10 Bizarre Things We Used To Believe

Women have really been given the short end of the stick when it comes to crazy things we used to believe. There was even a common belief that women who read too much would become infertile.

It's kind of true - any woman who has read up on the finer details of childbirth is less likely to ever want to experience that kind of horror personally.

One of the strangest beliefs held was that hysteria – a handy catch-all term for mental illness and general obstreperousness in women – was caused by a woman's womb wandering throughout the body, so named for the Latin word hystericus, meaning 'of the womb'.

The scary thing is this belief goes back as far as 1900 BC and was only really discredited in the early 20th century.

The ancient Egyptians would combat this wandering womb by putting foul-smelling odours close to the woman's nose and nice-smelling things near the... lower openings. This practice was to entice the womb to sit at a lower position of a woman's body.

The decline in the female hysteria theory is due primarily to a better ability to appropriately diagnose legit disorders such as schizophrenia or epilepsy. It's also down to the decline in mental illness diagnoses for such conditions as 'being poor' or 'not agreeing with you'.