Wandering wombs and vibrating cures
Once, women’s problems were often ascribed to a ‘wandering womb’. The organ would go walkabout in the abdominal cavity, and as it bumped into various other organs like the liver and spleen, may cause sluggishness, weakness, even vertigo and of course, hysteria. The physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia believed the womb “an animal within an animal,” an organ that “moved of itself hither and thither in the flanks.” I’d like to blame this purely on the ancient Greeks. (I love the de