Cramps: The Eras Tour (Guest Post!)
A fun guest deep dive about cramps and history
Hey horny readers! This week’s newsletter is our first ever guest post. It’s about period cramps, but please keep reading even if you’ve never had a period.
As always, thank you so much for reading the Adult Sex Ed newsletter. If you’re enjoying it, please share with friends, so they can be hilariously informed.
Adult Sex Ed comedically challenges why we think what we think about sex. In case you’re new, I’m Dani Faith Leonard, a comedy writer, film producer, and performer. In 2018, I started a comedy show called Adult Sex Ed and launched this newsletter last year. Each week, I take a fun deep dive into a topic that I’ve been researching. Want to know more? Read the whole description on substack here.
Ready to plug the holes in your education? Okay, let’s go!
This week’s newsletter is our first ever guest spot! Please welcome Kate Helen Downey, who launched a substack in advance of her new podcast, Cramped.
Here’s more from Kate:
If you've ever experienced painful period cramps (aka dysmenorrhea), you probably know how difficult it is to get help from a doctor. I've had debilitating cramps since I was 14, and I've never gotten a diagnosis or effective treatment. It took years to discover that I wasn't some unique medical mystery - MILLIONS of people with uteruses are in pain every month, and medicine doesn't have a lot of answers for us. We mostly end up dealing with it on our own. I think that's pretty bullshit, so I'm making a podcast called CRAMPED, trying to find the reasons we don't have better research on and treatment for period pain. While I'm working on the podcast, I'm sending out my discoveries, findings, and personal journey in this substack. If you have a uterus, or love people who do, you might be surprised by what I'm uncovering.
This post is a quick overview of my attempt to answer the question "How would my severe dysmenorrhea have been diagnosed & treated at different points in history?"
Ancient Greece & Egypt
According to the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus, the oldest known medical text in Egyptian history, the uterus was said to be “hungry for semen,” wandering around the body causing havoc while searching for it. Dealing with a cough? That’s just the uterus poking the lungs! Hit with a random nosebleed? The uterus found its way to your nasal cavity. But almost all gynecological pain was attributed to an angry uterus’ want for semen. Treatments could involve “vaginal fumigation” (burning things to tempt the uterus back to its normal position), or soaking wool cloth with potions and sticking it inside the vagina.But the “best” treatment by far, was marriage, sex, or pregnancy (and ideally all three!). This actually WOULD provide a short-term solution to my cramps, since I wouldn’t have my period if I was pregnant and breastfeeding - so no dysmenorrhea. On the plus side, I probably would have been told to drink a bunch of wine to help with the pain.
Medieval period in Europe
According to Hildegard of Bingen, women had painful childbirth and monthly cramps because Eve disobeyed God by plucking the apple and giving it to Adam. So my really horrible period cramps might mean I was a particularly evil woman, and I deserved the pain. In some parts of Europe, I might have been considered possessed by the devil. And of course, if I was already on somebody’s shit list - and you know I would be - having severe pain and throwing up because of my period might get me on trial for being a witch, and maybe executed! But of course, having herbal knowledge or any understanding of how to mitigate the pain would ALSO get me executed for being a witch. And, to be fair, death WOULD resolve the cramps. During the medieval era,they weren’t big on pain relief, particularly for women, but the good news (sort of) was back then most women got their periods later in life, and skipping periods due to malnutrition or disease was pretty typical. Plus, the church was doing everything it could to keep any knowledge of birth control out of the hands of women (witch!), so I’d probably be pregnant or breastfeeding a lot of the time. All in all, it seems like in this era, bad cramps would have been the least of my worries.
1700s in North America
If I lived in a rural area, there would probably be at least one woman in the immediate area, maybe a female relative, who had learned midwifery from another female relative. They would have knowledge that combined generations of passed-down observation and trial-and-error, herb & plant medicinal uses that were often learned from Native American tribes in the area, and African medical techniques and herbal medicine brought by enslaved women. For severe dysmenorrhea, I would probably be given tea made of black cohosh, cramp bark, nettles, red raspberry leaf, or willow bark, depending on what grew in the area (or what could be gardened). I might also get an abdominal massage. Hopefully I would be told to rest, since if I lived in rural North America at this time, I would be farming my ass off for survival. If I found some herbal cures that worked particularly well, I might end up taking on some midwifery myself, or becoming my area’s “specialist” in menstrual cramps and period pain, and help other women. All in all, despite ibuprofen not existing yet, this era seems like a best case scenario, historically speaking. And in fact, I currently drink herbal teas made from red raspberry leaf, black cohosh, and cramp bark in the days before my period, and I genuinely notice a difference in my cramps. So good on those generations of Native American, African, and colonial women sharing information on plants and pain among all the, y’know, atrocities.
Early 1800s, a city in the United States
By this time, “doctors” were attempting to be a real profession, complete with mandatory training, licensing, and punishment for anyone practicing healing without this training. Unfortunately, the training these male doctors were getting was mostly based on ancient Greek philosophy, and not on actual observation of cause and effect. These doctors had to prove that their brand of healing was more powerful than midwives or lay healers, and since they didn’t actually know how to FIX anything, they tried to prove that THEY could produce more powerful effects than the illness, therefore “beating” the illness. Which mostly meant bloodletting, “purging” using laxatives or drugs to induce vomiting, or enemas. Since dysmenorrhea already causes purging, and I would already be bleeding due to my period, a doctor would probably prescribe “calomel”, a mercury salt, which was fully poison, and would not help my cramps in the least.
By the late 1800s, the first treatment would be opium, alcohol, or cocaine, which, TO BE FAIR, wouldn’t NOT help the pain. They might also inject different substances INTO my uterus, which definitely wouldn’t help, but would ensure I would never call the doctor again. But if the dysmenorrhea persisted, and I was a wealthy woman, able to afford a new thing called surgery, they would likely do (anesthesia-less) surgery to remove my ovaries, since the ovaries were thought to be the cause for anything wrong with a woman - it’s giving ancient Egypt again. By 1906, it was estimated that over 150,000 women had had their ovaries removed in the U.S. Here are some of the symptoms that would indicate a surgeon should cut out your ovaries:
“eating like a ploughman, masturbation, attempted suicide, erotic tendencies, persecution mania, simple ‘cussedness’, and dysmenorrhea.”
I think we can all agree, they had me at “simple cussedness.”
Wasn’t that fun?? Writing this did have the unexpected effect of making me very, very grateful for ibuprofen and heating pads and running water and privacy. Can you imagine having intense cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea in a one-room medieval cottage, a 1700s farmstead, or a tenement building?
A large amount of the information in this was from Barbara Ehrenreich & Deidre English’s excellent overview of experts’ advice to women, For Her Own Good. Highly recommend it!
PS - Subscribe to Kate’s substack to see a guest post from me tomorrow! —Dani
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This is horrifying 🤣
Interesting post.