ABSTRACT
In the Hippocratic On the disease of virgins, it was on account of ‘food and the growth of the body’ that an excess of blood was present in young girls at puberty. This phrase was open to a range of interpretations in medical writers which were explored from Lange onwards, and which allowed the disease of virgins to retain the digestive symptoms that had been part of green sickness before it became a condition specific to young girls around the time of the first menstrual period.
