| Popis: |
This chapter evolves from McLaren’s, Riddle’s and van de Walle’s views on whether women employed herbal and other preparations as abortifacients or emmenagogues. Greece’s tardiness in abandoning empirical and popular medicine meant that women had access to and knowledge of emmenagogues until the end of the studied period. The knowledge and use of emmenagogic preparations, for the wellbeing of women, to avoid or cure sterility and, in many cases, to enhance fertility, was widespread in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Similar knowledge regarding the use of herbal infusions as abortifacients was also available in the same period and, while these do not seem to have been in use as such in the nineteenth century, they were after the 1920s. Physicians were accommodating and supportive of the need to use emmenagogues and they emphasised their expertise and modernity by prescribing pharmaceutical preparations and, later on, hormonal ones for this purpose. |
