E9: Wrath - The Demonisation of Women’s Rage & Sexuality Part 1

In this powerful opening episode of our Wrath series, we begin unpacking the long, twisted history of how women’s anger, sexuality and emotional expression have been pathologised, feared, and demonised throughout the ages.

We trace the roots of "hysteria" and "melancholy" from ancient Egyptian beliefs about the wandering womb, through Hippocrates' dubious sex-based prescriptions, to medieval Europe’s descent into superstition and sin. We trace how diagnoses like hysteria and melancholy were used to explain—and control—women’s bodies and behaviour. Along the way, we explore how very real medical conditions — like endometriosis — were misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and transformed from bodily afflictions to signs of madness, evil, and even witchcraft.

We also touch on the early roots of the European witch hunts and how the seeds of fear, misogyny, and moral panic began to grow. This episode digs into the early myths that still echo in modern medicine and lays the foundation for Part 2, where we dive deeper into the witch trials, including the brutal history of the Scottish hunts and the infamous Scold’s Bridle.

🧠🔥 Check out our blog post for references and further reading — and stay tuned for Part 2.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:19

On today's episode, we're covering our next deadly sin, which is wrath, which I thought would be good to kind of cover the demonisation of women's rage and sexuality throughout history.

SPEAKER_01: 0:32

From nagging wives, hysterical virgins, sex obsessed nymphos, to the devil's concubines... Outspoken, empowered women have historically been ostracised from society. Whether it be theological, physiological, spiritual or legal, there is a long history of women being punished or cured for their rage and sexuality.

SPEAKER_00: 0:56

First off, let's take a look at the long and complicated history of hysteria. And it's surprising links to endometriosis. This is one that I hadn't heard of before. Like, I've never seen that comparison drawn. Like, I feel like when we think of hysteria, it always gets written off as just, like, historically a misogynistic way. It can be keeping women down and it being about, like, oh, they're too emotional, they're this or that. And it definitely ended up that way, which we'll kind of cover a bit later on, but... In the beginning and what it was kind of based off of, there does seem to be like a strong link between it and endometriosis.

SPEAKER_01: 1:39

Yeah. For me, the term kind of conjures up images of like 1950s American housewives and like alongside things like vibrators and lobotomies.

SPEAKER_02: 1:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:49

That's kind of the general vibe I get from that term.

SPEAKER_00: 1:54

It's interesting how it's kind of morphed into that over time. But the term actually first came up from about 2,500 years ago. So it's been the kind of solution to a problem that has been about for a long time. Because of the direction that doctors and science and medicine took hysteria, it became discredited as an idea.

SPEAKER_02: 2:20

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 2:22

But the roots of it and what it was based off of. Though the reasonings they came up with surrounding it are wild, it still points to it being a very real thing that was happening to women that was just being taken and ran away in a wild way. Mostly because they didn't believe them. They didn't believe the pain. They didn't believe the... They thought they were just being hysterical women.

UNKNOWN: 2:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:54

Which is why it's almost been a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, I'd say. Aye, because it

SPEAKER_01: 3:00

kind of painted women a certain way for such a long time that it was kind of difficult for them to escape that sort of labelling.

SPEAKER_00: 3:11

Aye, that to be the kind of destination it was headed towards, basically. Because women don't tell the truth about their own bodies and experiences.

UNKNOWN: 3:20

No.

SPEAKER_00: 3:21

They're just complaining for the sake of it. So medicine has historically fallen on either side of either magic, demonological or scientific views. And things have took a bit of a weird journey. I was kind of expecting it to go from one to the other but there's been a bit of back and forth over the last 2,500 years. You'd sort

SPEAKER_01: 3:47

of expect it to go from magic and demons To science. And there'd be a fairly straight line from one to the other.

SPEAKER_00: 3:56

Yeah, but no. That has not been the case. Through all of this though, there has always been evidence that women are the weaker of the two sexes. That has just been, even now, that's still taken as biological fact. So whether it be from a weak disposition... vulnerability to mental disorders or that they're more easily influenced by supernatural forces and more likely to commit sinful acts there's always been a kind of a reason why women have been not only the weaker of the two sexes but the more kind of corruptible and therefore the more corrupt ah yes

SPEAKER_01: 4:42

prisons famously full of women

SPEAKER_00: 4:43

yeah yeah

SPEAKER_01: 4:46

Famously, mostly women that do crime.

SPEAKER_00: 4:51

It's a woman you don't want to meet on a dark alley.

SPEAKER_01: 4:53

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 4:54

So, as I was saying, the first reference to this type of disease was in the Eber Papyrus in Egypt in 1600 BC. It was the first medical document to have references to depressive maladies. where kind of traditional symptoms of hysteria have been noted within, in which they described seizures as well as a kind of like sense of suffocation and death, which to me sounds a bit like anxiety, like a

SPEAKER_01: 5:27

kind of panic attack. It sounds like sort of anxiety, depression, like just a sort of when your emotional feelings sort of take on like a physical aspect.

SPEAKER_00: 5:40

Yeah. which, I mean, it makes sense. I feel like anxiety, as much as people talk about it like it's a new thing, it would have affected people, especially back in the day when, like, mere traumatic stuff was happening semi-regularly. Like, people were dying and, do you know, like, the way that people died was, like, obviously people would have been a lot more used to it back then, but it's not as if it would have had

SPEAKER_01: 6:02

effects on them. I certainly find anxiety to be quite, like, a physical sensation heavy sort of thing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 6:11

And without the kind of words to describe that, you know, like, if you're in such a panic state that you're, like, shaking and stuff like that, maybe we could have been taken as a seizure back then.

SPEAKER_01: 6:21

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I could see quite easily how, like, a panic attack could be mistaken as a seizure.

SPEAKER_00: 6:27

Especially if someone's went, like, non-verbal and stuff like that, and, like, kind of non-responsive, like, why it could be seen as such.

SPEAKER_01: 6:35

I think that kind of comes down to, like... the confines of language and having built that language around... We're at a point where we've had thousands of years now come up with the surrounding language for things like that to express that quite clearly and distinguish it from other things. I don't know if that's a new concept at this time. They're not going to have the words to describe... this new different thing when to look at it looks close to something i've already encountered

SPEAKER_00: 7:13

and got language for yeah so within this as well there was the first documentation of i don't exactly know what words they used to describe it but it was later kind of termed the wandering uterus by hippocrates we'll cover in a wee bit but it was kind of understood at the time that the uterus wandered about the body kind of freely of its own will which again kind of comes back to this like if somebody is in such crippling pain especially if they're getting pain in different parts of their kind of torso and abdomen why they would kind of link that to it being the organ like physically like moving around the body because when you get like period cramps like it can feel like in all different places yeah it's not just kind of in the one area, like it can feel like it's kind of moving about your body and if that's the way that they've described it it makes sense that this is the kind of the theory that they've came up with

SPEAKER_01: 8:20

Ah, you can kind of see the thinking going on there and I'm sure there is some kind of thing where like organs can kind of move and be in the wrong place and it causes some issues. So I think there is almost like this wee grain of sort of maybe science that could inform that line of thinking.

SPEAKER_00: 8:48

Yeah. To an extent.

SPEAKER_01: 8:54

I'm absolutely not saying they were right. I'm just... You can just about see... why they might think a thing like that.

SPEAKER_00: 9:04

So the cure for this at the time was they kind of seen the uterus as like a kind of another animal, like an alive thing that had the same motivations as well as of course a sense of smell. So the treatment for this was to use sweet smelling substances or perfumes or anything nice that was a nice smell. Either at the mouth and nose or at the vagina to lure the uterus back into position. Depending on whether it was too far up or too far down. Depending on where you were putting the nice smelling trap, I guess. I don't know. while at the same time using a kind of acrid or bad, foul-smelling substance at the opposite end to kind of scare it away. So it was a kind of dual-approach, double-ended...

SPEAKER_01: 10:09

Well, I mean, that would certainly work on me. I would be likely to gravitate towards the nicer smelling away from the horrible one. I

SPEAKER_00: 10:20

feel like this was literally the line of thinking that went into coming up with this.

SPEAKER_01: 10:24

yeah like it would work on me but like I absolutely would never dream of using it to move an organ

SPEAKER_00: 10:32

yeah yeah so the Egyptians kind of were the first people to start or at least the first documented people to kind of use this I don't know what to call it like I feel like I could coin a really like funny name but I cannae think of anything now Like, oh, I can think he's dual action.

SPEAKER_01: 10:53

Dual action uterus seduction.

SPEAKER_00: 10:59

Yeah. But it was later used by the Greeks as well. So in about the 5th century BC, so was that like 1100 years later? Hysteria as a term was first coined by Hippocrates, who was the father of modern medicine. You'll maybe recognise the name for the Hippocratic oaths and... He was an influential guy.

SPEAKER_01: 11:22

Having heard some of his thinking, it very much felt like a fling everything at the wall and see what sticks sort of approach.

SPEAKER_00: 11:33

I mean, I think that's what science was in the beginning. They kind of had to take that approach because there was no frame of reference, there was no nothing to work from. It was just, other than obviously... Like, the stuff that they were working from wasn't necessarily all that scientific in nature.

SPEAKER_01: 11:52

Ah, it very much kind of has the vibes of more of, like, a philosophy than, like...

SPEAKER_00: 11:58

Yeah. Well, all the physicians back then, like, in the ancient Greece, a lot of them, they're, like, a philosopher and a physician. Like, this seemed to be quite a common kind of crossover, which is what, like, is mad to think about now.

SPEAKER_01: 12:13

Ah, it's why you're seeing sort of, like... personality traits and, like, human behavioural traits being ascribed to an organ. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 12:24

They just thought, they overthought things, basically. Like, the ways that they thought about things were, like, quite big picture, but then we're working with the small picture and the individual, and it just, they two things don't mesh well together, in my experience. Yeah. So he described hysteria as compulsive movements caused by a restless and migratory uterus in the body. So again, very similar. The kind of compulsive movement thing again kind of lends itself to what I was saying about endometriosis and the kind of cramps. That happens anyway, but when it's to the point where it's causing people severe pain, it makes sense that it's notable.

SPEAKER_01: 13:09

And again... You can kind of almost see the thinking of, like, this is something acting of its own accord, you know, outwith the person's control. It must be, like, some kind of sentient thing. thing that is attacking them from the inside.

SPEAKER_00: 13:28

I think this kind of goes in line with a lot of the ways that they've seen erections and stuff like that as being out of their control and the female being the failed man. It was like this being internal and therefore an issue. You can kind of see the kind of lines of thinking that have led them to where they were. This is caused by poisonous stagnant humours.

SPEAKER_01: 13:51

Oh, fantastic. I love humour.

SPEAKER_00: 13:54

So for people that haven't come across humours before. This was kind of like the OG medicine and the way that we know it today was based around the concept of everything that could be wrong with a person was because of there being an issue and an imbalance of the four humours within the body or bodily fluids.

SPEAKER_01: 14:17

So the humours being blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.

SPEAKER_00: 14:24

Yeah. And obviously we're not going to go too far into that, like if you're interested, go and look it up. But these not only determine somebody's health, but also their temperament. So an imbalance of these caused not only different health problems, but different kind of personality traits. And I feel like this is again kind of showing for us where this blend of philosophy and medicine became... a bit an issue. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 14:50

because it sort of managed to encompass people's morality into their health and their health problems. So, you know, there's certain things that can sort of morality-based behaviours that can imbalance your humours and then cause you some kind of ailment.

SPEAKER_00: 15:10

You can see how that was problematic.

SPEAKER_01: 15:13

Ah, you can also see why that would be useful in religious cultures and ways of controlling people. I

SPEAKER_00: 15:26

have to say though, I can see where if you were starting at a baseline of knowledge people when they're ill tend to be quite short tempered. I can see totally where they've pulled this from. When people are ill and sick it does tend to change the way that they behave. Because they're in pain. And suffering. And that's why. But if you don't have the knowledge to think about things like that, it makes sense where you would go. Like, ah, there's a cause and there's a solution. Like a cause and effect. So, hysteria. Caused by poisonous, stagnant humours which are trapped within the body and require sex to be released. So... In the beginning, or at least at this time period, the types of people that were being diagnosed with hysteria tended to be unmarried women, widows, young women virgins, and the answer to this was for them to get married and have sex. It very much tied into the social norms and values of the time, which is where we can see it for what it is, a method of control.

SPEAKER_01: 16:41

Yeah. If you can reduce these people's autonomy through this kind of mystical quote-unquote science.

SPEAKER_00: 16:50

It was very much used as like a ghost story for people to kind of discourage them from living outside regular script to how they expected people to behave there. Which meant that women that were more outspoken or lived their lives in a way where weren't really conforming were therefore labeled hysterical and this was kind of the beginnings of this even though they very much understood it as a physical ailment at the time rather than like a mental health one it very much did begin as this physical kind of thing within the body Because of the humours and the way that they looked at health, there was still this mental component to it, even though it wasn't necessarily described within the symptoms at that point. And a behavioural component. So they believed that sex widened their canals and therefore allowed room for the body to be cleansed. So doctors were quite literally... prescribing sex as a way of curing this at the time

SPEAKER_01: 18:07

but it had to be married sex oh yeah you've got to get that bit down first got to be married

SPEAKER_00: 18:16

aye so these toxic fumes would release themselves from the vagina of those with hysteria and their uterus would wander freely around their body and they would have all sorts of disorders from anxiety to compulsions and paralysis. Convulsions and paralysis. So alongside sex and marriage, they were also encouraged to fumigate their face and genitals to trick their uterus into behaving in a very similar manner to what the ancient Egyptians were using.

SPEAKER_01: 18:51

So

SPEAKER_00: 18:52

there was this kind of hangover for that that was still, even though it was over a thousand years later, this was still the kind of treatment alongside sex and marriage.

SPEAKER_01: 19:01

Also kind of worked as this sort of, oh you don't want to end up like that, you better just go and get married and perform your wifely duties so you don't end up becoming hysterical. Got that sort of preventative element to it as

SPEAKER_00: 19:19

well. Very much so. And the thing is as well, another kind of link there with endometriosis is that there's still this kind of ongoing myth that pregnancy cures endometriosis. But what it does is because you're not having a period while you're pregnant, it can temporarily reduce the symptoms of it while you're pregnant. So in a sense, if hysteria was indeed endometriosis, at least at this time, getting married and having loads of sex would have had some relief for people. There would have been some temporary relief for them while they were pregnant, which kind of perpetuated this agenda. It would have worked as much as that shit. So,

SPEAKER_01: 20:08

you get a wee nine-month holiday from horrible pain at the cost of a child.

UNKNOWN: 20:18

LAUGHTER

SPEAKER_01: 20:18

So every time you want a wee break from your pen, you then get lumped with the responsibility of another child.

SPEAKER_00: 20:28

And every time you have a kid, and the hysteria comes back, and your husband or whatever ships you back off to the doctor, they're like, ah, you're not having enough sex. Back you go. And that would have been the system. But it would have probably been blamed on other things, do you know what I mean? It's just... Rage inducing.

SPEAKER_01: 20:52

That doesn't sound like much of a life.

SPEAKER_00: 20:55

No. 24 hour baby machine indeed.

SPEAKER_01: 20:59

Are you like human puppy

SPEAKER_00: 21:00

mill? 24-7 baby machine indeed. 24 hour, oh my god, can you imagine? So, Claudius Gallen in the 2nd century AD kind of continued with Hippocrates' theories. Quote, Ancient physicians and philosophers have called this disease hysteria from the name of the uterus, that organ given by nature to women so that they might conceive. I have examined many hysterical women, some stuporous, others with anxiety attacks. The disease manifests itself with different symptoms but always refers to the uterus. So I found this really interesting in that, like, how did they diagnose it then? Because my understanding of what he's saying here is that it has any number of symptoms, but because it's a woman, it's definitely the uterus that's causing the issue here.

SPEAKER_01: 21:57

It's the only difference. The only difference between men and women. Famously.

SPEAKER_00: 22:01

And that's enough for it to just...

SPEAKER_01: 22:08

I'm finding it interesting that we're seeing more of this anxiety kind of language where it sort of moved away a wee bit from this.

SPEAKER_00: 22:18

Moving closer to the mental health side as the language is progressing. Let's be honest, as society is becoming more civilised, I guess, people have more stresses in a way that they maybe didn't before. Do you know what I mean? As society is evolving and changing and people aren't really built to be living in cities and stuff. that's just not natural for us so it makes sense that that kind of movement was causing more kind of mental health disorders in people and they were having to therefore come up with new terms and stuff for it so this, he became the kind of Hippocrates started this line of thinking and then Gallen kind of became the kind of go-to guy for several centuries after his point after his time as well as his kind of treatments and stuff which included stuff like purges administrations of various herbs including belladonna extract which is nightshade

SPEAKER_01: 23:22

deadly nightshade

SPEAKER_00: 23:24

as well as getting married and also repressing stimuli that could excite a young woman so I couldn't find anything about like what that kind of what things excited a young woman back in 2 AD or 200 AD sorry but as we'll kind of cover a bit later on the Victorian had a very similar way had a very similar theory to do with hysteria it's mad that it lasted all that time where young women being excitable and being excited by things could cause hysteria and the list included things like listening to music drawing horse riding as well as doing too much exercise while on their period which is why I think even now there's still kind of hang ups to this where like if you have your period stay at home don't overexert yourself like there was still this kind of ongoing kind of vibe with that when we were younger

SPEAKER_01: 24:29

That's kind of been a big sort of point in the advertising of like period products and things is like oh regain freedom to leave your house and

SPEAKER_00: 24:39

actually exist as a person aye there's been this kind of like answer to it but it's because there has been this kind of this hang up that's still been about for like

SPEAKER_01: 24:49

well we're

SPEAKER_00: 24:50

saying the victorian times but from my understanding of this yeah like wild

SPEAKER_01: 24:56

it's another sort of like excitement being dangerous is one of these kind of through lines that you see popping up time and time again and uh even the origin of Kellogg's cereal is kind of based in some kind of religious opposition to excitement. That

SPEAKER_00: 25:17

has heavy, heavy roots in racism as well. It's like the spicy food is the demon. It needs to be bland. That's an interesting one as well. Flavour will make

SPEAKER_01: 25:32

people masturbate.

SPEAKER_00: 25:35

I mean... It is exciting.

SPEAKER_01: 25:42

It certainly is. I've clearly been led astray by my excitement. But aye, that's the kind of thing we see popping up time and time again. Excitement being dangerous. Kind of no surprises seeing it here.

SPEAKER_00: 25:59

At least at that point they were now being gender specific. That's what the one... thing that i'll say for them in that very small way everybody was to blame so there wasn't really any kind of contention of this as a treatment um getting married sex the addition of herbs the fumigation um these were all kind of the accepted treatments and there wasn't really any contention of this until a wee bit later on that century um by soranus who was another greek physician who's actually considered the founder of gynecology and obstetrics. He wrote a treatise on women's health. Actually wrote that it was the toils of procreation were actually the cause. So it was women having sex and having children that was causing a lot of these issues. And instead for hysteria, prescribed sexual abstinence, hot baths, relaxation, massages and exercise.

SPEAKER_01: 27:03

Well, this is starting to sound a little bit more empathetic. Yeah. Certainly a great leap from poison. Literal

SPEAKER_00: 27:16

poison.

SPEAKER_01: 27:16

Yep. And all these things could be actually beneficial to a person, especially if they're dealing with things like anxiety and, you know.

SPEAKER_00: 27:27

Yep. And muscle cramps that relaxation and hot bath, like the heat and things with it, like all of these things. Definitely would have worked.

SPEAKER_01: 27:34

This feels like sort of the first step in the right direction. Treating the patients as people.

SPEAKER_00: 27:43

Yeah. A bit more holistic, which is needed, I find, for some of these issues. So he even had an explanation as to why the kind of fumigation... I love that word, it's fucking hilarious in this context.

UNKNOWN: 27:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 28:00

these two minutes, just need to fumigate my vagina before I come

SPEAKER_01: 28:05

out. Uterus is a little bit high today.

SPEAKER_00: 28:10

Feeling a bit low. So he argued that the use of these kind of scent therapies worked because they relaxed and constricted the muscles. And in that sense they probably would have.

SPEAKER_01: 28:27

Yeah, I'm... This guy's thinking seems to be a little bit closer to something I could get on board with. Feels a little bit more based on the reality that we know and live in.

SPEAKER_00: 28:42

Is somebody anxious? Send them for a hot bath and a massage. Like, that's something that we would do and recommend today. It's wild that this guy was existing at the same time period where people were, like, putting onions at people's vaginas and shit. Like... wild. But despite this, there were still many followers of Hippocrates, one of which being the physician Arateus of Cappadocia, who went so far as to consider the womb an animal within an animal, an organ that moved itself hither and thither in the flanks, an animal hungry for motherhood. So this is where it started getting into the more the womb is a living creature, it's hungry for dick, it's hungry for a baby, it's bored, it's restless, it's craving motherhood. And people that were going out with it weren't placating it. And that was what was causing all these issues, was that it was just like going on a rampage, basically. Yeah. A rampage only a baby could stop.

SPEAKER_01: 29:57

Yeah. I feel like I find the way that this is worded to be utterly repulsive.

SPEAKER_00: 30:05

It's vile. They just have this such deep rooted hatred of women. So I've not looked up anything specifically about Aristotle for this but He had so many theories on women and how they were inferior to men. They were failed men. That was how people viewed things at the time. Everybody's heard of Aristotle. He's one of the most famous philosophers of all time. But he despised women. He seen them as like... He didn't think they had anything to do with procreation at all. He thought even children were the product of men. They needed to be because women weren't an equal partner in procreation. There was so much he wrote about and therefore influenced all these people that we've just been talking about.

SPEAKER_01: 30:56

He was essentially saying that women are empty fields for men to sow their seeds. And

SPEAKER_00: 31:04

seen them as nothing more than that. They were the cause of the original sin. They were like... toxic, they had, they were, like, they needed to be fumigated. Do you know, like, you can see where, like, yeah, and this guy was the influence of a lot of the kind of, the way that people viewed women, and therefore viewed women's health, that at the time, they weren't even seen as people, to the point that the things that were wrong with them were caused by an animal that existed out with themselves. Like, even that, they weren't autonomous of. Like,

SPEAKER_01: 31:42

This is, again, the same kind of rhetoric that you get with a group that the group in power want to sort of exert their power over. There always seems to be this stage of, well, they're actually not the same as us. They're a different thing entirely. Mm-hmm. Do you know what I mean? You commonly see it with sort of race stuff, kind of much later on than this, but it's interesting to see that that was the sort of view, the view on women as well. That's... I don't know, there's only so many times I can say that it's gross.

SPEAKER_00: 32:28

It's really interesting to me though, because Aristotle was the guy that... I've seen a couple of people on TikTok talking about this and it's not true. It was one of these women's stories, things that I was telling you about that we're going to do a podcast episode on. With his wife being like his dominatrix.

SPEAKER_01: 32:47

Ah, right, yep.

SPEAKER_00: 32:48

And the classic fucking philosopher is hilarious. She was, to him, totally abhorrent. He hated her. He thought she was the worst person that he had ever met. Constantly said... fucking horrible shit about her all the time and she just, she beat him.

SPEAKER_01: 33:08

Fair.

SPEAKER_00: 33:09

Fair, yeah. Um... And he said that he married her because if he could put up with her, he would see the best in the rest of humanity. Or something like that. There was some kind of quote film that was along the lines of that. Well, that's vile. But I find it mental. Like, how has he got all these views of women when he's getting, like, battered the fuck out of you by one, like, on the regular? And she's, like, constantly at him, like, really domineering, really controlling. Like, how can he see her as weak? Like... Was this him playing out his fucking fantasies at his work because he was going home and not having that experience? Do you know what I mean? I don't know. So Hippocrates' followers proceeded to write over 60 books, which are collectively known as the Hippocratic Corpus. They're still widely debated and read today. They're really important.

SPEAKER_01: 34:02

So these, like, sort of medical...

SPEAKER_00: 34:04

Medical texts, yeah, yeah, yeah. Him and his followers came to be known as the Hippocratics because he had a school of knowledge and he had all these followers and they kind

SPEAKER_01: 34:17

of formalised a school of medicine

SPEAKER_00: 34:21

that still survives today. Obviously a lot of it has been changed and updated and stuff but they formed the basis of modern medicine as we know it today. This is why doctors take the Hippocratic oath. Yeah. This is where the philosophy bit comes in, because it was all about what it means to be a doctor. Ah, some of the ethical considerations. The ethical side is a lot of what's still used today, rather than the actual medical, which obviously is very outdated. Well, you would think, but anyway. Some of it has managed to survive, which is wild, but yeah. So, Hippocrates viewed the following four factors as highly predictive of gynecological disease. Menstrual dysfunction is the cause. Pregnancy is the possible cure. Pain and infertility are potential outcomes if the woman is left untreated. As I've said, nearly two and a half thousand years later, they still correspond nearly seamlessly with the set of symptoms identified today as emblems of endometriosis. Yeah. As mentioned, there's still this ongoing myth that endometriosis is cured by pregnancy. In fact, when I went and looked it up, there's people on Reddit for as soon as a year ago that are still claiming that they've been given this advice from medical professionals.

SPEAKER_01: 35:50

That's absolutely wild. Especially, like, considering like the kind of modern day implications of having a child

SPEAKER_00: 36:00

yeah

SPEAKER_01: 36:01

a couple of thousand years ago families were a lot bigger there was a lot more sort of like community looking after children and even going back you know a hundred years yeah things are a wee bit different but modern day advising people to get pregnant and have a child for a nine month breaking symptoms

SPEAKER_00: 36:25

Well, this is the scary part because it's not that they're advising this for a nine-month breaking symptoms. They're advising this as a cure, which is a myth. A 2,500-year-old myth that is still existing within the fucking medical community today. Nothing surprises me at this point, but that really shook me. I

SPEAKER_01: 36:51

mean... The medical community has got a ways to go to bring this equality for women. Even some of the things you've told me about the money and resources and research that's been done into certain things for men versus for women.

SPEAKER_00: 37:14

I like erectile dysfunction versus endometriosis. It's disgusting. There was a point A couple years ago, I think it was 2019 or maybe 2018, where the only research study that had been done on endometriosis was if it affected women who were less attractive more.

SPEAKER_01: 37:36

Wow. That's gross.

SPEAKER_00: 37:39

That's very gross. So one Hippocratic author warned that that if they have never been pregnant, the deranged state of menstruation is more common and more dangerous than when they have born children. And that she will be released from the disease when she is pregnant. So again, this is just kind of in line with what we were saying. That this was the advice of the day. I love the term deranged state of menstruation. LAUGHTER

SPEAKER_01: 38:13

Aye, that term could only have been created by a man.

SPEAKER_00: 38:17

I love the implication as well, that if I'm right, someone, or not someone, sorry, a woman being in pain is equated to them being deranged. Like, they couldn't possibly just be in pain.

SPEAKER_01: 38:30

Aye, there's got to be some sort of moral failing.

SPEAKER_00: 38:35

Like, they're literally insane.

SPEAKER_01: 38:36

Not like when men are in pain.

SPEAKER_00: 38:38

No. So, moving forward a bit. The early middle ages or the kind of dark ages were not a time of science. If you look at the kind of surrounding landscape of what was going on at the time, do you know like between 30 and 60% of the population had died of the plague or were dying of the plague during this time within Europe. There was wars, there was famine, there was empires falling and new ones trying to come up in their place. It makes total sense why science just totally got put on the back burner at this point. It was essentially like the full Europe got a terminal illness. Everybody turned to God, everybody turned to salvation and that afterlife and morality and... From that stemmed witches and demons and the devil and all this stuff became the forefront to answer what was going on.

SPEAKER_01: 39:35

So this is where we see our sort of strange sidestep from the progress of science, kind of, to demons and sort of mythology and superstition.

SPEAKER_00: 39:50

Yep. Which is totally understandable. It's

SPEAKER_01: 39:54

understandable, but it is wild.

SPEAKER_00: 39:56

It is wild. Things were very quote-unquote civilised. Things very much did take a back step during this time. I don't know about you, but I don't know a lot about the Dark Ages. I know bits and pieces. I think that's kind of

SPEAKER_01: 40:14

the point.

SPEAKER_00: 40:15

The way that they're portrayed in media, rather than how it was. But I didn't realise it spanned such a long period of time.

SPEAKER_01: 40:26

It's a surprisingly long period of time.

SPEAKER_00: 40:29

Like, they reckon it was about 900 years, kind of start to finish, and things just stood still. Like, progress was just like, no. We don't need it, we just need to survive. Like, basically everybody was just in survival mode. Art, culture, science, medicine, like... It was mad that medicine during a plague was like, nah, we don't need that. Fuck that. We need fucking churches. We need

SPEAKER_01: 40:56

witch hunters. We've had our own little glimpse into that, do you know? During Covid came this rise of science denialism.

SPEAKER_00: 41:04

That is a very interesting point, actually. I never thought of that.

SPEAKER_01: 41:08

Do you know, the groundwork had already been laid for it and has been for years and years, but... there was this massive uptick in people not trusting science, not trusting medicine.

SPEAKER_00: 41:22

Yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 41:22

because what they felt they were seeing at the time didn't necessarily line up or do you know they were being told about vaccines and vaccine effectiveness and you know because they didn't necessarily understand the scientific language or how it actually worked they were going well what they've told me is wrong or oh they've changed their mind from what they were saying a few weeks ago but they kind of have always seen that science is this like infallible fact

SPEAKER_00: 42:02

and

SPEAKER_01: 42:02

So for a scientist to come out a few weeks later and say, oh, this thing that we said before, turns out that's not actually how things are. Things are more like this. That sort of just eroded all the trust and confidence in this. Like, oh, science will save us. So I can very much see how in a much more severe outbreak...

SPEAKER_00: 42:30

That happened at a much bigger rate. Much bigger, yeah. But just with what was available at the time to get eternity, rather than chlorine enemas and bleach enemas and shit. It was fucking witch trials. Far

SPEAKER_01: 42:44

more exciting.

SPEAKER_00: 42:46

Depends on who you were, I guess. Depends on how many of your family had died. Right, so can I take a glimpse of where people's heads were at? at the time. I've got a quote from a revered scholar, Lactantius, from the 4th AD. He kind of questioned the need for any further scientific inquiry asking, So, this kind of culture... of thinking kind of led to quite like a disturbing change in views as we've been saying from a kind of scientific way of looking at things to a scientific for the time to one of kind of witchcraft and demonic possession

SPEAKER_01: 43:39

you can see why if everybody around about you is dying and it feels like an inevitability that you are going to die young yeah from this disease, that what is the point in trying to fix that?

SPEAKER_00: 43:54

The problems, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 43:56

Why not move your focus to your immortal soul? Yeah. That's going to be about forever.

SPEAKER_00: 44:03

Like, people were terrified and there was plenty of people that were willing to capitalise on that fear. You know, a lot of what kind of led people to this way of thinking was the preachers and their kind of focus on God was punishing everybody and there needed to be... It left room for people to get mass fucking influenced by the church.

SPEAKER_01: 44:30

Aye, because what they're offering is hope.

SPEAKER_00: 44:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 44:34

In this time when there is no possible hope for you right now, they're offering hope for your eternal soul and that's... I imagine that would have been some comfort.

SPEAKER_00: 44:46

Aye, that moved up the priority list when you could die any second, basically. So with this, hysteria moved from what was essentially a physical ailment to one that was a more psychological one, or a morality one. Yeah. Which kind of went hand in hand at the time because mental illness was sin. Yeah. So when things moved to being more psychological at that point became... more blame based and more about your behaviour and your faith.

SPEAKER_01: 45:21

It feels like it's taken sort of mental health a long time to begin recovering from this point.

SPEAKER_00: 45:28

Well this is why it's still taboo now. Because mental health like people talk about these days like oh mental health didn't exist. It did. It just was seen as like the devil for like thousands of years. For over a thousand years people seen people that had mental illness as people who were possessed by demons.

SPEAKER_01: 45:52

It was some sort of moral failing on their part.

SPEAKER_00: 45:54

That had led them to be in that situation. So you can understand why people there's still this kind of left over stuff like people not wanting to talk about mental health because it's seen as being immoral. Even if people don't know why that is now. That feeling's still there. That knowledge is still there.

SPEAKER_01: 46:15

We've seen that quite a few times with the things we've talked about. The why behind it. Sort of getting lost over time. But that idea of that thing being bad or whatever still persists. Yet nobody could really point to what the actual reason for that

SPEAKER_00: 46:36

is. Well, this is the reason. In this one particular case. So it moved away from being this kind of biological need for procreation to the presence of evil. So around 600 AD, Greek physician Paul of Aegina suggested that suffocation of the womb was an illness that usually afflicted lascivious women or those who use drugs to prevent conception. So this was the first kind of documented evidence quote that I could find of somebody who started to point specifically to behaviours as being the cause of hysteria, as it was known then. It moved from the wandering of the womb to them being like, nah, it doesn't wander, it's an organ. They've got an understanding of that at this point, that it's not just willy-nilly flapping about in the body.

SPEAKER_01: 47:37

It's moved on from being a creature.

SPEAKER_00: 47:40

At this point, eh, I mean, it's still being suffocated. There's still this kind of like... I'm not saying that they still think it's a creature, but they've still kind of like personified it in a sense, even in the language that they're using surrounding it. Because they're seeing it as being suffocated. So suffocation of the womb. Which, again, period cramps, constriction, I can see where suffocation comes in. Like at this point, this is what's like... kind of starting to line up even more with this kind of theory. So the suffocation of the womb is specifically at this point getting the sluts and those who didn't want kids.

SPEAKER_01: 48:24

So the womb is being suffocated by God or by their actions? Or is it punishment for their actions?

SPEAKER_00: 48:34

I think it's the you know like God wants us to have kids that's why he gave you a womb in the first place and if you're overusing it and not for children or if you're specifically not having kids by taking medications then you're going against God's will and you shall be punished. It's my understanding of what was going on at that. Kindly in line with that we've got our first female contributor to the mess that is the history of hysteria. Hildegard of Bingen who was alive between 1098 and 1179. She was a German doctor who kind of resumed Hippocrates' work around humoral theory, which is fucking like... Wild. Wild choice. Because they were way past... Well, I mean, they weren't really, at the end of the day. Do you know, this is the kind of point that we were making earlier, where we were several hundred years past this, but...

SPEAKER_01: 49:36

We'd had that period of stagnation where things kind of ground to a halt. So this is just... Picking

SPEAKER_00: 49:42

back up at the other side of this. Even though it was so long later, which, yeah. So she attributed black bile to the original sin. So some of the early autopsies that they had done during the early first centuries, obviously that was really fucking frowned upon. at that time, that was not standard practice. Doing an autopsy. So there's no much written about them because any that were done were done in secret because it was kind of against the kind of morality what was acceptable at the time.

SPEAKER_01: 50:22

That always struck me as a sort of, that was quite a big step away from the sort of religious and moral

SPEAKER_00: 50:30

Yeah, messing with these bodies was pretty frowned upon. Especially cutting them up and, you know, they were sacred, they were... I

SPEAKER_01: 50:41

mean, obviously, like, the Egyptians had a wee dalliance with cutting into bodies, but that was... But they weren't doing autopsies. That was kind of...

SPEAKER_00: 50:50

They were, but they weren't. That wasn't the purpose, do you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01: 50:54

But you'd think that there'd be kind of some... some kind of medical understandings and things would have been picked up from there. But that was kind of specifically a religious sort of ritual thing going on. But outside of religious practices, I find it wild that they got to the point of cutting into bodies.

SPEAKER_00: 51:23

So there are a ton of wee dalliance in that, but secretively. And when they had been looking into hysteria they had discovered that there had been in one patient there was like cysts on the ovaries and when cut open black bile came out of them so there had already been this kind of link between hysteria and the kind of womb diseases with black bile so this is where she has picked that back up and went black bile Original sin mate.

SPEAKER_01: 52:00

Definitely couldn't have been like clotted blood or...

SPEAKER_00: 52:05

No. So she had seen melancholy, which was depression, sadness, and very, very highly linked with hysteria. Because who were the most melancholic people of the time? Women. Who were the most hysterical people of the time? Women. So they were both kind of, no interchangeable as such, but very interlinked and kind of seen as one cause the other and stuff.

SPEAKER_01: 52:32

I think after seeing this sort of treatment that women got as a result of showing emotion, you can really see why it's so baked into our culture that men shouldn't show emotion. Yeah, they'll be seen as women. God forbid they start getting this treatment, that would be terrifying.

SPEAKER_00: 52:54

Yeah. Aye, so like, sad and depressed, melancholy. Yeah. Angry, irrational, anxious, hysteria. That was the kind of, like, the emotions, any emotion, were quite easily put into these different categories. Yeah. Where there were afflictions, either in the body or in the mind. Or in the moral soul, as our pal Hildegard seen. So... She's seen melancholy as a defect to the soul, rooted in evil and therefore incurable.

SPEAKER_01: 53:31

She's really found herself on the wrong team here. Yeah. I mean, props to her for managing to become a doctor in this time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 53:40

I feel like it was probably a name only. In the sense that I highly doubt in 1098, I'm assuming that was when she was born, so let's say 1130. that she was being accepted as a doctor I could be wrong maybe Germany was further forward at that time period than I would imagine the rest of Europe so she was also the first that I found anyway who attributed melancholy and hysteria to both men and women because to her Adam and Eve shared dual responsibility for the original sin were seen as equals in the eyes of gods and therefore were both victims of melancholy and hysteria and sin, essentially. That's a

SPEAKER_01: 54:33

little bit more

SPEAKER_00: 54:34

progressive. A wee bit progressive. So men were seen as ugly and perverse and women were slender, unable to think freely and infertile due to their weak and fragile uteruses. Always back to the uterus. There's no like men were ugly and perverse because of their dicks. Or because they had

SPEAKER_01: 54:54

weird balls. Melancholy is stored

SPEAKER_00: 54:58

in the balls. Wandering balls. That float freely around their body. So the mainstream view at the time was still very much that women were intellectually, theologically and physically inferior to men. And we still see that today. That's not something that has entirely gone away. Or indeed started at that time. This has just been how society, since society has came into being, has treated women. Because it's been a necessity for it to function. But that is besides the point. So this idea, as we've said, has roots in Aristotelian concept to the kind of male superiority, women inferiority. And the idea of that the woman is a failed man. Thomas Aquinas from 1225-1274 wrote Summa Theologica which confirmed Aristotle's theories and advanced on them. He wrote that the inferiority of women was rooted in sin, that women were, some women, mostly old women, specifically for some fucking reason but yeah were evil minded conferring with demons who were able to enact their will through their eyes so they could just look at you and let the demons would get you they gazed on children in a poisonous evil way jealous of their youth I feel like this is where this old witch in the woods eating children thing comes from is fucking Thomas Aquinas and the granddaddy of his ideas Aristotle. Well this

SPEAKER_01: 56:52

also, you know, with it being kind of mostly older women and things, this kind of to me immediately feels like they're saying these are women that are no longer desirable to me therefore they must be bad. They serve no purpose.

SPEAKER_00: 57:10

Exactly. The types of women that were labelled with these labels tended to be the ones that were sexually undesirable. Whether that be because of sexual promiscuity, like their anger, their general demeanour, them being argumentative, them being scolds, or them being widowed too young or too old. And these were the most by far people that were not only diagnosed with hysteria but also labelled as witches which we will come back to. So the preachers at the time were also disclosing the Old Testament's condemnation of witchcraft and sorcery that was kind of adding to this ongoing fear of just women in general. Never mind women being witches but just women in general because nobody was safe. To the point that the ecclesiastic societies actually imposed celibacy and chastity on their clergy as a way of protecting them from the evil, wicked ways of women that still exist today. That's still an ongoing thing in a lot of the churches. Because the witches might get them. Because the poisonous old women might send demons out from their eyes to smite them. Or not smite, sorry, that's God's words. Um...

SPEAKER_01: 58:38

interfere with them.

SPEAKER_00: 58:41

Yeah, we'll go with that. So the church was kind of struggling at this point. There were some new kind of humanist theories that were coming out for the philosophers. Things were starting to move a wee bit further away from religion in terms of the morality and the ways that people were looking at the best way to live a life, what it means to be a good person. Things were starting to kind of... I don't want to call it science, but move away from the traditional religious ways and more into humanist theories, as I've said. So the church had to step its game up. They were losing political control, they were losing money. Really, that was the big one. They were losing influence, and they were losing power, and they were losing money.

SPEAKER_01: 59:28

Their business was failing, so they had to find a new gimmick.

SPEAKER_00: 59:33

So, boom. Heresy. anybody who had anything negative to say about the church became a victim of it. We've kind of touched on this a wee bit before with how the church kind of labelled everybody heretics, any kind of opposing religions, any rival businesses, any rival companies. They were doing a hostile takeover. They were labelling them heretics. They were killing everybody and then they were getting all their buildings, their lands, their titles. Not their titles, but their buildings, their lands, their wealth. And once the church had kind of ran out of other businesses to do this way, they kind of had to focus in on the population. They always

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:20

need a good body.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:23

So they were attempting to unify Europe under the one banner, which kind of led to mental illness and hysteria as being labelled as links with demons, the devil, and people began to be exercised as treatment for a lot of these mental illnesses, including hysteria. The church became the doctors.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:43

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:45

So by about 1484, this instability of Catholicism within Europe kind of led to the intensification of the inquisitions by the churches. They kind of tried to regain this control that they were slowly losing. And the witch hunts in Europe began.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:01

Oh, fantastic.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:04

So the German Dominicans, Heinrich and Sister Kramer... and Jacob Springer are accredited with the publication of the infamous Hammer of Witches or the Malleus Maleficarum in 1486. Maleficarum being specifically witches as opposed to the wizard equivalent Maleficorum. Further driving home the point that to be female is to be without question evil.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:35

Yep. You've got... It's official now. We've got official books and documents to say that it's the women and not the men.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:46

I find it really interesting that this shift from science to witches and wizards and fucking necromancers and demons and shit back to science again. In almost direct parallel, you've got hysteria and melancholy moving to Witches and then moving back to Hysteria again. Like it's all part of the same thing. It's just the same like it's serving the same purpose under a different name. And I've never I've never heard of that link before but you can literally watch it happen.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:27

Aye, like I've heard of these things all kind of isolated on their own and gone yep, right, that's Sounds horrible, but fine, whatever. I didn't realise that it was just kind of one continuous journey. Yeah. That it was all the one thing, the one kind of sustained attack on women. Yeah. For all this time. And it's pretty difficult to just even sit and hear this. Yeah. Like...

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:06

It's hard listening, it's hard reading. This took it out of me because I'm just... It's so difficult. I think when you hear about this stuff, sometimes it's easy to hear it from a distance. And you can imagine yourself in that situation. And I think this is why a lot of the time people do tend to think people in the past is different from people now. because of the atrocities and the things that have happened, it creates this, like, oh, they didn't know any better. Like, it almost, like, infantilises the people of the past and it's like, that would never happen now. In a sense.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:43

Like, it allows that kind of deniability. I don't know, as you dive deeper into these things and you start looking at things and you start looking at, like, people's thought processes and realising that people are the exact same as they've always been.

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:57

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:58

It hits so much closer to home reading about stuff. It makes it more difficult to keep that distance there.

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:07

The kind of main difference between then and now feels like we've all just had sort of collectively centuries of experience where the kind of the side that is oppressing women and oppressing any groups that don't

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:31

meet the white man thing

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:35

they have learned to get sneakier and more subtle whilst the other side have learned that they've got power in numbers and can call it

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:45

out

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:47

but it just feels like this constant slight shift of they get one step sneakier and the other side gets one step bolder about calling things out

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:57

yeah Aye. I feel like this leans into as well, like, this argument of, do you know, what's natural? Like, women's natural submission to men. And it's like, why the fuck have they had to go to all this trouble to uphold this if that's the case? Why has there been

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:12

a fight for thousands of years? If it was natural, there would have had to be no effort put in.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:18

And not just a fight, but a fight where they've had to burn people. Like, do you know what I mean? It's not just been like... a wee squabble. They've actively had to put the fear of death in people to get them to comply.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:31

And they still haven't. That much work cannot possibly be natural. That's systematic control. That's fighting against the tide of nature. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:49

So circle back to the Malleus Maleficarum. The text itself is actually really reminiscent of the medical text from the day. Exploring the link between physical ailments and those who work with demons and the devil. So this is just further attributing physical illness and physical and mental illness with sin and the devil and morality it explains in three parts how infertility pestilence and famine are caused by the devil with the help of his witches showing evidence of their existence and how to find and punish witchcraft it also explains how if the reader disbelieves any of the texts that is the work of the devil himself Meaning that anybody who argued with them was also labelled the witch. Wrapped up in a neat little bow. But the fucking mind games as well, that's straight out the cult manifesto. At that point, that person, if you are reading that, you're like, shit, the devil's got me. Like, it just pulls you further into the system.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:12

Yeah, and I think then when you get people in that kind of state where they, you know, if they've had that doubt and then, oh, the devil's got me, they're far more likely to then try and pass that blame on, oh, well, it must be this wee old woman for down the road. She's using her devilish powers to make me think like that. I couldn't possibly be

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:42

to

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:42

blame for that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:44

Because of course, females are inferior to men. If that's a man in that position, it couldn't possibly be him. It's his maid. It's his wife. It's his daughter. It's that old woman down the road. You can see how this encouraged a witch hunt. Because it was setting people up to need somebody to blame.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:08

Yeah. Incentivise them to shift the blame from themselves.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:12

Yeah. To save their immortal soul. It's quite a neat trick. It's horrible, but you can see why it worked so well. So this led to a worrying trend, where if a physician couldn't discover the cause of an illness, then it must be the workings of the devil. And because... they obviously knew so little about just generally things anyway but like specifically women's illness because everything it sounded like anything that was wrong with a woman was her uterus anything that was wrong with a woman typically ended up being hysteria so and because they didn't understand what the chat with that was and a lot of people were saying that was because of his sin anyway like anybody who was labelled as hysteria was susceptible to then being labelled as a witch And it did happen. A lot. So, mental illness itself was condemned as a sin as the devil is more able to interfere with those predisposed to hysteria and melancholy. Which, of course, again, is women.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:20

Weak-minded, weak-souled.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:23

Yeah. All just weak.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:26

But they're seen more as people now only in the sense that

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:31

they're

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:32

conniving. Yeah, they're sneaky. They're in league with the devil. They have the autonomy to do the devil's work. But nothing else. Do you know what I mean? Their

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:41

autonomy extends to making the bad choice.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:44

Yeah, to badness. Even the Latin word for female, which is fomina, comes from fi and minus, which means to have less faith. So even the language was set up to show that women... were not as pious, were not as faithful, and therefore were more likely to be in tow with the devil. Over the next 300 years, thousands of women were tortured, captured, and killed in the name of witchcraft.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:18

How depressing. And on that bombshell...

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:24

Wait, is that Top Gear? I miss Top Gear. And with that, We have covered at least the historical side of Hysteria and we'll be continuing this on next week with The Witches of Scotland.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:40

Yeah, quite a good wee transition there.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:43

Yeah, it's a shame it's not on one episode.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:47

I think there's just a bit too much to say on two and a half thousand years worth of history.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:55

Well, we're not even up to date yet. Yeah. Really, this was the first 1500 years.

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:00

Aye.

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:00

But, yeah. Come back next week, guys.

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:05

Alright, see you next week.

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:07

Bye!