There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.
I’m going to tell you a little story about a menstruating nurse.
Dr. Bela Schick, a doctor in the 1920s, was a very popular doctor and received flowers from his patients all the time. One day he received one of his usual bouquets from a patient. The way the story goes, he asked one of his nurses to put the bouquet in some water. The nurse politely declined. Dr. Schick asked the nurse again, and again she refused to handle the flowers. When Dr. Schick questioned his nurse why she would not put the flowers in water, she explained that she had her period. When he asked why that mattered, she confessed that when she menstruated, she made flowers wilt at her touch.
Dr. Schick decided to run a test. Gently place flowers in water on the one hand… and have a menstruating woman roughly handle another bunch in order to really get her dirty hands on them.
The flowers that were not handled thrived, while the flowers that were handled by a menstruating woman wilted.
This was the beginning of the study of the menstrual toxin, or menotoxin, a substance secreted in the sweat of menstruating women.
photo { Andres Marroquin Winkelmann }
