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3000 Years Ago One Doctor Called All Women Crazy And It Stuck
Most women don’t even know the one woman who made sure we can’t be medicated without consent anymore
Eleanor Riese was 47 when she died of the side effects of drugs she was forced to take against her will. In an asylum. In America.
It wasn’t even forever ago.
Because that’s a thing we think about those terrifying stories of women being thrown in asylums. We think it was a horrible thing that happened to women hundreds of years ago, like in the Victorian era.
But no. She died in 1991.
She didn’t know they’d make a movie about her life, and she didn’t know Helena Bonham-Carter would play her.
Here’s all she knew. What was happening to her was wrong. And she had to fight the powerful men who did this to her. Because it wasn’t just her.
The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. And she won. But it was too late. At least for her.
Let me tell you a stupid thing the ancient Egyptians believed.
They believed a woman’s uterus could detach and float around inside her body. When it bumped into other organs, it made women go crazy.
But no worries. They had a cure.
You put something stinky under the woman’s nose and something pretty-smelling, like lavender, down at her hoo-ha to encourage the uterus to float back down where it belongs so she won’t act crazy bananas anymore.
That’s so stupid I can’t wrap my head around it, but it’s true.
It was documented in the Eber Papyrus, the oldest medical document known to man. It’s dated 1600 BC and filed in the historical records at the National Library of Medicine.
Centuries later, Hippocrates gave this malady an official name.
Hippocrates, if you didn’t know, was an ancient Greek physician. Regarded as the father of medicine, he’s credited with the Hippocratic Oath, which is an oath doctors take pledging to refrain from doing harm.
Hysteria, he called it. From hystera, the Greek word for uterus. The actual movement of the wandering uterus…
