ABSTRACT
For Nicholas Culpeper (14) there was clearly a direct connexion between the state of the womb and the degree of a woman’s sexual desire. Lasciviousness, it appears, is less subject to her will than to physiological predetermination. Woman was consequently presented by medical treatises as at the mercy of her womb. Its voraciousness and insatiability can lead to nymphomania (14, 15); satisfaction of its desire to breed is a biological necessity; denial can lead to dementia and depression. The common remedy for this complaint in young women was that prescribed by Robert Burton: marriage, ‘to give them content in their desires’ (17). This conviction that woman is a sexual being drew support from ideas about generation. If conception required discharge of female as well as of male seed, then sexual excitement and orgasm is as necessary for its release in the woman as in the man; simultaneous orgasm yields the greatest chance of conception: both should ‘spend at a time’ (14; see Laqueur (1986), pp. 1-16, and Laqueur (1990), index s.v. Orgasm, for full accounts of the relation between orgasm and conception in the Galenic tradition). The clitoris, first described in the medical literature of Western Europe in 1559 (Laqueur (1990), pp. 64-6, but see also p. 98), was consequently assigned an important, indeed, essential, role in generation since without sexual excitement there could be no conception (Eccles (1982), pp. 29, 34; see ibid., pp. 26-42, for a full account of ideas on generation, sexuality and the female productive system). No heed is paid in medical texts to the contrary evidence of women’s own experience, even when (as they occasionally were) written by a woman.
