On the Diseases of Virgins
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Peri Parthenion (Diseases of Young Girls, or On the Diseases of Virgins) is a text from the Hippocratic Corpus. It introduced morbus virgineus.
Hippocrates’ ideas laid the foundation for medical ideas about women for centuries onward, from the Romans to the Victorians. On the Diseases of Virgins addresses the virgins’ disease, or morbus virgineus, an illness that afflicted parthenoi. Symptoms included poor coloring, swelling, difficulty breathing, palpitations, headaches, and others, most significantly, cessation of menstruation. The book explains that this sickness is caused by the failure of a woman of appropriate age to marry. Extra blood cannot escape because the necessary opening is closed, and it fills the body, clogging it and making a woman ill. The woman is cured when the blood finds its outlet – that is when she marries and loses her virginity. Pregnancy is the cure.
The idea that virgins succumb to this illness because their wombs are not being used for the purpose they were intended and it is this disuse that makes them ill supports the cultural values of Greek society, emphasizing the weakness of women and their narrow purpose. This, along with the many supposed illnesses that could befall virgins, encouraged them to marry and bear children.
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