At Home - Bill Bryson [177]
Some countries were slightly more liberal than others. In France, exceptionally, a woman could divorce a man on grounds of adultery alone, though only as long as the infidelity had occurred in the marital home. In England, however, standards were brutally unfair. In one well-known case, a woman named Martha Robinson was for years beaten and physically misused by a cruel and unstable husband. Eventually, he infected her with gonorrhea and then poisoned her almost to the point of death by slipping antivenereal powders into her food without her knowledge. Her health and spirit broken, she sued for divorce. The judge listened carefully to the arguments, then dismissed the case and sent Mrs. Robinson home with instructions to try to be more patient.
Even when things went well, it was difficult being a woman, for womanhood was automatically deemed to be a pathological condition. There was a belief, more or less universal, that women after puberty were either ill or on the verge of being ill almost permanently. The development of breasts, womb, and other reproductive apparatus “drained energy from the finite supply each individual possessed,” in the words of one authority. Menstruation was described in medical texts as if it were a monthly act of willful negligence. “Whenever there is actual pain at any stage of the monthly period, it is because something is wrong either in the dress, or the diet, or the personal and social habits of the individual,” wrote one (male, of course) observer.
The painful irony is that women frequently were unwell because considerations of decorum denied them proper medical care. In 1856, when a young Boston housewife from a respectable background tearfully confessed to her doctor that she sometimes found herself involuntarily thinking of men other than her husband, the doctor ordered a series of stringent emergency measures, which included cold baths and enemas, the removal of all stimulus, including spicy foods and the reading of light fiction, and the thorough scouring of her vagina with borax. Light fiction was commonly held to account for promoting morbid thoughts and a tendency to nervous hysteria. As one author gravely summarized: “Romance-reading by young girls will, by this excitement of the bodily organs, tend to create their premature development, and the child becomes physically a woman months or even years before she should.”
As late as 1892, Judith Flanders reports, a man who took his wife to have her eyes tested was told that the problem was a prolapsed womb and that until she had a hysterectomy her vision would remain impaired.
Sweeping generalizations were about as close as any medical man would permit himself to get to women’s reproductive affairs. This could have serious medical consequences, since no doctor could make a proper gynecological examination. In extremis, he might probe gently beneath a blanket in an underlit room, but this was highly exceptional. For the most part, women who had any medical complaint between neck and knees were required to point blushingly to the affected area on a dummy.
One American physician in 1852 cited it as a source of pride that “women prefer to suffer the extremity of danger and pain rather than waive those scruples of delicacy which prevent their maladies from being fully explored.” Some doctors opposed forceps delivery on the grounds that it allowed women with small pelvises to bear children, thus passing on their inferiorities to their daughters.
The inevitable consequence of all this was that ignorance of female anatomy and physiology among medical men was almost medieval. The annals of medicine hold no better example of professional gullibility than the celebrated case of Mary Toft, an illiterate rabbit breeder from Godalming,