In 1878 a member of the British Medical Association wrote to the British Medical Journal, asking whether it was true that if a woman cured hams while menstruating the hams would be spoiled.  He had known this to happen twice.  Another medical man wrote that if so, what would happen to the patients of menstruating lady doctors?  A third wrote (in the Journal for April 27, 1878):  “I thought the fact was so generally known to every housewife and cook that meat would spoil if salted at the menstrual period, that I am surprised to see so many letters on the subject in the Journal.  If I am not mistaken, the question was mooted many years ago in the periodicals.  It is undoubtedly the fact that meat will be tainted if cured by women at the catamenial period.  Whatever the rationale may be, I can speak positively as to the fact.”

It is probably the influence of these primitive ideas which has caused surgeons and gynaecologists to dread operations during the catamenial period.  Such, at all events, is the opinion of a distinguished authority, Dr. William Goodell, who wrote in 1891[372]:  “I have learned to unlearn the teaching that women must not be subjected to a surgical operation during the monthly flux.  Our forefathers, from time immemorial, have thought and taught that the presence of a menstruating woman would pollute solemn religious rites, would sour milk, spoil the fermentation in wine-vats, and much other mischief in a general way.  Influenced by hoary tradition, modern physicians very generally postpone all operative treatment until the flow has ceased.  But why this delay, if time is precious, and it enters as an important factor in the case?  I have found menstruation to be the very best time to curette away fungous vegetations of the endometrium, for, being swollen then by the afflux of blood, they are larger than at any other time, and can the more readily be removed.  There is, indeed, no surer way of checking or of stopping a metrorrhagia than by curetting the womb during the very flow.  While I do not select this period for the removal of ovarian cysts, or for other abdominal work, such as the extirpation of the ovaries, or a kidney, or breaking up intestinal adhesions, etc., yet I have not hesitated to perform these operations at such a time, and have never had reason to regret the course.  The only operations that I should dislike to perform during menstruation would be those involving the womb itself.”

It must be added to this that we still have to take into consideration not merely the surviving influence of ancient primitive beliefs, but the possible existence of actual nervous conditions during the menstrual period, producing what may be described as an abnormal nervous tension.  In this way, we are doubtless concerned with a tissue of phenomena, inextricably woven of folk-lore, autosuggestion, false observation, and real mental and nervous abnormality.  Laurent (loc. cit.) has brought forward several cases which