Before the rise of modern Western gynecology in the 1800s, vaginal steaming was one of the main methods of treatment for female reproductive health.

People often assume that vaginal steaming is no longer used because it was replaced with modern innovations that superseded this natural method, but the history of genecology shows that is not exactly the case.

One of the earliest books written about female reproductive health, The Trotula, was published in 12th century Italy. Vaginal steaming was widely referenced throughout this early medical text as a treatment to address birth injuries, infections, infertility and uterine dysfunction. The Trotula was highly esteemed throughout Europe was the top most medical authority on female health.

A couple hundred years later in the 1400s, European countries all passed laws making the practice of medicine without a license illegal. As a result, female health practitioners were often not permitted to attend university and receive a medical degree, were forcibly removed from practice sometimes imprisoned or sentenced to death for attending to women patients.

It was at this time that male physicians began treating female patients though they had limited training, knowledge or experience on women’s health issues. Rather than consult the female practitioners who were pushed out of the field, they started a male-dominant form of gynecology developing their own methods founded in surgical experimentation.

The modern western gynecology currently taught in medical schools was largely informed by the work of J.Marion Sims. Sims was a slave owner in the 1800s who experimented with surgical procedure performed on his enslaved women without the use of anesthesia. Because Sims had access to an expendable population of women that had no legal rights of protection, Sims learned how to perform uterine surgery resolving fistulas (a common birth injury at the time) and became recognized as the leading expert in the field.

J.Marion Sims, known popularly as the grandfather of gynecology, and his predecessors likely had no knowledge of vaginal steaming, but ironically, vaginal steam is a non-invasive natural method for fistulas. Eventually Sims moved to New York and founded the first modern Western gynecology medical school to train other physicians how to perform his surgical techniques. Poor Irish women were convinced to become patients with the promise of anesthesia to prevent them from feeling pain. Shortly thereafter, women from the general population started to become paying patients.

Since then, gynecology has continued to develop as a field of medicine and has kept its focus primarily on surgery as the main method of treatment or cure for conditions. Cesareans and hysterectomies, also developed using experimentation on enslaved Black women, are now the most frequently performed surgeries in the world.

Other than surgery, the main areas of development since the Sims-Era of gynecology has been pharmaceuticals such as birth control, artificial hormones. Now medical inserts such as the intrauterine device (IUD), vaginal mesh, coil inserts (Essure) are also becoming a new trend for innovations.

Without a dispensable testing population of women, many new gynecological methods are released without full testing on the short and long term consequences. This basically makes the general population a part of the ‘experiment’. Birth control pills, for example, have been widely and overly prescribed to women of all ages without full knowledge of the long-term health effects. Unfortunately, this has resulted in harm to hundreds of thousands of women as certain birth controls are found to cause liver damage, hormonal replacement therapy has been found to cause a 75% higher risk of cancer, and Essure coil inserts (a surgical method of birth control) can cause irreversible organ damage.

The primary focus of modern western gynecology is surgical intervention as the main method of treatment, though it is admittedly not the most effective or suitable treatment option for women.

While vaginal steaming is not standard practice in modern Western gynecology, this does not mean that it is of no value to modern medical practice.

Now more than ever, the field of gynecology needs to revisit earlier non-invasive and holistic methods of treatment to restore their commitment to women’s health and wellness.