menstruum

It is what chemists would call the 'menstruum' in which all our qualities are worked and made manifest, which holds them together.

Selections from the Letters of Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury to Jane Welsh Carlyle 1892

Nilotes held the moon to be of “male-female sex,” the men sacrificing to Luna and the women to Lunus. 387 Isis also was a hermaphrodite, the idea being that Aether or Air (the lower heavens) was the menstruum of generative nature; and Damascius explained the tenet by the all-fruitful and prolific powers of the atmosphere.

The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night 2006

Keeping this doughty resolution, he sat down to dinner with his counsel learned in the law; and speedily they dispatched the dish of chops which was set before them, and the better part of the bottle of old port, which served for its menstruum.

Saint Ronan's Well 2008

So the Wazir bade unbind him and he rose and taking virgin glass,554 brayed it and mixed it with unslaked lime and a menstruum of onion-juice.

The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night 2006

Note 55: Dinant, p. 23: "Dicit autem ARISTOTELES feminam quodammodo esse marem imperfectum et eius menstruum sanguinem esse indigestum sperma; similem superfluitatem esse sperma viri et menstruum sanguinem mulieris excepto quod superfluitas hec maior in femina est et colorem retinet sanguineum propter defectum caloris digerentis." back

A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries 2005

Note 65: The only reference I have found of medical writings linking women's monthly cycles with the Christian notion of original sin appears in the work of a woman, Hildegard of Bingen's Causae et curae (ed.P. Kaiser [Leipzig, 1903]), in which the author emphatically drew a parallel between Eve's actions in the Garden and menstrual cycles: Quare menstruum.

A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries 2005

Note 164: Canon, 1.3.3, fols. 66va-b: "Nutrici preterea est precipiendum ut temperato utatur et ut nutrientibus boni chimi alatur et ne ullo modo aliquis cum ea coeat: hoc enim sanguinem permiscet menstruum, et lactis odorem corrumpit, et ipsius minuit quantitatem, immo fortasse impregnatur in quo nocumentum duobus attinens filiis existit." back

A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries 2005

“Prandy was the best menstruum for onions and sheese.”

The Adventures of Roderick Random 2004

While most tinctures are in a ratio of one part herb to five parts menstruum, extracts are more concentrated, as much as one to one.

THE NATURAL REMEDY BIBLE JOHN LUST 2003

“Though we talk of the progress that the race has made in learning and enlightenment,” he wrote, “it is alarming to notice … how germs which men deem dead really lurk dormant for ages, and then develop themselves with startling rapidity when they find the proper menstruum”:

A Furnace Afloat JOE JACKSON 2003