Wandering uterus and forced sterilization. How was the diseases explained and treated women for centuries? Test "Cold" For many centuries, knowledge about female health has been based on stereotypes: for example, it was believed that learning harms women, since their nerves are too “tightly stretched”, and the ovaries are inflamed from reading. Until the 1990s, most clinical testing of drugs were carried out on men, and the female body and its specific needs remained unexplored.