Every year tens of millions of animals are killed by vivisection, the practice of experimenting upon live animals. The argument I am concerned with considers those animal experiments which are frivolous to human health. Many arguments have been proposed, declaring that animal testing is necessary for the progress of medicine. A global discomfort with women’s menses has led to increased financial burdens and missed education opportunities for women and girls, and for some, a lack of access to safe sanitation has caused otherwise preventable deaths.Animal testing cruel, unnecessary practiceīeing the last week of the quarter, I must dedicate my final column to my furry imprisoned friends, the animals of research testing. While menotoxin did eventually fade from the literature, never having been properly demonstrated or fully discredited, the stigma surrounding menstruation as something dirty or shameful remains. In a 1974 letter to The Lancet, University of California, San Francisco, epidemiologist Virginia Ernster said that in the absence of well-controlled menotoxin experiments, photos of wilted flowers “are insufficient data on which to build a case.” Nevertheless, a 1977 letter in The Lancet opined the need for better model systems to study the phenomenon, and a 1979 paper published in a Scandinavian journal speculated that menotoxin might be influencing menstruating women themselves, perhaps by acting on the central nervous system to affect mood changes. Investigations of the menstrual poison persisted in scientific publications into the 1970s. Nevertheless, their conclusions also supported the idea of the fabled menotoxin. The researchers soaked white lupin ( Lupinus albus) seeds in different body fluids and watched them sprout, and placed daisy-like flowers labeled as cinereans in dilutions of the fluids and saw them wilt. Three years later, two plant physiologists at Johns Hopkins University followed up on Schick’s research, testing the blood, saliva, breast milk, tears, sweat, and even breath of menstruating women. In 1920, he published his results in a Viennese medical journal, calling the substance “menotoxin” (a name he attributed to a certain person by the name of Groër in a footnote)-thus bestowing scientific legitimacy upon centuries of folklore. The results were often contradictory-menstruation sometimes had a neutral or beneficial effect on the flowers-but Schick concluded that menstruating women did indeed exude some sort of plant-killing poison. He also sampled his maid’s armpit sweat, blood, and serum when she was menstruating and tested the effects of these bodily fluids on plants. He introduced variables such as the length of time that she and control women handled the flowers and the use of rubber gloves. Over the next few months, Schick’s experiments with his maid continued. The control flowers stayed fresh for days. After the women had taken a short walk with the flowers, Schick noted that the menstruating maid’s flowers were already withering, and continued to deteriorate over the next several hours. When his maid’s next period started, Schick’s gardener handed her and a control (a nonmenstruating woman) freshly cut anemones ( Anemonastrum sp.), white chrysanthemums ( Chrysanthemum sp.), and yellow sunflowers ( Helianthus sp.). So when he heard from his maid that her menstrual cycle had somehow killed his roses, King imagines him quipping, “We’re not just going to go by folklore. His eponymous “ Schick test,” which he developed in 1913 after moving from Hungary to Vienna, detected preexisting immunity to diphtheria, helping determine who needed a diphtheria vaccine throughout the early 1900s. Schick couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but he was a man of science. If you’re making jam, it won’t set.” She adds that such rumors got “repeated into the 20th century.” The maid told Schick that the flowers had died because she’d touched them, and that this always seemed to happen when she was on her period.įor more than a millennium, perhaps stemming all the way back to Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder’s writings in the first century AD, there have been myths about the insidious effects that menstruating women have on their environments, says Open University historian Helen King, naming a few: “If you’re curing meat, it won’t cure properly. The next morning, he was surprised to see that the roses-which had been ready to burst into bloom the day before-were now dead, their withered petals spilling onto the table. One summer afternoon in 1919, Hungarian-born pediatrician Béla Schick handed his maid a bouquet of red roses to put in water. ABOVE: A photo from a 1923 study showing the effect of blood serum drawn from the arm of a menstruating woman (left) and that of a nonmenstruating control (right) on flowers labeled as cinerea (taxonomy unknown).ĭ.I.
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