At Home - Bill Bryson [178]
An understanding of female anatomy and physiology was still a long way off, however. As late as 1878 the British Medical Journal was able to run a spirited and protracted correspondence on whether a menstruating woman’s touch could spoil a ham. Judith Flanders notes that one British doctor was struck off the medical register for noting in print that a change in coloration around the vagina soon after conception was a useful indicator of pregnancy. The conclusion was entirely valid; the problem was that it could be discerned only by looking. The doctor was never allowed to practice again. In America, meanwhile, James Platt White, a respected gynecologist, was expelled from the American Medical Association for allowing his students to observe a woman—with her permission—give birth.
Against this, the actions of a surgeon named Isaac Baker Brown become all the more extraordinary. In an age in which doctors normally didn’t go within an arm’s length of a woman’s reproductive zone and would have little idea of what they had found if they went there, Baker Brown became a pioneering gynecological surgeon. Unfortunately, he was motivated almost entirely by seriously disturbed notions. In particular, he grew convinced that nearly every female malady was the result of “peripheral excitement of the pudic nerve centring on the clitoris.” Put more bluntly, he thought women were masturbating and that this was the cause of insanity, epilepsy, catalepsy, hysteria, insomnia, and countless other nervous disorders. The solution was to remove the clitoris surgically and thus take away any possibility of wayward excitation. He also developed the conviction that the ovaries were mostly bad and were better off removed. Since no one had ever tried to remove ovaries before, it was an exceptionally delicate and risky operation. Baker Brown’s first three patients died on the operating table. Undaunted, he performed his fourth experimental operation on, of all people, his sister. She lived.
When it was discovered that he had for years been removing women’s clitorises without their permission or knowledge, the reaction of the medical community was swift and furious. Baker Brown was expelled from the Obstetrical Society of London, which effectively ended his ability to practice. On the plus side, doctors did at last accept that it was time to become scientifically attentive to the private parts of female patients. So ironically, by being such a poor doctor and dreadful human being, Baker Brown did more than any other person to bring the study and practice of female medicine up to modern standards.
II
There was, it must be said, one very sound reason for being fearful of sex in the premodern era: syphilis. There has never been a more appalling disease, at least for the unlucky portion who get what is known as third-stage syphilis. This is a milestone you just don’t want to experience. Syphilis gave sex a real dread. To many, it seemed a clear message from God that sex outside the bounds of marriage was an invitation to divine retribution.
Syphilis, as we have seen, had been around for a long time. As early as 1495, just three years after the voyage of Christopher Columbus that introduced it to Europe, some soldiers in Italy developed pustules “like grains of millet” all over their faces and bodies, which is thought to be the first medical reference to syphilis in Europe. It spread rapidly—so rapidly that people couldn’t agree