A WOMAN’S BODY

Anatomy of the Uterus


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In Plato’s Timaeus, the philosopher wrote about the formation of the universe and the physical world, including the human body.

A sculpture depicting the face of an elderly man with cropped hair and a beard covering the entire neck.

Bust of Plato. Greek, 4th century BCE. Marble. Capitoline Museum. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Musei Capitolini, Rome / Alfredo dagli Orti / Art Resource, NY.

The dialogue tells of differences between the sexes and characterizes the uterus as a wild animal, “a living thing within her with a desire for childbearing.” Plato describes the male genitals as an animal, too, but men’s anatomy is a different beast: self-willed, not governed by reason, and seeking to overpower everything else.

A light reddish-brown object shaped like a phallus.

Anatomical votive of male genitalia. Roman. Terra-cotta. Wellcome Collection: A635600. Photo: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0.

Since the uterus needs to bear children, it will become frustrated if unfulfilled and begin to wander about the body wreaking havoc. The Timaeus is a philosophical text, not a medical treatise, but the notion of a wandering womb is a recurring one throughout ancient Greek writing about the female body. In Diseases of Young Girls, a resolutely medical text from the Hippocratic Corpus that is frequently considered the earliest gynecological treatise, the author describes how pregnancy and childbirth contribute to female health by preventing the womb from wandering. According to this Hippocratic view, the uterus is not fixed in place within the body, and when not weighed down by a fetus or when the humoral balance becomes overly dry, the womb will migrate.

A light reddish-brown object shaped like a figure eight. Wavy lines are carved across the bottom portion.

Anatomical votive of a uterus. Roman. Terra-cotta. Wellcome Collection: A636078. Photo: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0.

The unmoored, traveling uterus can put pressure on other internal organs and, in extreme cases, even move to the throat and cause death by suffocation. This idea—advanced by male authors and present in philosophical and medical thinking—reinforces the notion that the female body needs to be controlled by men and provides an anatomical justification for social norms about a woman’s expected role as a wife and mother.

Let us momentarily extend a charitable interpretation—after all, the Timaeus also fancifully claims that the human body was created to prevent our heads from “rolling around on the ground” and to allow it to get over tall things. None of these thinkers knew that the uterus is actually attached since they did not perform systematic dissections; it was the Hellenistic anatomist Herophilus who corrected this view after conducting research on the female genital tract. His findings were adopted by later Roman medical authors. Soranus of Ephesus combined his Methodist approach with a Hippocratic view that also incorporated Herophilus’s discoveries. His book, Gynecology, includes a description of “thin membranes” that hold the uterus to the bladder. Soranus rejected the Platonic and the Hippocratic view of the womb:

“The uterus is not an animal (as it appeared to some people).”

A page illustrated with a circular shape in red. Lines of handwritten text fill the rest of the page.

Illustration of the uterus. From a 9th century CE manuscript of Soranus of Ephesus (98–138 CE), Gynecology, fol. 28r. Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique: MS 3701–15.

Yet he nonetheless maintained that the uterus could cause hysterical suffocation in women who had experienced “recurrent miscarriages, premature birth, long widowhood, retention of menses and the end of ordinary childbearing or inflation of the uterus.” While Soranus disputes the notion of a wandering womb, he presents a different reason for uterine suffocation, namely, that the membranes holding the womb in place contract and pull the organ upward. Writing a generation after Soranus, Galen also called the accuracy of a wandering womb into doubt, yet he, too acknowledges that the uterus is not completely immobile:

“The womb certainly does not move from one place to another like a wandering animal, but is pulled by tension.”

While disputing the notion of a fully mobile womb, Galen nonetheless advanced a theory for uterine suffocation: retention of menses caused by trapped semen and blood.