Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  Indeed, as numerous eminent physicians testified, the notion of the "virgin cure" was quite widespread. His Majesty's Prison Surgeon Dr. James Devon's testimony in this case was both sweeping and damning: "There is a curiously persistent and widespread belief that a man who suffers from venereal disease can get rid of it by having connection with a virgin. I have been surprised at discovering the existence of this belief in people generally well informed as well as among the comparatively illiterate. I have tried to find evidence for the theory that it is a belief traceable to certain districts but I have discovered it among people of different places and of different occupations—so different that now I should scarcely be surprised to come across it anywhere."

  And indeed there was no reason that Dr. Devon should have been surprised to find evidence of this particular myth in turn-of-the-century Scottish society. Since at least the eighteenth century, rape cases involving children had been commonplace in other British Isles courts: in eighteenth-century London, approximately one in every five capital rape cases on the books involved a victim under the age of ten. The virgin cure myth, as Antony Simpson notes in his analysis of such rapes, was a commonplace excuse offered by accused child rapists, and lawyers and judges throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth knew of the belief and were familiar with its use as a justification for rape.

  The belief was never limited to the British Isles, although it remained a noticeable presence in British venereal disease surveys until the mid-twentieth century. It was noted as a problem among some subcultures in the nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century United States as well, particularly populations for whom neither higher education nor medical treatment was commonly available. And while the myth is no longer prevalent in the First World, it continues to flourish elsewhere. Since the advent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, the millions of infections around the world and the desperate straits faced by the HIV-positive in the Third World have created a tragically fertile field in which the myth of the virgin cure has flourished. In South Africa specifically, where a number of highly visible infant rape cases have brought the issue to the international news pages, the rates of child rape have risen by as much as 400 percent. University of South Africa surveys of South Africans reveal that substantial percentages of those interviewed—as high as 32 percent in Gauteng province, the region that contains the country's capital, Pretoria, and one of its largest cities, Johannesburg—believed that sex with a virgin could cure AIDS.

  The virgin cure myth is thus no mere artifact of an ignorant past, but a very real and present problem. A taboo within a taboo, it is difficult to discuss and more difficult to prevent. Merely entertaining the possibility that some people might believe the virgin cure possible, much less attempt it, is so unpleasant that many people take refuge in denial, or blame it on the ignorant, on the poor, and on parents too incompetent or wicked to protect their children from such a fate. Such claims hold up no better now than they did in the nineteenth century. The virgin cure may, these days, be a more pressing concern in black townships in South Africa than in predominantly white communities in the United States or northern Europe, but this is no excuse for smugness . . . or false security. As the historical record shows, when desperate situations make it seem reasonable to think about doing desperate things, interest in the virgin cure knows no ethnic or cultural bounds.

  The Disease of Virgins

  Sex with a virgin has been believed to be a cure for more than just venereal disease. For over five hundred years it was believed to cure virgins themselves of a very specific medical disorder that only they could suffer. This disease, known as morbus virginaeus in Latin, or simply "the sickness of virgins" in English, is no longer considered to exist as a condition in Western medicine. Prior to the twentieth century, however, it was not only a common diagnosis but had a substantial medical literature as well. With its long history, its inconclusive nature, and its sudden disappearance from the medical landscape, the disease of virgins is not only a curiosity, it is also a first-rate medical mystery.

  The disease of virgins went by many names. Known in different places and times as chlorosis, "the white fever," Bleichzucht, lespales couleurs, greensickness, and geelzucht, it was one of the few diseases whose ultimate cure was hinted at in its very name. Marry the girl off and relieve her of her virginity, and a cure was sure to be had, the lyrics to the British Renaissance ballad "A Cure for the Green-Sickness" implied. Deprive her of a lover, on the other hand, and she might well die:

  A Handsom buxom Lass

  Lay panting in her bed,

  She lookt as green as grass

  And mournfully she said:

  "Except I have some lusty lad

  To ease me of my pain

  I cannot live,

  I sigh and grieve,

  My life I now disdain."

  Indeed, women sometimes died of greensickness, either due to the course of the disease itself or from suicide triggered by mental derangement, such as "desiring death as a lover," which was sometimes a symptom. And indeed, marriage and particularly childbearing were believed to be a sovereign cure. What this disease of virgins really was, on the other hand, is harder to say.

  As implied by the multitude of names used to identify this illness, the disease of virgins was not so much a discrete condition with distinct characteristics all its own, like dysentery or a broken leg, but a syndrome, a collection of symptoms that all seemed related in some way. Some of the symptoms, such as lack of menstruation, paleness, lack of normal appetite, and pica (the desire to eat dirt and other substances normally considered inedible) remained relatively constant over the centuries that the condition was described in medical books. Other symptoms, like a feverish pulse, swelling of the eyelids and ankles, difficult breathing, heart palpitations, delusional thinking, chest pains, suicidal tendencies, swelling of the liver, a supposed "backwards flow" of the blood toward the heart, and the green complexion implied in the name "greensickness," turn up in accounts from some time periods and not others. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the array of symptoms associated with the disease of virgins, it often overlapped with other diagnoses. A young woman showing symptoms of this disease might also be diagnosed with anything from lovesickness to obstruction of the spleen, and in some cases such a diagnosis might even have been the correct one.

  From a historical perspective, however, the most interesting thing about the disease of virgins is that it was a disease of virgins, an iconic disease suffered by women at a stage of life when they theoretically were in their prime and full of potential. As a disease of virgins, it also insistently points to virginity as a source of trouble rather than a source of reassurance and safety.

  The primary symptom of the disease of virgins was lack of menstruation. In the understanding of the humoral medical system, it was believed that when a woman did not menstruate properly, the blood that should have been purged from her body by menstruation became backed up inside. This excess blood might putrefy and become poisonous (menstrual blood was often considered to be poisonous to begin with), weigh down the woman's womb and limbs, or even cause her circulatory system to become so backed up that blood would be forced to flow backward. According to Hippocratean theory, the backed-up blood might put pressure on the heart and cause mental disturbances and the sensation of being strangled, cause women to see ghosts, or make them try to drown or hang themselves. Virginity might have saved women from the enormous risks of childbirth, but what good was that if it meant that they developed a disorder that might kill them anyway? Virginity, held up for so many centuries as the Christian ideal for women, might save women from the ravages of sexual sin, but it could not save them from the treachery of having a womb.

  While the disease of virgins did nothing to make the female body seem less toxic and dangerous, it did provide quite a good argument for the expediency of marriage. It can scarcely be complete coincidence that the emergence of this disease as a distinct and distincdy virginal phenomeno
n in the medical literature, curable by nothing more or less than the topical application of marital sex, coincided very closely with the emergence of Protestantism in Europe. Protestantism, unlike Catholicism, had no real use for adult virginity. It is no coincidence that greensickness appears on the heels of Protestantism. Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the doors of the Castle Church at Wittenberg in 1517; by 1526 his German mass (the first Protestant service) had been formulated. The first major medical writing on the disease of virgins, in the German physician Johannes Lang's Medicinalium epistolarum miscellanea, appeared right on schedule in 1554.

  This is by no means to say that the disease of virgins was invented as a Protestant plot to get women married off, or even that it only suddenly began to exist in the sixteenth century. In point of fact, a set of symptoms very similar to those of the disease can be found in the Hippocratean corpus, and certainly the medical literature bears out the fact that young women with menstrual irregularities and mood disorders have always existed. But there was clearly something specific to the mid-sixteenth century that allowed doctors to suddenly begin speaking of a disease of virgins when, previously, they would have spoken about individual symptoms. That something, in a nutshell, was the emergence of a social climate in which virginity could be discussed in a negative light without running the risk of committing heresy.

  Not, mind you, that this made the symptoms of the disease of virgins any more genuinely a result of virginity than they had ever been. Such symptoms can strike women of any age and sexual status, and many things may cause them. In fact, one of the curious side notes in the history of the sickness of virgins is that sometimes the absence of menstruation, upset stomachs, and other symptoms associated with it were actually symptoms of something else entirely, namely the rather nonvirginal condition of pregnancy. The fact that absent menses are an ambiguous symptom was not lost on doctors and midwives. In calling for purgatives, medications to induce menstruation, bloodletting, and other treatments, writers cautioned against using them on women who were pregnant. Since early pregnancy can be indistinguishable from the symptoms of greensickness, there was a possibility that treating greensickness could cause miscarriage, and it seems clear that doctors understood that this might, in fact, be precisely what was desired. For legal reasons, however, they dared not give the impression that they endorsed it. The medical disclaimer, in other words, is nothing new.

  There were of course other causes than pregnancy for the symptoms associated with the disease of virgins. Various explanations have been advanced over the years, running a broad gamut from Bright's disease to biliverdin jaundice to the rare variant of acute myelocytic leukemia known as chloroma. These and other highly specific diagnoses, however, likely accounted for only a very small number of cases of morbus virginaeus. If nothing else, the fact that so many of the girls who suffered from the disease of virgins survived it argues against many of the more terminal explanations. To this end, most of what are considered the likeliest modern-day diagnoses for greensickness or the disease of virgins are forms of anemia, particularly a variant known as hypochromic anemia.

  It is conjectured that much of this anemia was caused by insufficient nutrition. Whether because limited food availability and sexism have offered them no better or because the pressures of social conformity have led them to permit themselves no more, women and girls have often gone without sufficient nourishment. It is hardly coincidental that many treatments for the disease of virgins included the recommendation to improve the girls' diets, specifically adding meat and wine, both of which were believed to strengthen the blood (and which red meat, a good source of dietary iron, in fact can), and other nourishing foods. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when patent medicines for the treatment of what was by then called chlorosis became available, some of the most successful were mineral supplements.

  In this light we can understand some of the ways that marriage and motherhood might have helped to cure the disease of virgins. It was not, as was often written, the opening up of the passages of the womb and vagina by intercourse and childbearing that cured the disease by making a straight and ready path for the exit of all that pent-up menstrual blood. Rather, as wife and head of the domestic sphere, a woman was likely to have better access to food. Marriage and motherhood might also have helped to resolve psychological causes of greensickness as well, possibly simply because unnecessary invalidism was no longer an option—her household needed her.

  None of this, of course, discouraged the myriad people who pruriently joked about the cure for chlorosis being a simple matter of applying an appropriately virile penis. As this tidbit of anonymous Elizabethan doggerel shows, greensickness and curing it were—a bit like menstruation still is today—the butt of many a bawdy barroom joke:

  A maydenfaire of ye greene sickness e late

  Pitty to see, perplexed was full sore

  Resolvinge how t 'amend her bad estate,

  In this distresse Apollo doth implore

  Cure for her ill; ye oracle assignes,

  Keepe ye first letter of these severall lines.

  Despite the many cures attempted, jokes cracked, and explanations advanced, the disappearance of symptoms in women who suffered from the disease of virgins remains as mysterious, and has nearly as many possible explanations, as the disappearance of the disease itself. For four centuries the disease of virgins, under all its many names, was the paradigmatic clinical disorder suffered by young women, in much the same sense that depression and eating disorders are the paradigmatic disorders suffered by young women today. As late as 1901, Sir Clifford Allbutt could still write that "the chlorotic girl is well-known in every consulting room, public or private." But somehow, as the first quarter of the twentieth century wore on, the disease of virgins gradually vanished. No longer considered a viable diagnosis, no longer included in current medical texts, young women who presented with the same symptoms that would have gotten them diagnosed with chlorosis a decade earlier were now being told they had other things wrong with them. After five hundred years, the disease of virgins went from ubiquity to nonexistence in the space of a generation.

  Where it went, and what to make of the very real disorders and discomforts of the women who had suffered it, are matters of considerable debate among historians of medicine. Dr. Helen King of the University of Reading, United Kingdom, and the author of a monograph dealing with the history of the disease of virgins, offers a number of possible explanations, including improvements in medicine, such as the ability to diagnose and treat anemia, a general improvement in diet, and an increased understanding of the importance of adequate vitamins and minerals in nutrition. Did eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia gradually take over the cultural position once occupied by chlorosis? King acknowledges the theory, but believes the comparison is inadequate. It seems that the only honest answer to the question of the sickness of virgins is the unglamorous truth: just as virginity itself is wont to do, it disappeared from the scene, its afterlife unknowable and unknown.

  Cut to the Chaste

  When the vagina doesn't finish canalizing and thus never forms a vaginal opening, what remains is an unbroken expanse of skin that completely covers the vaginal entrance. We call this an imperforate hymen. No one knows why imperforate hymens develop, only that they do so on a fairly regular basis. Imperforate hymen is the single most common anomaly of the female genitals and is, in fact, a birth defect.

  Imperforate hymens can cause several medical problems, ranging from the merely inconvenient to the quite severe. Most commonly, imperforation causes hematocolpos, a buildup of menstrual blood, endometrial tissue, and vaginal fluids within the vagina that occurs simply because there's no way for any of it to get out. Because the vagina is rather elastic and expandable, quite a quantity of menstrual fluid can build up behind the imperforate hymen, causing abdominal pressure and pain. The fluid puts pressure on the bladder and on the rectum, which can cause constipation and symptoms that
may mimic urinary tract infection. Sometimes it also causes hematometra, a buildup of blood inside the uterus or fallopian tubes that can be mistaken for tumors.

  Fortunately for the numerous young women who find themselves having to deal with the surprise of an imperforate hymen, treatment is simple. Hymenotomy, also called hymenectomy, is precisely what the name implies, the surgical cutting of the hymen. Typically done on an outpatient basis, the standard Western hymenotomy surgery can be done according to any of several different incision styles, including a cross-shaped incision or one shaped roughly like the fictional masked swordsman Zorro's celebrated Z. The incision creates a central opening in the hymen so that menstrual fluids can drain from the vagina. The cut edges of the hymen are either pinned back with sutures or the surgery may be done with a laser scalpel, which cuts and cauterizes at the same time; both methods prevent the cut edges from healing back together. Since neither the opening of the vagina nor the hymen itself is particularly vast, this is only a small incision, usually less than an inch. Once the cut is made, the backed-up menstrual fluid may be removed by suction or allowed to drain on its own. As is common with superficial wounds in the genitals, the healing time is typically short.

  The secondary purpose of hymenotomy is to allow vaginal penetration. Hymenotomy is also sometimes used to increase the size of the hymenal opening in women whose hymens are not imperforate, but merely particularly thick or inelastic in a way that makes penetration difficult or uncommonly painful. During the middle of the twentieth century, in fact, there was something of a vogue for gynecologists to perform preemptive hymenotomies on the theory that it would prevent wedding-night trauma from painful first penetration. From the 1930s to the 1960s or so, many gynecologists offered the procedure to patients announcing an impending wedding. Such "just in case" hymenotomies have passed out of fashion as doctors have recognized that they are typically unnecessary, both because most women do not suffer significant pain when they are first penetrated, and because the psychoanalytic theory of wedding-night trauma has fallen out of favor. Contemporary doctors will generally wait until an actual problem arises before deciding to take a scalpel to a woman's hymen.