Wait… They Thought Our Uteruses Could Just Wander Off?

Every generation thinks it’s finally figured women out. Every generation is humbled.

I know it’s not a uterus, but I did it. I finally found a vulva to compete with all these dicks. Cambrils, Spain | Image © Paradis Media llc

Every so often, I stumble across a historical “fact” that makes me stop whatever I’m doing and mutter, “Wait… I’m sorry, come again?”

This week’s winner?

For centuries, many respected physicians genuinely believed the uterus could wander around the body.

No, not metaphorically. Physically.

As in, she could get bored, decide she’d had enough of the pelvis, head north, and start freeloading somewhere near the lungs.

The Wandering Womb

We’re not talking about fringe medicine either.

We’re talking about a very real, very peculiar history that seems to have originated in the fertile plains along the Nile in Ancient Egypt. The earliest known references appear in the Kahun Gynecological Papyrus (around 1800 BCE). Egyptian physicians believed the uterus could shift around and cause symptoms all throughout the body.

Treatments often involved placing pleasant-smelling fragrances near the vagina and unpleasant odors near the nose — or vice versa — depending on where they thought the uterus had gone.

Already, we’re off to a strong start, right?

“Just stick a sprig of jasmine in her crotch and have her sniff a rotting fish. Problem solved,” the almighty they say in my imaginings.

Then the Greeks got involved, because… why not? Hippocrates, and later Plato, expanded on this idea.

Plato’s version is delightfully bizarre.

In his dialogue Timaeus, he describes the uterus in colorful terms:

… and the same is the case with the so-called womb or matrix of women; the animal within them is desirous of procreating children, and when remaining unfruitful long beyond its proper time, gets discontented and angry, and wandering in every direction through the body, closes up the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives them to extremity, causing all varieties of disease…

The idea was that if a woman went too long without becoming pregnant, the uterus became a rebellious roamer, making its way around the body, and causing all manner of physical and emotional distress.

Not only could it travel… it apparently got quite moody.

Hippocratic medicine moved away from describing the uterus as literally sentient, but it still embraced the idea that it could move within the body and that many illnesses in women originated there.

The recommended treatments?

Exactly what you’d hope. We’re back to those sweet smells down south to lure it downward. Foul odors near the nose to drive it away. Or standard fare: marriage, pregnancy, and regular sex. The female reproductive organs mustn’t get bored! Keep that uterus occupied, or it’ll make mischief!

Then came Galen. In the second century CE, he actually rejected some of the more extreme wandering-uterus ideas. He argued that the uterus was anatomically anchored by ligaments and couldn’t literally roam around the body.

Progress, ladies!

Except… he still believed that many female illnesses stemmed from retained menstrual blood or “female seed,” a medical framework that was still deeply tied to reproductive biology.

Fast-forward a thousand years and you’ll find that it was these ideas that evolved into what became known as *hysteria, which comes from the Greek word hystera*, or uterus.

Even though physicians had mostly dropped their beliefs of the uterus physically wandering around the abdomen, “hysteria” became a catch-all diagnosis for symptoms ranging from anxiety and depression to fainting, insomnia, irritability, paralysis, seizures, and every other unexplained ache and pain.

Which is almost more remarkable. That uterus stopped traveling, but her reputation preceded her.

What’s funnier? The diagnosis or the complete confidence with which it was delivered?

This wasn’t completely out of left field. It actually fit with how they understood the body.

Greek medicine revolved around balance — humors, vapors, fluids moving through the body. Organs weren’t viewed as fixed anatomy, so it sort of makes sense.

One tiny organ managed to lend its name to centuries of women’s emotional lives.

Having a rough day? Probably your uterus.

Feeling overwhelmed? Classic uterus.

Existing while female? Suspiciously uterine.

It’s easy to laugh — and honestly, we should. History deserves to be laughed at sometimes. Humans have believed some astonishingly ridiculous things with breathtaking confidence.

Meanwhile, Back in 2026…

But here’s where it gets a little uncomfortable. It’s easy to laugh at dead doctors. It’s considerably harder to admit that women’s health research still has some embarrassingly massive blind spots.

Ancient physicians thought the uterus was difficult to pin down, but modern researchers know that the real slippery bitch is perimenopause.

Which at 46, I’m most confidently in — and it sucks — big time.

The truth is we know that perimenopause exists, but it simply refuses to behave consistently from one woman to the next. Beginning years before, maybe even a decade before the final menstrual period, hormones fluctuate dramatically rather than decline in a neat line.

And corresponding symptoms? These suckers can appear, disappear, morph, or arrive in combinations that seem designed to keep everyone guessing — doctors, patients, and partners, too.

One woman gets a handful of hot flashes. Another wins a very unlucky lottery (It’s me!) and gets insomnia, heart palpitations, itchy skin, dry eyes, joint pain, frozen shoulder, neuropathy, brain fog, night sweats and some very weird cyclical—and I swear I'm not making this up — “fuzzy tongue” thingy.

I’ve watched myself go from my usual 50/50 split between anxious and “halfway decent,” to more of a 95/5, with added derealization. Yes, I just suddenly feel like I’m not attached to my body anymore at all. It’s really… not fun!

My once dependable three-day cyclical migraines? They’ve decided to finally quit! Yay… I think?

But two different gynecologists, thanks to my cycles not budging off their clockwork 28-days, have said, “No, not perimenopause.” While I walked out mumbling, “Probably perimenopause.”

Researchers now openly acknowledge that symptom prevalence, duration, and severity vary enormously, making this one of the most heterogeneous transitions in medicine that we know of.

That variability isn’t just frustrating for women; it’s frustrating for science.

The Estrogen Empire

Perimenopause is remarkably difficult to study because hormone levels don’t simply drift downward — they oscillate wildly. Estradiol can spike to reproductive-age levels one week and plummet the next. Ovulation isn’t sure what it wants to do. Menstrual cycles lengthen, shorten, come with scary ferocity, disappear, then inexplicably return.

Unlike menopause, which is defined retrospectively after twelve consecutive months without a period, perimenopause has no single blood test that can confirm it. Diagnosis still relies heavily on age, symptoms, and menstrual history, which means we’re all sort of trying to piece together a moving puzzle while the picture keeps shifting.

And yeah, there’s an awkward historical footnote that helps explain why so many questions remain unanswered. For decades, women of reproductive age were routinely excluded from clinical research because fluctuating hormones were considered a confounding variable that made studies more expensive and complicated.

From a research design perspective, it was easier to study men.

You know what’s a surprisingly ineffective way to study women’s health? Studying mostly men.

I mean, in doing so, an unintended consequence, though one that might have been apparent with foresight, was that medicine developed an enormous evidence base around bodies with relatively stable hormonal patterns.

Researchers are now working to close that data gap, but they’re also candid about how much remains unknown, particularly when it comes to why some women experience only mild symptoms while others hit that unlucky jackpot.

What once looked like an unruly collection of unrelated complaints has often been written off as what menopause physician Dr. Mary Claire Haver calls the “Whiny Woman.” You know the one. She’s “just stressed.” “Just anxious.” “Just getting older.”

Meanwhile, estrogen is withdrawing from receptors scattered throughout her brain, bones, blood vessels, skin, muscles, bladder, and just about every other organ system that had grown rather fond of having it around.

Which is oddly comforting. Ancient physicians weren’t entirely wrong that something important was happening throughout the body. They just blamed the wrong traveler. This wasn’t a case of a womb on a walkabout, but estrogen stealthily running amok in every nook and cranny.

But I will admit one thing.

The next time I misplace my readers or get a measly two hours of sleep, I might be tempted to walk to the florist, buy myself a bouquet of roses, sit with a few between my legs and, well, something stinky near my schnoz, and pray to the pharaohs and the goddesses that my uterus makes her way back to a happy, symptom-free home.

Just in case.

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