Silent travellers: germs, genes, and the “immigrant menace”

prolonged discharge from the womb; so singing is not a "remedy", nor is the condition furor uterinus. In an extended discussion of the images of Ashmole 399, Dixon argues that they form a single "saga of uterine woes" (p. 31) of eight pictures, in which a woman suffering from uterine suffocation eventually dies. She interprets the autopsy in the sixth picture as evidence that death was seen as due to the womb becoming detached from the vagina. There are many serious problems with this interpretation. Since the pictures occur on a loose bifolium which was a later addition to the manuscript, there may be no connection between them and the different gynaecological tracts included in the collection. Even from the black-and-white illustrations given by Dixon (pp. 27-30), it can be seen that she is conflating two separate sequences; only in the first four does a blank scroll unfurl from the hand of the physician, and the dress of the physician changes from the first four to the second four. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the womb was thought capable of detachment from the vagina. Dixon (p. 37, n. 83) claims to have found "detachment of vagina and womb" in Wellcome MS. 49, folio 38, but this famous "disease woman" only has her womb shown as a separate organ on her left side-and her intestines on her right-in order to label more clearly the parts of each organ. Indeed, Dixon herself later describes, in ancient and medieval sources, "the belief that the vulva, vagina, and uterus of women were not separate anatomical components but a single, self-contained organ" (p. 117). This book will no doubt find a large audience, helped by the presence of over 100 plates and illustrations; however, the care which is given to meticulous dissection of the visual material is in no way associated with a similar sensitivity to medical materials, and the central historical argument linking the two therefore remains perilously open to challenge.