When you think of a "uterine exorcism," which you most likely have never thought about before, you might come to the conclusion that it's a euphemism for abortion. It's not. The euphemism for that was “menstrual regulators,” meaning concoctions that caused an abortion. No, uterine exorcism was exactly what it sounds like.
In the days before modern medicine, anything that ailed a woman could be blamed on her uterus. It was a mysterious organ that couldn't be explained, and many learned men thought it could wander about the body and dehydrate a woman through her liver or suffocate her by invading her lungs. One treatment for a wandering uterus was to lure the organ back to the pelvis by putting honey on a woman's pelvis, while making the woman smell something awful in order to scare the uterus into returning to its proper place. If that didn't work, the last resort was to call in the priests to perform an exorcism. A 10th-century addition to a 9th-century medical manual contains an invocation for such a ritual. Read about wandering wombs and uterine exorcism at Dirty Sexy History. -via Strange Company
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