Menstruating Men
In her work titled “Menstruating Men: Similarity and Difference of the Sexes in Early Modern Medicine,” Gianna Pomata cites Johann Baptist De Wenckhin’s experience of meeting a forty-year-old man who had a menstrual flow. In her scholarly work, she describes how cases of periodic bleeding found in men are interpreted as “vicarious menstruation” in medical literature and the learned periodicals of early modern Europe. What are the public supposed to make of this head-scratching information presented in the renowned pages of the German Ephemerides medico-phsicae, the Journal des savants, and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society?
Historians have stressed that from antiquity to the late eighteenth century European medical learning was dominated by a model of sexual difference centered on the male paradigm. The male body was the Gestalt, the paradigm that guided the perception of the female body.
However, stories in Pomata’s piece describe incidences in which modern doctors of the time understand male bodily phenomena via the model that is provided by the female menstruating body. Men with periodic or regular bleeding were thought to have “periods” as women do. It is interesting to think of this research in line with Katharine Park’s assertion that the female body was the paradigmatic object of dissection. Park doesn’t dispute the standard claim that the male body was the generic body, in the sense that it was the perceived norm from which the female body deviated. However, evidence provided in Park’s sources of the 1300s, such as that of the account of the dissection of Chiara of Montefalco in 1308, make it more challenging to sustain these ideas.
For example, Pomata describes in De humani corporis fabrica, Vesalius’s reports that he once dissected “a man who suffered from the complaint called hemorrhoids… ; at regular intervals this man used to have a flow of blood from the anal veins in the very same way in which women have their menstrual flux”. In Vesalius’s eyes, the analogy between the hemorrhoid flow and female menstruation is so evident that he applies observations from the dissection of a male corpse to throw light on a problem concerning the anatomy of menstruation. Upon beginning an autopsy of a male, he describes how “the branch of the portal vein under the final tract of the colon as well as the portion of the same vein running along the mesentery all the way to the rectum was swollen from blood. I infer from this that something similar happens in women, although I have never been able to observe it in the dissection of a female body.”
It should be noted that the observations of periodical bleedings in males weren’t the result of independent observations but of a shared intellectual tradition that singled out a phenomenon as noteworthy. An original nucleus of stories, taken from famous Renaissance medical authors such as Antonio Benivieni, Vesalius, and Amatus Lusitanus, this particular history is repeatedly quoted in the seventeenth in early eighteenth century.
This scholarly article summary was written for a Vassar College 2017 Spring course called Sex, Gender, and the History of Medicine. It was part of a unit on masculinity.
