An ancient and extinct herbal estrogen

[Lucy Ross]

I was surprised to read about this on the transsexual.org site (home of the COGIATI test):

You might be interested, however, to hear that there actually may once have been a plant that just might have produced strong estrogenic compounds. Found on the coins of  many ancient empires from Greece in it's glory to then end of Rome, as well as documented fairly well, was a mysterious plant that apparently acted as a confident birth control when used as a tea. Fortunes were made of the wild plant, and it was eventually harvested to extinction sometime just before the fall of Rome. No civilization, in the mad rush to acquire the plant, and in the foolish belief of it's inexhaustibility, had ever bothered to cultivate and domesticate it. By the time it was extinct, it was too late. A typical silly human story. Oopsie!

Letters12  Jennifer is referring to Silphium:

Many medical uses were ascribed to the plant.[13] It was said that it could be used to treat cough, sore throat, fever, indigestion, aches and pains, warts, and all kinds of maladies. Hippocrates wrote:[14]

When the gut protrudes and will not remain in its place, scrape the finest and most compact silphium into small pieces and apply as a cataplasm.

It has been speculated that the plant may also have functioned as a contraceptive, based partly on Pliny's statement that it could be used "to promote the menstrual discharge".[4] Many species in the parsley family have estrogenic properties, and some, such as wild carrot,[15] are reputed abortifacients (chemicals that terminate a pregnancy). Given this, it is quite possible that the plant was pharmacologically active in the prevention or termination of pregnancy.

This makes me wonder if ancient people weren't capable of utilizing some manner of herbal HRT, and whether this might have been reflected in ancient myths.

Silphium went extinct in the 2nd/3rd century BCE.

[Pisces228]

I do not think it is ever appropriate to suggest that herbals may be equivalent to hormonal therapy.  At the least, they are a waste of money; at the worst, they are not approved as safe by medical standards and they could interact with other medications/ be harmful on their own.  Posting this is suggesting that even though the plant is extinct is that herbal can be automatically ruled as safe because they grow out of the ground and this is not true.

[Roll]

I do not think it is ever appropriate to suggest that herbals may be equivalent to hormonal therapy.  At the least, they are a waste of money; at the worst, they are not approved as safe by medical standards and they could interact with other medications/ be harmful on their own.  Posting this is suggesting that even though the plant is extinct is that herbal can be automatically ruled as safe because they grow out of the ground and this is not true.

I don't think that she was making that suggestion, just bringing this up from a historical/academic standpoint.

[Lucy Ross]

Roll is exactly right, herbal estrogens do little or nothing, and I'm in no ways advocating wasting money on them, but I'm always curious about what ancient peoples cooked up over the millennia, and they had no qualms about taking things to extremes, too.

[HughE]

Back in 2011, when I first realised that I have signs of having partly developed as female instead of male, in order to verify a suspicion as to what might have caused it, I did a google search in an attempt to find out what would happen to an unborn male baby if his mother were to take an overdose of contraceptive pills while pregnant with him. I drew a complete blank as far as the medical literature is concerned (other than to discover that it's not all that unusual for ERs to encounter such a situation, where it's treated as a minor poisoning incident, and that there's no long term follow up done of the exposed children). However, up popped a page about Silphium, a herb used by the ancient Greeks and Romans as a contraceptive and abortifacient.

Apparently silphium worked well as a contraceptive, and had similar effectiveness to modern birth control pills. It could also be used to induce miscarriages in already pregnant women. We don't know what gave it its unique properties because it was overharvested to the point where it went extinct partway through the first century AD (sometime during the reign of the emperor Nero, 54 - 68 AD), so all we have left of it now are drawings of the plant, and of its heart-shaped seeds (which are apparently the origin for the symbol we use for love). However, it's though to have contained high levels of phytoestrogens.

No medicine is 100 percent effective, so it's likely that some Greek and Roman babies would have survived an attempt by their mothers to do away with them. Perhaps that's the origin of the hermaphrodite of mythology: a being whose soul is made up of the fusion of a male and a female spirit, inhabiting a body with the genitals of a man, but the arms, legs and breasts of a woman. My breasts never grew very large, but otherwise that's a fairly apt description of who I am.

Apparently, hermaphrodites and other nonbinary representations of people feature quite prominently in ancient Greek and Roman art, but museum curators tend to keep them hidden away.

http://www.artlyst.com/features/transgender-artist-ela-xora-hospitalised-hunger-strike-piers-morgan-comment/

[Gertrude]

Ancient people's had a lot of remedies, none of it scientific by today's standards and we don't always know the negative side with them. Some people think that if if grows in the ground it's okey dokey. I'll put it another way, there's no short way around the barn and with hormones such as estrogen, we have a good idea what works and what doesn't.


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[Roll]

Ancient people's had a lot of remedies, none of it scientific by today's standards and we don't always know the negative side with them. Some people think that if if grows in the ground it's okey dokey. I'll put it another way, there's no short way around the barn and with hormones such as estrogen, we have a good idea what works and what doesn't.

Also, they may have straight up just not lived long enough to see certain effects, life was harsh. (Ie: Miracle cures that are really poisoning the body with cancer that would kill you at 50, but they died in battle at 25 anyway.)