This article examines the place of habit in the medical thought and practices of 18th-century Britain. Scholars, including Steven Shapin and Phil Withington, have shown that habit was important to the broadly humoral understandings of health, disease, and regimen that dominated in Europe for much of the early modern period. In this article, I offer the first sustained attempt to understand the role of habit in the medical thought of 18th-century Britain, focusing on the influential Scottish physician William Cullen. For the first time engaging with all of Cullen’s work on habit, including his correspondence, pathological lectures, and clinical lectures, I show that medics of the 18th century developed a new understanding of habit, linked to changing ideas about the nervous system. Increasingly, they emphasised the role that habit could play in causing the periodical return of bodily functions, even when there appeared to be no plausible physical cause. In so doing, medics engaged with one of the key debates of the 18th century – the contested notion that human nature itself might be contingent on social and environmental conditions. For them, habit provided the means by which society could quite literally change the body. These ideas come through clearly in the striking suggestion – hitherto unnoticed – that menstruation was the product of habit, arising not from nature but from culture. Discussions of menstruation reveal the political stakes of habit, with links to highly contested debates about the role that bodies of different genders might play in society.

The history of intentional menstrual suppression is often assumed to begin in the 1960s, with the advent of effective oral contraception. This article, however, demonstrates that in the Roman Imperial period, despite widespread belief in the importance of menstruation for maintaining female reproductive health, there was already a diverse marketplace for menstrual suppression techniques. By reading sources against the grain and engaging in critical speculation, this study investigates the available methods, who may have sought them and why, and how their use might reinforce or challenge gendered norms and power dynamics. This study focuses primarily on three sets of sources: Galen's medical treatises on bloodletting, the pharmacological compendia of Pliny the Elder and Dioscorides, and body amulets to regulate vaginal blood flow. It proposes that individuals engaged with these technologies not only to normalise excessive periods, but also to delay, minimise or eliminate menstruation for convenience.

Menstruation is part of women’s normal life, which requires basic hygienic practices. Managing hygiene can be affected by several factors and situations such as natural disasters. Focusing on ‘super flooding’ in Pakistan’s Sindh Province, we pay attention to how this ‘natural disaster’ has affected hygienic practices of menstrual cycle of women. The study meticulously examines the dynamics of menstrual hygiene management, encompassing the nuanced encounters with feelings of shame and embarrassment among girls and women situated in flood camps, schools, and community shelters. It also intends to highlight women’s challenge and embarrassment to participate in the distribution process of essential resources such as pads. The insights garnered from this study hold potential relevance for various stakeholders, including policymakers, healthcare practitioners, and researchers, offering a nuanced comprehension of the intersection of menstrual hygiene, climate change, and well-being of women.

This study examines a collection of expressions for the taboo topic of menstruation in Dutch, German, and Mandarin Chinese. A model for the identification of conceptualization patterns in taboo verbalizations is set up, analyzing each expression according to the X-phemistic mechanisms and, if applicable, the metaphorical source domains or metonymic vehicles at its origin. The various conceptualizations of menstruation are approached from a socio-cultural perspective; variation in conceptualization is examined through a correspondence regression analysis with three speaker-related explanatory variables (L1 and associated cultural background, menstrual experience, and age group). The underlying interest is linguo-cultural as the study aims to verify whether dominant menstrual attitudes are reflected in the linguistic conceptualization of menstruation within each socio-cultural group. Such correlations are indeed found, although the youngest age-group shows some unexpected linguistic behavior.

The substantial strain that women are facing during the COVID-19 pandemic can affect their menstrual cycle and further impair their quality of life. In low- and middle-income countries, this strain is exacerbated by: cultural taboos and poor education related to menstruation; ‘period poverty’; unavailability of menstrual hygiene products; and poor hygiene facilities. We suggest actions that governments, healthcare professionals and individuals can take to address these factors and minimise the psychological impact of COVID-19 on women's physical and mental health.

Female bodies as sexual and reproductive are subject to much scrutiny in Western societies and the church. Mysteriously missing from discourses related to such scrutiny is the reality of menstruation and its place in theology and females’ lives. From within a feminist theological perspective, this article aims to recover menstruation and menstrual awareness, and to advocate for the positive possibilities of widespread recognition and acceptance of, and engagement with, these realities to advance female presence in sexual theology and related discourses. In engaging contemporary social discussions, Jewish and Christian histories of menstruation, contemporary sexual theologies, and varied feminist theologies, this article proposes a robust view of menstruation in the sexual lives of faithful females.

Our aim in this study is to describe the characteristics of sexual development in twins and estimate the role of heritability and environmental factors as causes of certain sexual disorders. Two hundred and ten adult same-sex twin pairs (92 monozygotic [MZ] female, 41 MZ male, 55 dizygotic [DZ] female and 22 DZ male pairs) were involved in the study. Data were collected in 1982 by self-administered questionnaires that included items on sexual maturation, sexual life, contraception, mutual sexual activity within twin pairs and alcohol use. The ratio of married to unmarried twins was nearly the same in MZs and DZs, with the exception that the divorce rate was higher in MZ female twins (14%), and DZ and male twins were slightly more likely to be single. Menarche was later in twins compared to non-twin Hungarian women. 57% of MZs experienced menarche within 3 months of each other, 77% within 6 months while it occurred for 30% and 43% respectively in DZs. The first seminal emission indicated some delay in male twins compared with the Hungarian general population sample. MZ first kisses occurred later than DZ's first kisses. The same was true for the first petting, masturbation and first sexual intercourse. Anorgasmy is 27% heritable but the estimate is not statistically significant. Concordance rate for premature ejaculation in MZs was greater than in DZs but the structural equation model showed significant misfit. Age at menarche appeared to be strongly heritable.