Despite being the main site of women’s sexual function and orgasm, and hence a vital part of the human anatomy, the clitoris was virtually ignored by the medical community for nearly two millennia. Mentions of the organ were rare, and those that did exist were generally not positive: between the first and fifteenth centuries BCE, one of the few documents to directly address the existence of the clitoris is the 1486 Malleus Maleficarum, which described it as the “devil’s teat” and advised that any woman who had one could be assumed to be a witch.
