Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood by Bill Hayes

southeastern Bolivia and British Guiana (now called Guyana) shrouded pubescent girls in pods hung from the rafters of darkened huts. Here they remained for months, “suspended between heaven and earth,” Frazer lyrically observed.
    It all seems too awful to be entirely true. And indeed, one must question whether Frazer was embroidering or maybe just misinformed. After all, the occasional curious little girl surely disproved tribal beliefs by harmlessly peeking at the sky, say, or at a kid brother. Sure enough, as historian George W. Stocking Jr. suggests in his introduction to the current edition of
The Golden Bough,
a degree of skepticism is merited. Frazer, a man whose aspirations were more literary than scientific, was an armchair anthropologist who received his field reports secondhand, if not third or fourth. Knowing this helps explain why, despite Frazer’s liberal use of labels such as “savages” and “barbarians,” his accounts have such an engaging fable-like quality; even the book’s title sounds drawn from the Brothers Grimm. The stories of caged and suspended girls call to mind tales such as that of Rapunzel, kept for years in an impenetrable tower beginning at the pubescent age of twelve.
    In contrast to Frazer’s method of observing life at a remove, the French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) rolled up his sleeves, conducting studies of menstruation that were nearly as invasive as gynecological exams. Michelet, renowned to this day for his panoramic
Histoire de France,
kept a private diary (published posthumously) in which he recorded in graphic detail the menstrual cycles of his wife, Athenais, who was thirty years younger than him. Entries included subtle observations of her daily flow—color, volume, density, odor—as well as an analysis of his own feelings, not hers, about her bleeding. Despite this particular fascination, his view of women in general was no more enlightened than was typical for his time. He reiterated in his essay
“L’Amour”
(1859) the belief that menstruation was a mark of women’s natural
“débilité mentale et physique,”
which sounds no less insulting in French.
    His opinion was an echo of Aristotle, who, writing more than two millennia earlier, declared menstruation as proof of women’s inferiority. Aristotle also saw in bleeding an almost supernatural component. A menstruating woman’s reflection could stain any mirror with a bloody cloud, he stated in
De Insomniis.
Such superstitions can be found, tenfold, in the writings of the first-century Roman author Pliny the Elder. In his
Natural History,
a thirty-seven-volume encyclopedia that remained a credible scientific resource up through the Middle Ages, Pliny warned that the touch of a menstruating woman turned wine sour, made crops wither, dulled razors, rusted iron, killed bees, and caused a horrible smell to fill the air. “The Dead Sea, thick with salt, cannot be drawn asunder except by a thread soaked in the poisonous fluid of the menstruous blood,” Pliny wrote. “A thread from an infected dress is sufficient.” He was also certain that menstrual fluid could make a potent impact on natural events. If held up to flashes of lightning, for instance, it could halt a hailstorm or a whirlwind. But not a volcano, sad to say. Pliny died at Pompeii in A.D. 79 while studying the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius.
    It’s easier for me to understand viewing the Earth as the flat center of the universe than to fathom how such mistaken ideas of menstruating women endured. I have to wonder if Pliny, who lived well into his fifties, ever spent extensive time at home with a wife and daughters. Did the women in his life concur with his notions? More recent accounts, some written from an instantly more credible perspective—female—place menstruation in a broader social context. Among the customs of the Pacific Northwest’s Spokane Indians, the original inhabitants of the region where I was raised, a girl at puberty