Whatever happened to chlorosis, also known as “green sickness” and the “disease of virgins”? Nota bene: this historical chlorosis shouldn’t be confused with usual contemporary sense of chlorosis, a botanical term describing the inadequate production of chlorophyll, manifest in leaves that are yellow instead of green.

In the mid-seventeenth century, John Graunt, the “father of English statistics,” claimed dozens of young women in mid-seventeenth century London were dying of green sickness every year. Since this essentially meant they were dying from a lack of sexual activity, people were too embarrassed to name the cause. In his table of disease, Graunt politely termed it “Stopping of the Stomach,” but in his text he said it was really green sickness, and “[f]or since the World believes, that Marriage cures it, it may see a shame, that any Maid die uncured…”

Scholar Winfried Schleiner writes that “green sickness was so well known that it could be referred to on the popular stage and used in political satire.” The most notable example is from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Enraged that his daughter Juliet doesn’t want to marry the dud he’s picked for her, Capulet yells, “Out you green-sickness carrion! Out you baggage/ You tallow-face!”

Tallow or beef fat is usually pale, off-white, sometimes yellow: complexion was a key sign of chlorosis, which was named with a Greek word meaning pale, pallid, or yellow-green. German physician Johann Lange in the 1554 described a patient with “pale cheeks, a trembling heart at the lightest physical activities, her loathing of food, swollen ankles.” Rodrigo a Castro in 1603, calling it virgin’s disease, white fever, and lover’s fever, said that “young women who are particularly good-looking and lovely” were subject to it. This was because, he said, such “temperate” women, in the sense of having their humors in balance, had blood vessels too narrow to expel the bad blood that built up in them.

An anonymous poet wrote of the Duke of Monmouth, the womanizing son of Charles II beheaded in 1685 for trying to usurp his uncle, “But O the Green-sick Girls may boast,/ This Duke had cur’d Them to his Cost.” According to Castro, nuns, who were supposed to be professional virgins—no Duke of Monmouth for them—could try bloodletting or enemas for a cure.

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At first, chlorosis was very much a gendered disease: only women had it. But it could be applied to men, metaphorically at first. Shakespeare again provides an example: in Henry IV, Part 2, Falstaff complains of a non-drinking young prince that “there’s never none of these demure boys come to any proof […] they fall into a kind of male green-sickness, and then, when they marry, they [be-]get wenches.”

The idea of green sickness comes out of Renaissance medicine, which in turn took a page from Hippocrates’s rediscovered book On the Disease of Virgins. One of Sappho’s poem fragments also helped align the symptoms with love-sickness. Upon spotting her beloved in conversation with a man, the poet wrote “I am more chloros [green, grassy, moist] than grass.” The color green has long been associated with jealousy or envy—see Shakespeare (again!) on the “green-eyed monster.”

Although scholar Helen King, cited by Schleiner, traces green sickness into the medical literature into the 1920s, you’ll not find it in any listing of diseases today. Green sickness has completely vanished. What was it? Could it have been a social/cultural construction imposed on mopey, malnourished, and/or rebellious teenagers not wanting to be married off?

But what about those symptoms, however vague by today’s reckoning? Schleiner wonders, without committing himself, what this historical disease really was, meaning what it was “in our terms.”

Could it have been some form(s) of anemia, which is still common today? There are alignments of anemia with some of the early modern symptoms of green sickness—though very few people today are likely to think anemia is caused by a blockage of bodily humors curable by intercourse.

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