Menstrual Toxin 



265 



125 (2085) 



A phyto-pharmacological study of a menotoxin or menstrual 



toxin. 



By DAVID I. MACHT and DOROTHY LUBIN. 



[From the Pharmacological Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, 

 Baltimore, Maryland.] 



Macht and Livingston have already shown in connection with 

 a study of cocain and its derivatives that various drugs affect 

 animal and cell protoplasm very differently. Thus it was shown 

 that while cocain is very toxic for animal tissues, it is compara- 

 tively little toxic for plant protoplasm. On the other hand, 

 sodium benzoate which is practically non-toxic for animal tis- 

 sues was found to be extremely toxic for the root of lupinus 

 albus. These observations suggest the idea that plant cells may 

 be much more sensitive to some animal toxins than animal cells 

 or tissues might be. This idea was a starting point for the 

 present investigation. Shick has recently revived or called at- 

 tention to the ancient popular belief as to the contaminating or 

 deleterious effects of the touch of women at the time of men- 

 struation. He performed a few experimnts on cut flowers 

 seemingly corroborating this idea. The present authors decided 

 to investigate this whole question in a more scientific and ac- 

 curate way by the use of whole living plant organisms and not 

 cut flowers, inasmuch as the latter method is unreliable for 

 obvious reasons. The procedure was very much the same as in 

 the study of Macht and Livingston on cocain and its derivatives. 



Seedlings of lupinus albus were grown in a perfect nutrient 

 medium (Shive solution) and the rate of growth of the single 

 straight well defined root was measured to within one-half of 

 a millimeter. Similar seedlings were grown simultaneously and 

 under exactly the same conditions in Shive solution containing 

 a definite amount, usually 1 per cent, of normal blood serum, 

 and on other occasions exactly the same kind of experiments 

 were performed with solutions containing blood serum obtained 

 from menstruating individuals. Whenever possible normal and 

 pathological blood was obtained from the same subjects. The 

 effect of normal serum on the growth of seedlings as compared 



