As our ELBOW team is coming back from the summer holidays – which we enjoyed very much – it is time to turn our heads back to the past, medical electricity, and embodied experiences.

We would like to introduce to you the cases and materials our ELBOW research team is working with. In our opinion, the time for communicating about our research is not only in the end of the ELBOW project, but during the process as well. This is why we will share case studies that our researchers are dealing with in the context of their research.

Our first case study is about menstruation and a surgeon who treated the so-called ”obstructions” of menstruation using electricity. So, here is what our ELBOW researcher Annika Raapke has to say about this case.

Shocking early modern periods

 Judging by 21^st century legal, political, medical, economic – really, you name whatever category you can think of – standards, Early Modern Europe was not a particularly women-friendly place. But things weren’t all bad, at least in the eyes of the contemporaries. Because while most women might not have had much, for large parts of their lives they at least had one thing men (usually) did not: menstruation.

That may not sound very comforting to our modern-day ears. In terms of early modern European medical culture however, having your own monthly cleansing system was a fantastic physical perk that carried all kinds of health benefits which women got for free for as long as it lasted.  

Since menstruation was so important, any disturbance of the flow that was not due to pregnancy was seen as a serious issue that required medical intervention. One of those who intervened on behalf of a healthy flow was the surgeon John Birch.

In the 1770s, he treated women suffering from so-called “obstruction”, meaning a blockage of the menstruation, in his London practice, using electricity. Some of the more interesting and peculiar cases he treated were published in 1780 – and for the modern-day reader, it does not get much more peculiar than the case which Birch presented as “Case IV”. 

February 10^th, 1779, a young woman, about 22 years of age, came to me to be electrified for a pain in her side, which she had been troubled with for some months, without being able to get relief. She related to me, among other things, a very particular circumstance. – From the time that she first began to menstruate, she said, that they flowed regularly in their natural channel for two successive months, but on the third month they had as regularly been vomited up from the stomach, which at those times was affected with pain and sickness.

“Now, hold on”, some of you may say. “This woman vomited up her menstrual blood?!” Well, yes. 

While not exactly an everyday occurrence, finding new and exciting exits out of the body was by no means impossible for Eighteenth-century fluids. Menstrual blood, semen, breastmilk, urine etc. were all meant to leave the body, and in the Early Modern period, they were practically escape artists that would get out in any way they could. If something went wrong with the “rightful” flow – if it was obstructed – then the flow would solve that problem somehow, usually creating new problems along the way. 

But, as said above, cases like these were unusual even for early modern practitioners, so Birch was duly intrigued and accepted her as his patient.

From his publication of her case, we don’t get to know much about what the woman herself thought of anything, apart from one interesting aspect which may, again, surprise you: Her main concern was not the menstruation-vomit. It was the pain in her side that worried her.

Apparently, the woman was not too stressed about how or where the menstrual blood made its way out of her, as long as it did so every month, as it should. However, Birch did not share her view on things, and seemed to be mostly interested in repairing the menstrual flow. 

In order to do that, he began to gently use electricity on her, “to try if the Electric shock would have the power to alter the course”, and succeeded first after three days, when she informed him that “the menses had appeared at their natural outlet; but they stopped the next day, and a pain seized the side and the back. These pains were removed by gentle shocks, and the menses flowed again.” 

So far, so good, you may say. But then, it turned out that gentle shocks were not enough to convince a stubborn flow which had, after all, been coming through the stomach and mouth for years that it was time to give its existence a new direction (literally). After only a couple of days, the woman was vomiting blood again. This time, Birch, recognizing a true adversary when he saw one, cranked up the electricity on the 19^th of February:

Then I increased the strength of the shocks, passing them through the stomach to the os pubis [the pubic bone] and to the feet. – The menses flowed from this time in a larger quantity than before, without intermission, for three days, and the pain in her side, for which she first applied to me, was quite removed, and did not again return.

Apparently, even this highly stubborn flow was no match for Birch’s electric apparatus. After four months, Birch examined the woman again and found that her menstrual flow had been taking the appropriate route and approved exit ever since. 

Birch was quite happy over these results and wrote enthusiastically about “the powers of electricity over the animal economy”. However, he was still a bit annoyed with the fact that the woman’s particular “animal economy” had needed so much of the electric power in order to stop the misdirected flow for good. After all, Birch had had to give the patient electricity in much higher doses than he had originally anticipated, since the rebellious flow kept resisting him.

But Birch found an explanation: It was that “several disadvantages attended the operation of the Electric Machine in this case”.  The main disadvantage was that the electric machine was not exactly a pocket gadget. Birch’s patients usually had to come to him for treatments, instead of him electrifying them in their own homes.

For this woman, that was exactly what had caused her setbacks, since coming to him had meant “a long walk to come and go every day – the weather was cool and rainy, and to these circumstances I attribute the daily checks her discharge met with.” Birch was quite suspicious of the effect which the cold had on menstruation, and would rather have protected the woman’s “animal economy” from it.

Yet he was finally able to “remedy these little inaccuracies” of nature – such as vomiting up menstrual blood on a monthly basis – despite the extra challenges of cold, rain and discomfort. In the end, and like Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, all he needed was More Power.

Source material:

John Birch: Considerations on the Efficacy of Electricity in Removing Female Obstruction. (Citation: Case IV). 1780.