Flora Unveiled

The Two-Sex Model j 325

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Rostock, Germany, published Horticultura, in which he stated that flowers form as the

result of a “menstrual discharge”:

The florescence (flos)^7 of plants corresponds to the menstrual discharge of a woman

(menstruum muliebre), for which reason these discharges are also called “florescences”

(flores or [in German] die Blumen). As soon as a tree sends forth its florescences, there

is hope that it will also give fruit. Nor does a plant [ever] bear fruit before it bears

florescences. One that never flowers never bears fruit; this is exactly the same as with

women who, once the menstrual discharge has begun to break forth, are then fit for

reproduction. When the flow ceases due to [old] age, they become unfit to give birth.^8

In Laurenberg’s definition of the flower, the medieval euphemism for menstruation as

“the flowers” came full circle. A  seventeenth- century Italian medical text illustrates the

pregnant womb in the form of an open flower, indicating that the flower/ womb analogy

could be applied in both directions (Figure 12.1).

Like Laurenberg, Malpighi viewed menstruation as the removal of impurities from the

woman’s blood, a necessary step before conception could take place. This interpretation

of menstruation was at odds with the view taken by the Greeks. Both Hippocrates and

Aristotle had defined menstruation as the elimination of excess fluid (humors), which

women tended to accumulate because of their lack of heat and the “sponge- like” nature of

their bodies.^9 Good health, according to Aristotelian and Galenic theories, depended on

a proper balance of humors, but, importantly, there was nothing intrinsically unclean or

impure about the humors themselves. Far from viewing menstrual blood as a waste mate-

rial, Aristotle regarded it as the physical substance out of which the embryo was fashioned.

Male semen provided the organizing principle that caused the embryo to coalesce from the

menstrual blood, similar to the way rennet curdles milk in the making of cheese.

The Bible, on the other hand, treats menstrual blood as if were a contagion:

And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart

seven days:  and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even. And every

thing that she lieth upon in her separation shall be unclean: every thing also that she

sitteth upon shall be unclean. And whosoever toucheth her bed shall wash his clothes,

and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.^10

Medieval scholars adopted the biblical view of menstruation, which was associated

with God’s curse directed at Eve, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception.”

Malpighi’s understanding of menstruation as a means of removing impurities from the

blood was thus more closely allied to biblical/ medieval attitudes than to Greek humoral

theories.

Malpighi’s ideas about the flow of sap in plants were informed by his earlier studies on

the circulatory and lymphatic systems of animals. Malpighi had provided the first visual

evidence for the system of capillaries between the arteries and veins, the missing piece of the

puzzle in Harvey’s new theory of the circulation of the blood. In his discussion of the func-

tions of flower parts in Anatome Plantarum, Malpighi combined the Aristotelian model