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

by Rose George

Anyone writing about menstruation or, as I may call it from now on, the noxious catamenial flow, starts with Pliny. Gaius Plinius Secundus was known as Pliny the Elder and for his multivolume Natural History. There are many wonders in the thirty-seven volumes, but even Pliny admitted that it is difficult to think of “anything which is more productive of more marvelous effects than the menstrual discharge.”14 Human females, he wrote, are the only “animated beings” to have a monthly discharge. He was wrong about that. He was wrong in abundance. On the approach of a menstruating woman, he wrote, nature would cringe and submit. “Seeds which are touched by her become sterile, grafts wither away, garden plants are parched up, and the fruit will fall from the tree beneath which she sits.” Her look, also, is formidable, because it will “dim the brightness of mirrors, blunt the edge of steel and take away the polish from ivory.” She can kill a swarm of bees, turn iron and brass rusty. She can scare away hailstorms and lightning, as long as she is both bleeding and naked. At sea, she doesn’t even need to bleed: a storm will flee before the sight of her unclothed body. What a useful creature. Farmers must employ their menstruating wives with great joy, because “if a woman strips herself naked while she is menstruating, and walks round a field of wheat, the caterpillars, worms, beetles and other vermin will fall from off the ears of corn.”