Free Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank Page A

there. But never once does Galen mention anything like the structure many people believe constitutes the physical presence of a woman's virginity.
    In the Beginning Was the Word
    The other major reason ancient physicians wouldn't have found hymens in women's bodies even had they looked for them is that, for them, at that time, the word "hymen" meant something altogether different than it does today. In the literature of early Greek medicine, the word "hymen" comes up constantly. Aristotle, particularly, is full of them. There is a hymen of the brain, a hymen of the heart, a hymen of the intestines. You can hardly go three pages without a hymen popping up somewhere, because to Aristotle and the rest of the Greek world of his time, the hymen was nothing more or less than a membrane. Any membrane. The thick membrane around the brain that we call the dura was one such hymen. The mesentery, which anchors all of our intestines in place inside the abdominal cavity, was another. So too with the sac around the heart we call the pericardium, the muscular wall between the chest and abdomen that we call the diaphragm, the sac around the lungs that we call the pleura, and virtually every other structure that divides or separates one anatomical feature from another.
    Hymens, hymens everywhere, but not the kind you'd think. How, then, did this catch-all term for "membrane" come to mean something so specific? Not every twist and turn of the tale is known—many texts of this period have been lost to us—but virginity researchers including medieval history scholar Kathleen Coyne Kelly and historian of ancient Greece Giulia Sissa have been able to trace the outlines of the transformation.
    After Aristotle and the writers of the school of the so-called father of medicine, Hippocrates of Cos, the next major Western writers on medicine are two Greeks, the second-century Galen and the third-century Soranus of Ephesus. Galen uses the term "hymen" to mean "membrane," just as his predecessors did. Soranus does so, too, but interestingly enough, he defines the vagina itself as a hymen, saying that in his eyes it resembles an intestine with an ample interior. The vaginal canal, to him, was a membrane that formed part of the larger structure of the uterus, or matrix, which to Soranus and everyone else of his era was the female genital par excellence. The rest of the female genital anatomy, in texts of this period, is rarely discussed in terms of specific parts. Only the uterus, with its miraculous capacity to turn sperm and blood into babies, was considered truly relevant.
    After Soranus, there are a few examples of the Latin word himen (again meaning "membrane") in reference to matters gynecological. Often it is used, as in the tenth-century De viribus herbarum, to refer to the amniotic sac, the membrane that encloses the fetus while it grows in the womb. Occasionally himen is used in ways that seem to allude to a "virginal membrane," but not in ways that identify any particular part of the body. In the medieval era the himen of virginity, when the term is even used that way, seems to be more metaphorical—a symbolic boundary between virgin and nonvirgin—than it is something that anyone could point to in a dissection, or a patient's body. For centuries, though physicians clearly understood that there had to be some reason that women often bled when their vaginas were sexually penetrated for the first time, they saw no reason that such bleeding necessarily had to be associated with any specific bit of the genital anatomy.
    Kathleen Coyne Kelly has found that usage of the word "hymen" to refer to the same thing we mean when we use the term today did not occur until the fifteenth century, when physician Michael Savonarola used the word in his Practica maior. "The cervix is covered by a subtle membrane called the hymen," Savonarola wrote, "which is broken at the time of deflowering, so that the blood flows." Savonarola's vague placement of the hymen