Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  In hindsight, the flaw in Soranus's reasoning is obvious. He is not imagining a membrane that normally has a hole in it, as we now know the typical hymen to be. Soranus is thinking of the hymen as a solid, contiguous, unbroken thing, like the lid of a jar or an oiled bladder stretched tight over the mouth of a wine jug. There was every reason he should have thought of it this way. In the ancient world, the predominant image of the womb, that most important of the female organs, was that of a vessel. Some described it as an upside-down jug with a long neck, others as a bowl in which male and female fluids were mixed and blood added to produce a child, giving the womb a functional resemblance to a hater, the cup or jar in which wine was mixed with water before being drunk. A jug without a stopper easily spills. A lid with a hole in its middle is hardly a lid at all. All of which is to say that what we might be tempted to view as a misconception is not ill-conceived at all. Soranus was being rigorously logical.

  Not believing in the existence of a vaginal membrane, however, does not mean that Soranus did not believe in virginity. On the contrary, Soranus was, in contrast to Hippocrates and other Greek doctors before him, a proponent of virginity for both men and women. Gynecology is unique in the ancient world in that it actually takes seriously the notion of preserving virginity, and discusses the question of how long a girl could remain healthy as a virgin and what sort of lifestyle would best maintain her health. Soranus was a man of his time in this respect. This odd notion of a woman remaining a virgin rather than being married off at puberty was beginning to become a very charged and public issue in the Rome in which Soranus lived and wrote—a place in which a new faith, Christianity, was gradually gaining its feet.

  But what of this idea of a membrane inside the vagina? Where did it come from, and if Soranus believed it wasn't true, who believed it was? Unfortunately, Soranus neglected to mention where he heard the concept. We have no idea if the idea came from some now-lost medical tract, from some unusual report given by a woman or midwife, or from some other source entirely. Classicist Aline Rousselle offers the idea that the "sealing membrane" hypothesis may have been a Roman notion that evolved out of the Roman practice of frequently marrying girls off even before they had had their first menstrual. periods, a practice the Greeks did not follow and to which Soranus was opposed. The Romans would have observed, on multiple occasions, young women beginning menstruation only after they had been physically "opened" by intercourse, and they might then have conjectured that this opening of the passages by a penis removed some obstruction, making it possible for the menstrual blood to flow out.*

  We don't know whether Rousselle is correct in her speculation about the Romans, and it is possible that we never will. Given the circumstances under which Soranus worked, a Roman source is certainly one of the most likely. Unfortunately, though, we have no documentary evidence, and so Soranus's mention remains merely a tantalizing hint of an alternate theory.

  In any event, Soranus and his contemporaries did not need the hymen in order to have a concept of virginity. Nor did they need it to explain the symptoms commonly associated with virginity loss. Greek physicians believed that the uterus itself changed size when a girl began to menstruate, showing her readiness to conceive, and changed again when she left off being a parthenos ("girl" or "virgin" depending on context) and became a gyne ("woman" or "wife"). In aparthenos, the uterus was significantly smaller than it was in a gyne, and perhaps a little bit firmer, hotter, or drier as well. The humoral system by which ancient medicine was organized characterized heat, hardness, and dryness as qualities related to youth and maleness; coolness, sponginess, and moistness were associated with femaleness and age. According to this system, a fertile, childbearing uterus would be large, spongy, and moist. At least theoretically, virginity could be diagnosed with little more than a glance.

  Such theories lived on long after Soranus, and were repeated more or less verbatim from one text to the next. It is not until the brilliant early-eleventh-century Persian scientist and physician known to the Western World as Avicenna (Avicenna is a Latinization of ibn Sina; his full name was Abu Ali al-Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina) that we acquire a vision of the vagina that is substantially different from Soranus's. At the end of his chapter on the anatomy of the womb, Avicenna states that prior to the defloration of a virgin girl, there are membranes in the mouth of the womb woven from veins and extremely delicate ligaments. These are, he claims, destroyed by the man who "violates" her, and the blood that is in them runs out. Translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona sometime around the mid—twelfth century, Avicenna's description became the second influential model of the physical aspects of female virginity.

  Throughout the medieval era, physicians employed a range of visual metaphors for this "virginal seal." The most common were the images of a woven web, as we find in Avicenna and later in the De animalibus of Albertus Magnus, and the image of a "knot of virginity" or nodus virginalis or virginitatis. William of Saliceto was a fan of the knot image, and his Summa conservationis et cur adonis of 1285 describes the nodus virginitatis as "tightly tied and wrinkled with veins and arteries that stand out like creases on a chickpea." The images of a veil that hung within the vagina and that of a flap or sheet of skin were also popular. An anonymous commentator on the fourteenth-century De secretis mulierum refers to apellicula, a skin, in the vagina and bladder that is broken when a virgin first consorts with men. As we can infer from certain of the more unusual claims, like the creased and ridged surface William of Saliceto claims for his "knot" and the odd location of the pellicula claimed by the commentator on the De secretis, it is unlikely that any of these writers was, so to speak, sketching from an original model. That did not happen until 1544, when the 50 internationally famous Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius finally found the hymen in dissection . . . although ironically, he too failed to sketch what he saw.

  Vesalius Finds the Hymen

  Given how many people were interested in the nature and identity of the hymen, it is certainly strange that it was never isolated in an actual dissection until the middle of the sixteenth century. Why was the hymen not physically isolated until so late in the game? Certainly the relative infrequency of dissections of female bodies accounts for part of it. In most places, the only bodies legally available for medical dissection were the corpses of criminals who had been executed, which would make legal dissections of female bodies a rare event indeed. Another factor was almost certainly that virginity, as fascinating a topic as it is, has never been as medically important as pregnancy. Most premodern anatomies of women's bodies exist to detail the uterus, the fetus, and the stages of pregnancy. Given how many women have died in childbirth, as compared to the relatively infinitesimal number who have ever suffered more than temporary physical complications from being deflowered, we can excuse our progenitors for thinking that the search for the hymen was perhaps a legitimately lesser priority.

  Finally, however, in early 1544 in the university town of Pisa, Italy, Vesalius deliberately undertook dissections of the bodies of two women whom he believed to be virgins, intending that they serve a documentary, scientific purpose. The results of the dissections themselves remained unpublished until 1546, when Vesalius published a report of them as part of a tract he wrote about the use of ginseng in the treatment of venereal diseases, his Epistola rationem modumque propinandi radicis Chynae decocti (Letter on the China Root).

  We do not know the names of the women whose bodies Vesalius dissected, and we know little about their lives. One was a nun of middle years (Vesalius gives her age as "at least thirty-six years old") who had died of pleurisy, her corpse acquired from Florence. Scholars believe the nun's body came from the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, where Duke Cosimo de'Medici, one of Renaissance Italy's great patrons of the arts and sciences, had sufficient influence to arrange such a thing as an illegal body snatching without anyone asking too many questions (he had done so in the past for Leonardo da Vinci). A letter from a secretary of the Univers
ity of Pisa, dated 22 January 1544, survives in the Florence city archives, detailing Cosimo de'Medici's assistance in secretly acquiring bodies and having them shipped, at night and by barge, down the River Arno to Pisa where the celebrated visiting anatomist would dissect them.

  The second woman in whom Vesalius, during his Pisan sojourn, located a hymen was a seventeen-year-old hunchbacked girl. Vesalius said that he "examined the uterus [meaning the genitals overall] of the girl since I expected her to be a virgin because very likely no one had ever wanted her." The hunchbacked girl's body was stolen from the Camposanto, Pisa's medieval cemetery, to which, by well-established medical school tradition, enterprising students had arranged to find themselves in possession of gate keys. Among medical men of the time, body snatching and grave robbing were both commonplace and illegal. In his De humani corporis fabrica (1543), Vesalius himself quietly acknowledged that grave robbing was of unfortunate necessity to the medical man.

  On the dissections themselves, Vesalius said:

  When the flesh had been removed from the bones of the nun and the girl for the preparation of the skeleton, in the presence of a few students I examined the uterus of the girl since I expected her to be a virgin because very likely nobody had ever wanted her. I found a hymen in her as well as in the nun, at least thirty-six years old, whose ovaries, however, were shrunken as happens to organs that are not used.

  Vesalius's Epistola and the dissections he discusses within it do indeed represent something of a watershed in the medical history of the hymen. Finally, an anatomist with sufficient credibility to be taken seriously (and an audience of medical students to boot) had found the elusive hymen, allowing it to be inscribed in the record books once and for all as a duly verified anatomical entity. At the same time, Vesalius's confirmation of the physical existence of the vaginal hymen was not exactly a gynecological "shot heard 'round the world," transforming medical science and attitudes toward women's bodies and virginity overnight. It would be more accurate to say that Vesalius's discovery began to apply the brakes to what was, at that point, a twelve-hundred-year-long debate about what the hymen was and what it looked like.

  Even after Vesalius, as a matter of fact, medical science still didn't know what the hymen looked like. Vesalius never drew the hymen. This omission, in the work of an anatomical artist of Vesalius's caliber, is extremely curious, the more so since he knew full well that no one else had done it. We cannot expect that he would have included the hymen in the first edition of his 1543 De humani corporis fabrica (On the Formation of the Human Body). But it is genuinely odd that the hymen was also not included in the 1555 De humani corporisfabrica epitome, the edition of the Fabrica he created for use as a teaching text. Given Vesalius's self-proclaimed emphasis on correcting the errors made by the ancients, it would seem to have been precisely in his bailiwick to include it, but it is nowhere to be found.

  Why did Vesalius not detail the hymen? He himself left no clue. Some apologists for Vesalius, like the English physician Helkiah Crooke in his Microcos-mographia: a Description of the Body of Man (1615), explained it away by saying that the female drawings in the Fabrica were based on the body of a pregnant woman, and thus the hymen would not have been present. But perhaps—and this is merely conjecture—there is another reason that Vesalius did not diagram the hymen. It may very well be that despite having located it physically, Vesalius, as would prove to become the case with many other estimable medical men, was not entirely convinced that the humble-looking bit of flesh that is the hymen was all it was cracked up to be.

  Dueling Hymens

  It didn't seem to matter that Vesalius had neglected—we can only assume intentionally—to include the hymen in his highly thorough and scientific diagrams of the human body, and buried his testimony of discovering it in the depths of another treatise. The hymen was too much of an obsession for too many people for Vesalius's findings to go unnoticed. Other physicians leapt upon Vesalius's record of finding the hymen like the proverbial starving dogs, loudly proclaiming that they had seen the hymen, too, or if they hadn't seen it themselves, that they knew someone who had.

  James Guillemeau, author of a major treatise on midwifery, Helkiah Crooke, Johannes Vesling, and Severin Pineau were among the European doctors only too happy to take up the hymenal ball and run with it. Of these, Pineau was probably the most influential. His 1597 De virginitatis et corruptionis virginum nods (On Virginity and the Signs of Corrupted Virginity) is a discussion of virginity from the medical perspective, a self-proclaimed "true history" of the hymen. It includes full descriptions of the size, function, and anatomical makeup of the hymen and enthusiastic instructions on how to detect ruined virgins.

  Pineau's fans expanded upon his assertions willy-nilly: Crooke states that the hymen is not a single membrane but is really made up of eight parts, "caruncles" and membranes, and says that "all these particles together make the form of the cup of a little rose half blowne." Vesling confuses the issue further. He claims both "caruncles," after Crooke, but also a "fleshy skin that covers the passage" and is guarded by the aforementioned caruncles. Confusingly, Crooke additionally points to a membrane "vulgarly taken for the Hymen," explaining that there is yet another "thin skin" in the female genitals that is "stretched across the chink like a zone." Marie Loughlin, who chronicles this astounding proliferation of Renaissance hymens in the first chapter of her 1997 book Hymeneudcs: Interpreting Virginity on the Early Modern Stage, aptly characterizes it as a "desperate and conflicted search."

  Just how conflicted these writers really were, and how anxious they were to confirm an irrefutable physical proof of virginity, can be seen in Crooke's utter failure to maintain the courage of his own vociferous convictions. Proclaiming first that the hymen is the "only sure note of unsteyned virginity," he proceeds directly to make reference to an alternate virginity test. Essentially a parlor game, this test involves measuring a thread from the tip of a woman's nose to the base of the skull, then wrapping it around her neck. If the woman is a virgin, the thread should precisely encompass her neck, but if it is too short or too long, she is not. The test is a bizarre offering, coming from a man who clearly wants to believe that the hymen alone can prove or disprove virginity.

  French surgeon Ambroise Pare, a late-sixteenth-century pioneer of military surgery and the study of birth defects, would have answered Crooke's angsty self-contradiction with a derisive Gallic snort. Pare, a highly experienced surgeon and actively dissecting anatomist, was medicine's most vocal opponent of the hymen. He knew about the anatomical discovery of it, and was well aware of descriptions claiming it to be a membrane stretched across the vaginal opening.

  Like Soranus, though, Pare preferred to trust the testimony of his own observations. What he observed was that the hymen, as it had been described to him, simply didn't exist.

  In som virgins or maidens in the orifice of the neck of the womb there is found a certain tunicle or membrane called of antient writers Hymen, which prohibiteth the copulation of a man, and causseth a woman to be barren; this tunicle is supposed by manie, and they not of the common sort only, but also learned Physicians, to bee, as it were, the enclosure of the virginite or maiden-head. But I could never finde it in anie, seeking of all ages from three to twelv, of all that I had under my hands in the Hospital of Paris.

  At the same time, Pare understands that imperforate hymens do exist. His text cites a rather gruesome case study of a girl whose imperforate hymen, prior to surgery, led to such an extreme case of hematocolpos (backed-up menstrual blood that cannot exit the body) that it was "as if she had beene in travail with child." Later, in his Des monstres etprodigues, a 1573 compendium on monstrous births and birth defects, Pare would cite the hymen, along with extra fingers or toes and similar malformations, as an example of a malformation of the body that maims the person unlucky enough to be born with it, but that is not truly monstrous. As if this were not sufficient to clarify Pare's feelings on the matter, he furthermore made it clear in his De
la Generation de I'Homme (Concerning the Generation of Man) that the unsupportable myth of the virginal hymen could interfere with the workings of legal justice:

  Midwives will certainly affirm that they know a virgin from one that is deflowered by the breach or soundness of that membrane. But by their report credulous Judges are soon brought to commit an error, for that Midwives can speak nothing certainly of this membrane may be proved by this, because that one saith that the situation thereof is in the very entrance of the privy parts, others say it is in the midst of the neck of the womb, and others say it is within at the inner orifice thereof, and some are of the opinion that they say or suppose that it cannot be seen or perceived before the first birth. But truly of a thing so rare, and which is contrary to nature, there cannot be anything spoken for certainty.

  For Pare, a hymen was a membrane that sealed the vagina, and nothing else. When he did not find such a thing in the normal women and girls he examined, it was sufficient for him to state that the hymen did not normally exist, and that in cases where it did, it was a serious defect. Anyone who thought otherwise was a fool.

  Then and Now

  In the end Pare lost his crusade and the essentially Vesalian vision of the hymen promoted by Pineau won out. Seventeenth-century midwife Jane Sharp accepts the existence of the vaginal hymen without a quibble, and by 1668 we find the anatomical diagrams in the Anatomy of Thomas Bartholin prominently featuring a relatively accurate and correctly labeled hymen and hymenal orifice. From this point forward, the hymen is anatomical terra cognita, acknowledged universally to exist.

  Thus the hymen spent a few relatively uneventful centuries in the medical books, a minor anatomical feature of the female genitalia that could typically be found described as existing in two states, "intact" and "ruptured." Canon and secular law both valued the hymen highly as proof of virginity. On the personal level, the hymen mattered to brides and grooms and mothers and fathers. At the same time, in the heady heyday of Enlightenment skepticism, the Chevalier de Jaucourt, in an article composed for the first Western encyclopedia, could archly question the nature of virginity itself: