Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

by Rose George

Béla Schick was a Hungarian pediatrician who in 1910–11 devised the Schick test, still used to detect immunity to diphtheria. For that, we are grateful. He was also convinced that menstruating women made flowers wilt. This revelation came to him when he asked his maid to put some red roses in water and was shocked that by the next morning they had withered. She told him she was menstruating. Schick experimented further, giving flowers to menstruating women. The flowers died, quickly. He expanded into dough, getting several women to prepare some and noting that the dough prepared by the sole menstruating woman in the group rose 22 percent less than the others.39 Obviously, he concluded, a woman on her period was expelling not just blood and tissue but some potent chemical that had an abominable effect on botany and bacteria. It was, he declared, “menotoxin.” This also conveniently aligned with old-fashioned superstition and taboos. Pliny was right along with every other vividly absurd and usually male commentator on the corrupting superpowers of the bleeding woman. Women really could slay rodents with what a recent TV writer called our “menses badness.”40 Menotoxin was an attractive idea and an instance of ingenious branding, and it bore much academic fruit. In 1940, the anthropologist M. F. Ashley-Montagu wrote “Physiology and the Origins of Menstrual Prohibitions,” which explored recent research on menotoxin. His list of references was unsettlingly long and predominantly ...