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).
D.I. MACHT ET AL., J PHARMACOL EXP THER, 1923
One summer afternoon in 1919, Hungarian-born pediatrician Béla Schick handed his maid a bouquet of red roses to put in water. 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. 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.
For 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 ...
