Caspar Bartholinus and the Vulvovaginal Glands

Abstract

FEMALE semen, the name once applied to the fluid that issues from the woman's genitals during coitus, was assumed for many years to originate in the female testes, as the ovaries were called. This fluid, regarded as essential to fecundation since the time of Aristotle, was thought to discharge into the urethra, as in the male. Herophilus, whose original writings are all lost, but some ofwhich had been copied down by Galen and incorporated into the latter's writings, believed that he had traced the course of the seminal ducts from the female testes to the bladder. In Galen's De Semine, Herophilus is quoted as follows: 'A very small seminal duct occurs on each side, arising from the uterus. The first part of this duct is much folded, and as in males it runs from the testicle to the fleshy part of the neck of the bladder.' Corner3 has suggested that this description is based on an exa- mination of the genitalia of a sow with persistent Wolffian or Gartner ducts, not rare in this species. The true source of the female semen was not recog- nized until the latter part ofthe seventeenth century. Following the discovery of the vulvovaginal glands in cattle by Duverney, one of his contemporaries, Caspar Bartholinus, in I677 first called attention to, and described the functions of, these glands in women.