All These Hysterical Women

On abortion rights, wandering wombs, and hysteria

Leonardo DaVinci’s drawing of the uterus depicts it with the fallopian tubes circling out like demonic horns. The devil lies inside a woman, early medical writings argued. In his medical textbook On Monsters and Marvels, Ambroise Paré, the chief surgeon to both Charles IX and Henri III, argued that a woman’s womb was the site of unholy unions between na…