounding “chlorosis” … which means “greenish”.
The idea of who could be suffering from green sickness kept expanding through the centuries. Although it was still mostly young maidens who were presumed at risk, by 1681 English physicians like
Thomas Sydenham claimed the ailment not only adolescent virgins, but any “slender and weakly women that seem consumptive” could get it, even if they were married. The treatment for green sickness was to ingest iron, which would cure the anemia even if the
theory behind why it worked was bogus.

In the 18th century some physicians began to argue that green sickness could be caused by masturbation (which could also make both genders feeble-minded, blind, weak, and insane). Nevertheless, most doctors disagreed with this diagnostic criteria for green sickness, since orgasm (manually produced or not) was considered part of the
treatment for the disease.
When masturbation (especially women’s masturbation) became ‘dangerous’ in the 19th century, orgasm (called the hysterical paroxysm) without intercourse was only considered a healthy way to prevent hysteria and green sickness when it was facilitated by a doctor in a clinical setting.

Of course, once electricity became more common toward the end of the Victorian period, home kits for treating green sickness became very popular.
These kits were vibrators, and they were for HEALTH not SEXUAL PLEASURE so it was totally okay for women to use them.
