Did Ancient Greek Women Use Tampons? Testing the Hippocratic Tampon Claim

Search the history of the tampon and you will meet the same opening line again and again. Women in ancient Greece, it says, made tampons by wrapping lint around a small piece of wood, and the father of medicine himself, Hippocrates, described the practice in the fifth century BCE. Often the story continues backward to Egypt, where women are said to have used softened papyrus. It is a tidy origin story: a modern product with a classical pedigree.

The trouble is that nobody who repeats it cites a passage. When the claim is traced to its sources, it turns out to rest on a modern web page and a single Greek word that changed meaning over time. This article follows that trail and sets out what the ancient medical texts do describe.

Where the claim comes from

The most thorough investigation of the story has been made by Helen King, a historian of ancient medicine at the Open University whose doctoral research was on Greek ideas about menstruation and whose book Hippocrates’ Woman (1998) examines how Hippocratic gynecology was read and reused in later centuries.¹ In a blog post first published at Wonders and Marvels in 2014 and later reposted on her own site, Mistaking Histories, King looked for the passage in which Hippocrates supposedly describes a lint-and-wood tampon. She found none.²

What she did find was the apparent starting point. King identified a claim on the Tampax company’s website, stating that Hippocrates described such a device, as the likely original source, and noted that the idea had since been repeated uncritically across many other sites.² In a later interview she described the “ancient tampons” story as the biggest myth on the subject, adding that there is no evidence for it from the ancient world.³

The pattern is familiar to historians of medicine: a confident sentence in promotional material is copied into blogs, listicles and product pages until its repetition looks like corroboration. The claim is still in circulation. A 2023 feature in Greek City Times, for example, was headlined “Tampons Through Time: From Papyrus in Ancient Egypt to Hippocrates’ Insights in the Fifth Century B.C.”⁴ Popular historians who have checked, such as Greg Jenner, now flag the Hippocratic version as one that does not hold up, citing King’s work.⁵

A word with two meanings

If no text describes a menstrual tampon, why would anyone think one does? King’s answer points to the Greek word motos.²

In Hippocratic surgery, motos is lint: shredded linen used to dress or pack wounds. The standard Greek-English lexicon, Liddell, Scott and Jones (LSJ), glosses the noun as shredded linen or lint, defines the related verb motoō as “plug a wound with lint” (citing the Hippocratic treatise On Head Wounds), and translates the adjective emmotos as “treated with tents (motoi)”.⁶ According to King, the LSJ entry for motos also offers the English gloss “tent, tampon”.²

That gloss is accurate, but it uses English in an older medical sense. In surgical language before the twentieth century, a “tent” or “tampon” was simply a plug of soft material pushed into a wound or body opening, usually to stop bleeding or to keep a channel open. King notes that such plugs could be used for hemorrhage from various parts of the body, including the womb, which is a matter of treating abnormal bleeding, not managing an ordinary period.² A reader meeting “tampon” in a dictionary after the 1930s, when the word had come to mean a commercial menstrual product, could easily take the gloss to mean something it never meant.

The modern product is easy to date. Earle C. Haas of Denver filed his patent for a “catamenial device,” an absorbent strip with a withdrawal thread and an applicator, on November 19, 1931, and it was issued on September 12, 1933.⁷ King’s own short history of period products places the arrival of tampons in the 1930s, when they were advertised as “internal sanitary napkins.”⁸ The Greek word is about two and a half thousand years older than that sense of the English one.

King also observes that where the Hippocratic writers do describe lint wrapped around wood, the context is not gynecological at all: the example she cites is a dressing for bleeding from a fractured nose.²

What the Hippocratic pessaries were for

The Hippocratic Corpus is not silent about putting things into the vagina. Its two long treatises on Diseases of Women are full of pessaries (Greek pessoi), and this is probably the second root of the confusion. These texts are now available in English in Ann Ellis Hanson’s 1975 translation of Diseases of Women 1 and in Paul Potter’s 2018 Loeb Classical Library edition of both books, which presents the Greek alongside an English translation and a lexicon of the therapeutic ingredients.⁹¹⁰

A Hippocratic pessary was a vehicle for medicine. A frequently anthologized passage from Diseases of Women 2 shows how one worked: for a condition the authors attributed to the womb having moved upward in the body, the practitioner was to wrap wool around a feather shaft, dip it in a fragrant substance, insert it, and leave it in place until the womb was thought to have returned, removing it once the symptoms ceased.¹¹ Other recipes in the same treatises call for softening, cleansing or drawing agents, or for substances meant to bring on a delayed period.

These devices have a superficial resemblance to a tampon: soft material, sometimes wrapped around a stick or quill, inserted vaginally. Their function was the opposite of absorbing normal menstrual blood. They delivered drugs, and they were part of a medical system whose theory depended on the womb being able to wander, fill, empty and release blood. King states that the Hippocratic texts contain no mention of using such a device to control normal menstrual flow.²

How Greek doctors thought about menstruation

The silence makes more sense once the Hippocratic view of menstruation is understood. For these writers, regular and plentiful bleeding was a sign of health. Lesley Dean-Jones’s study of classical Greek medical theory shows how central menstruation was to the Hippocratic understanding of the female body, and notes that the Hippocratic authors believed a healthy woman lost a remarkably large volume each month, on the order of a pint.¹² King similarly points out that the Greek medical texts treated a heavy flow as the ideal.⁸

In that framework, blood that failed to leave the body was the danger. The Hippocratic Aphorisms go so far as to say that a nosebleed is a good thing if a woman’s period is suppressed, because the blood has found another exit.¹³ A physician working with these ideas had reasons to encourage menstrual flow and to treat its absence, and few medical reasons to block it. Plugging, in this system, was for hemorrhage, a pathological state.

None of this tells us what every Greek woman did in private, and that is a real limit. Women’s own practices were rarely written down by the male authors whose texts survive, and the cloth they would have used is the kind of material that seldom survives in the archaeological record. But it does mean that the medical texts cannot be used as evidence for routine tampon use, which is how the popular story uses them.

What women likely used

King’s conclusion from the available evidence is that home-made pads of rags were the standard way of managing menstruation in the ancient Greek world.² The argument is partly from later and better documented periods: in later historical periods rags were placed between the legs, then washed and dried for reuse, and in early modern Europe the historian Sara Read concluded that many women simply bled onto their clothing.³⁸ King also notes that in the nineteenth century the historian Theodor Mommsen suggested that the word rhakoi (rags) in Athenian clothing lists referred to menstrual cloths, an interpretation that remains a suggestion rather than an established reading.¹³

For Roman women, popular accounts often say that Soranus of Ephesus, the second-century CE author of the most systematic ancient gynecology, recommended wool or soft pads for menstruation. His treatise is available in English in Owsei Temkin’s 1956 translation.¹⁴ This article could not confirm a specific Soranus passage on menstrual absorption, so the claim is best treated as unverified until a reader checks the text itself.

The fair summary, then, is a distinction among levels of certainty:

• Documented: Hippocratic texts describe wool and lint pessaries as vehicles for medicines, and lint plugs for wounds and bleeding.
• Probable, on indirect evidence: cloth or rag pads were the ordinary means of managing menstruation.
• Unsupported: that Hippocrates, or any Greek text, describes lint-wrapped wooden tampons for normal periods.

The Egyptian papyrus story

The Egyptian half of the legend has a similar shape. Popular histories often state that Egyptian women used tampons of softened papyrus, a claim repeated both in features that accept it and in posts that are skeptical of the Greek version.⁴⁵ This research found no scholarly source that supports it.

What the Egyptian medical papyri do contain is better described as contraceptive or medicinal. The Ebers Papyrus (about 1550 BCE) includes a preparation in which lint or fiber is moistened with a substance derived from acacia and placed in the vagina, and the Museum of Contraception and Abortion in Vienna presents it as an early contraceptive recipe.¹⁵ Like the Hippocratic pessary, it is a medicated insert. Reading it as a menstrual product repeats the same slippage that turned the Greek motos into a tampon.

Why the myth persists

The ancient tampon story survives because it is useful. It gives a twentieth-century consumer product an air of timelessness, and it flatters the reader with a surprising fact. It also sits on a real foundation: ancient physicians did insert soft materials into the body, and the dictionaries do print the word “tampon.” What the story drops is context, the difference between a medicated pessary, a surgical plug and a menstrual absorbent, and the century-long shift in what an English word meant.

King’s tracing of the claim is a useful model for testing any confident “the ancients did it first” story: find the passage, read it in its setting, and check whether the word on the page means what we now mean by it. In this case the passage was never there.

Footnotes

1. King 1998, Hippocrates’ Woman. ↩

2. King 2017, Mistaking Histories, “The history of tampons – in ancient Greece?” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. Clue, Q&A with Helen King. ↩ ↩²

4. Greek City Times, November 15, 2023. ↩ ↩²

5. Jenner, “How did women in the past deal with their periods?” ↩ ↩²

6. LSJ, s.vv. motos, motoō, emmotos. ↩

7. U.S. Patent 1,926,900. ↩

8. King 2023, “From rags and pads to the sanitary apron.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Hanson 1975, Signs 1(2). ↩

10. Potter 2018, Loeb Classical Library 538; Geller, BMCR 2019.08.17. ↩

11. Hippocrates, Diseases of Women 2.126, 123, in Lefkowitz and Fant, no. 345. ↩

12. Dean-Jones 1994; BMCR 1994.10.13. ↩

13. King 2017, OpenLearn, “Four weird ideas people used to have about women’s periods.” ↩ ↩²

14. Temkin 1956, Soranus’ Gynecology. ↩

15. MUVS, “A Museum on the History of Contraception.” ↩