The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher eBook

The natural end of man and woman’s being is to propagate.  Now, in the act of conception one must be an active agent and the other passive, for if both were similarly constituted, they could not propagate.  Man, therefore, is hot and dry, whilst woman is cold and moist:  he is the agent, and she the passive or weaker vessel, that she may be subject to the office of the man.  It is necessary that woman should be of a cold constitution, because a redundancy of Nature for the infant that depends on her is required of her; for otherwise there would be no surplus of nourishment for the child, but no more than the mother requires, and the infant would weaken the mother, and like as in the viper, the birth of the infant would be the death of the parent.

The monthly purgations continue from the fifteenth to the forty-sixth or fiftieth year; but a suppression often occurs, which is either natural or morbid:  the courses are suppressed naturally during pregnancy, and whilst the woman is suckling.  The morbid suppression remains to be spoken of.

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CHAPTER II

     Of the Retention of the Courses.

The suppression of the menstrual periods, is an interruption of that accustomed evacuation of blood, which comes from the matrix every month, and the part affected is the womb.

CAUSE.

The cause of this suppression is either external or internal.  The external cause may be heat or dryness of air, want of sleep, too much work, violent exercise, etc., whereby the substance is so consumed, and the body so exhausted that nothing is left over to be got rid of, as is recorded of the Amazons who, being active and constantly in motion, had their courses very little, if at all.  Or it may be brought about by cold which is very frequent, as it vitiates and thickens the blood, and binds up the passages, so that it cannot flow out.

The internal cause is either instrumental or material; in the womb or in the blood.  In the womb, it may be in various ways; by humours, and abscesses and ulcers, by the narrowness of the veins and passages, or by the adipose membrane in fat bodies, pressing on the neck of the matrix, but then they must have hernia, zirthilis, for in men the membrane does not reach so low; by too much cold or heat, the one vitiating the action, and the other consuming the matter through the wrong formation of the uterine parts; by the neck of the womb being turned aside, and sometimes, though rarely, by a membrane or excrescence of the flesh growing at the mouth or neck of the womb.  The blood may be in fault in two ways, in quantity and in quality; in quantity, when it is so consumed that no surplus is left over, as in viragoes or virile women, who, through their heat and natural strength, consume it all in their last nourishment; as Hippocrates writes