{"id":1980,"date":"2016-01-05T16:40:45","date_gmt":"2016-01-05T15:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ounews.co\/?p=1980"},"modified":"2016-01-05T16:40:45","modified_gmt":"2016-01-05T15:40:45","slug":"the-obscure-history-of-the-virgins-disease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/arts-social-sciences\/history\/the-obscure-history-of-the-virgins-disease\/","title":{"rendered":"The obscure history of the \u2018virgin\u2019s disease\u2019 that could be cured with sex"},"content":{"rendered":"

Female virginity, we\u2019re increasingly told, is a psychological rather than a physical condition<\/a>. It\u2019s not something that can be \u201clost\u201d or \u201ctaken\u201d. Not every woman has a hymen, and it\u2019s rarely some tough barrier that keeps a woman \u201cclosed\u201d and which has to break and bleed; instead, it\u2019s a flexible set of folds of mucous membrane.<\/p>\n

Though there is potential confusion around what counts as a woman \u201closing her virginity\u201d \u2013 for example does anal or oral sex count? \u2013 the concept of technical virginity still focuses on whether there has been vaginal penetration by a penis. And surgical reconstructions<\/a> are still performed, for example in Iran, to create a \u201cmembrane\u201d that can tear or even produce some red dye.<\/p>\n

Looking back through European history, was the hymen always the definitive mark of virginity? A 14th-century writer, commenting on a book called On the Secrets of Women, named the hymen \u201cthe guardian of virginity<\/a>\u201d. This picked up an early Christian idea that virginity was spiritual as well as physical. Virginity was something more than a hymen \u2013 and it was possible to be a virgin in the soul even if not in the body.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

\u2018Guardian of virginity.\u2019<\/span>
\nShutterstock<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

By the 16th and 17th centuries, doubts about the hymen were widespread. In The Midwives Book (1671), the midwife Jane Sharp wrote<\/a> on just one page both that \u201cbleeding is an undoubted token of virginity\u201d and that \u201cthe sign of bleeding perhaps is not so generally sure\u201d. As for the hymen, she wrote that<\/a> \u201csome think it is not found in all maids\u201d. No change there, then.<\/p>\n

Virginity as a \u2018disease\u2019<\/h2>\n

But one thing was very different when early modern writers thought about virginity. They believed in a particular disease which only virgins could have. First described in the 16th century, what was called \u201cthe disease of virgins<\/a>\u201d had a range of usefully vague symptoms: feeling faint, breathlessness, odd eating habits. All of these were attributed to blood which hadn\u2019t managed to leave the body.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Odd eating habits?<\/span>
\nDinner by Shutterstock<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Surprise, surprise: while bloodletting could help, the best cure was having sex. Sex would open up the body and move the retained blood around. It\u2019s interesting that the idea of a \u201cdisease\u201d worked for those who believed in the hymen as a barrier, and for those who didn\u2019t. The latter thought that the problem was a different sort of closure, that of little internal \u201cmouths\u201d that allowed blood from all over the body to get into the womb in the first place.<\/p>\n

If you had the \u201cdisease of virgins\u201d your skin colour was thought to be a very unattractive hue, often greenish, or very pale \u2013 which didn\u2019t do anything for your chances of getting married. This is one possible reason why the condition was also called \u201cgreen sickness\u201d. Or perhaps it was so named because it affected those who were \u201cgreen\u201d in the sense of sexual inexperience.<\/p>\n

While physicians issued dire warnings of the consequences of not marrying as soon as your periods started, by the 18th century ordinary people told jokes about the \u201cdisease of virgins\u201d. In the 1705 ballad Enfield Common<\/a> a sufferer is cured by a \u201clusty gallant\u201d who manages to \u201cease her, and fully please her\u201d. He explains:<\/p>\n

Then with her leave there, a dose I gave her,
\nShe straight confes\u2019d her Sickness I did nick it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When virginity \u2013 hymen or not \u2013 was a disease, sex (preferably marital) was the only lasting solution. Some women were thought to have a recurrence if they didn\u2019t have children. A few writers thought that even particularly effeminate men could succumb to the disease. But for most the experience of sexual intercourse did the job. Or, to look at it another way, if this set of common symptoms appeared in a girl of marriageable age, the only diagnosis possible was \u201cthe disease of virgins\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Helen King<\/a>, Professor of Classical Studies, The Open University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Female virginity, we\u2019re increasingly told, is a psychological rather than a physical condition. It\u2019s not something that can be \u201clost\u201d or \u201ctaken\u201d. Not every woman has a hymen, and it\u2019s rarely some tough barrier that keeps a woman \u201cclosed\u201d and which has to break and bleed; instead, it\u2019s a flexible set of folds of mucous […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":1988,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[467,2364,2365],"class_list":["post-1980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","tag-classics","tag-virgin","tag-virginity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}