The fourteenth-century specter of the foul woman with a womb full of deadly rot, which infected the imaginations of medical men at the time, has taken many other shapes over the years. She is Martin Luther’s syphilitic whore. She is the immigrant cook, garnishing your dinner with teeming microscopic disease. She is the early twentieth-century fashionista spreading flu with her naked ankles. She is the 1940s good-time girl who looked so sweet, so clean—or the 1950s housewife whose neglect of “proper feminine hygiene” makes her husband gag. She’s the cancer patient who couldn’t visualize her
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