If you are a woman in your thirties, forties, or beyond, you have probably been told a lot about your hormones. By a doctor, a magazine, an app that tracks your cycle, an ad that arrived the moment you searched for something unrelated. It all comes with the confidence of settled fact, so it can come as a surprise to learn how recently anyone had the vocabulary for it.
It can also be tiring. Finding what helps your own body is mostly trial and error, and the reasons behind how you feel often go unidentified, even after you have done everything right. Clinicians describe hormone levels as shifting across a lifetime, and that is one of many reasons there is rarely one tidy answer. This is a short tour of how the vocabulary arrived, who was in the room when it did, and why it helps to know that you are standing on a fairly young body of knowledge.
A Word That Is Just Over a Century Old
The word “hormone” was introduced in 1905 by the English physiologist Ernest Starling, in one of his Croonian Lectures at the Royal College of Physicians in London. He drew on a Greek verb meaning to excite or arouse, and used it for the chemical messengers the body sends through the blood. A few years earlier, he and William Bayliss had shown that the gut releases one of these messengers, which they named secretin, to tell the pancreas when to work.
For thousands of years, people lived, gave birth, aged, and cared for one another without that word existing. The idea of the body as a system of circulating signals is a surprisingly recent one.
The 1920s and 1930s: Giving the Signals Names
The next few decades were a race to isolate these messengers in the lab. In the early 1920s, the American researchers Edgar Allen and Edward Doisy showed that fluid from ovarian follicles contained an active substance, in work done on laboratory animals. Estrone, an estrogen, was isolated in 1929, with Doisy in the United States and Adolf Butenandt in Germany announcing it within months of each other. Progesterone was isolated in 1934, with Butenandt among the researchers credited.
So the two hormones you hear about most were first pinned down less than a hundred years ago. What you were told about your cycle in school sits on top of work that is still, in historical terms, brand new.
Who Was Left Out of the Room
The more uncomfortable part of the story is who got studied, and how. Hormone research in the twentieth century moved fast, and consent did not always move with it. The first large trials of the oral contraceptive pill in the 1950s were run in part in Puerto Rico, among poor women, in a setting where the usual protections we expect today were thin. Accounts of the trials say many participants were not fully told what was being tested. It is one reason some women approach pharmaceutical products with a little wariness, and the history gives that wariness a firm basis.
Then there is the opposite problem. For decades, women were routinely kept out of clinical research altogether. In 1977, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a guideline recommending that women of childbearing potential be excluded from early-phase drug trials, out of concern about possible harm to a pregnancy. The guideline was titled “General Considerations for the Clinical Evaluation of Drugs,” and it applied to the earliest phases. Reviews of the period note that drug sponsors often read it more broadly than written, which kept women out of later phases too (a review of women's inclusion in clinical trials). In 1993, Congress passed the NIH Revitalization Act, which required that women be included in appropriate numbers in research funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Put those two facts side by side. First women were studied without enough protection, then they were left out for the sake of protection, and neither started from what women themselves wanted to know. If you have ever felt that your questions were an afterthought, the record gives you some company.
A Reminder From the Early 2000s
Many of the women reading this will remember the summer of 2002. The Women's Health Initiative, a very large U.S. study, stopped one of its arms early. On July 9, 2002, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute ended the estrogen-plus-progestin trial, which had enrolled more than 16,600 women and was planned to run eight years, after just over five. The stated reasons were no overall benefit and an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, with increases in some heart-related events as well (Fred Hutch's 2002 account). Advice many women had been given with great confidence was publicly revisited.
That moment taught a lot of people something easy to forget: the consensus you are handed is the best current understanding, and it has revised itself before. Living with that is not cynicism. It is paying attention.
What the Numbers Look Like Now
The picture has changed, and it is worth saying so plainly. In a paper published in Nature Communications on July 22, 2026, researchers at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine looked at drugs the FDA approved between 2015 and 2023, across 98 disease indications. They found that 67 percent of the pivotal trials met or exceeded the expected share of women, measured against how much of each disease falls on women (UC Irvine School of Medicine summary).
That is real progress from the 1977 guideline. The same work also found gaps that remain, including in cardiovascular disease and in autoimmune and inflammatory conditions. And the lead researcher, Sophie Zaaijer, makes a point that goes beyond headcounts: counting women is important, but the methods and the reporting have to be designed to show how women experience disease, treatment response, and side effects.
In other words, being in the room and being understood are two different milestones. The first is largely underway. The second is still being built, which is part of why your own experience of your body is not a footnote to the research.
What Traditions Kept Track Of
Here is where the older record becomes interesting. Herbal traditions had no word for hormones, no lab, and no trial. What they had was something quieter: generations of women watching their own bodies, noting what changed across a month and across a lifetime, and passing along what they reached for in each season. The record is uneven and often anonymous, written down late if at all, and you cannot hold it to the standard of a modern study. Nobody should pretend otherwise.
But it is a record, and much of it was kept by women, about women, at a time when almost nothing else was. That is part of why you may feel a pull toward it, and the pull is not irrational. Curiosity about what women did before the lab is curiosity about the part of the story that never made it into a journal.
Four Questions to Ask Any Health Claim
You do not need a science degree to read this history usefully. You need a few habits, and these four cover most of it.
- When was it studied? A finding from 1975, 2002, and 2024 may each have come from a very different pool of participants and a very different set of rules.
- Who was in the study? If the people studied do not look much like you in age, health, or life stage, the result may apply to you less than the headline suggests.
- What does the source say about its own limits? Good researchers state them. A claim that arrives with no limits attached is worth a second look.
- Who is telling you, and what are they selling? That applies to a supplement ad, a pharmaceutical brochure, and, yes, a company blog like this one.
None of that makes the answer easy. It does make it yours to weigh.
Where That Leaves You
You do not have to pick a side. You can take a prescription seriously and also appreciate a plant your great-grandmother might have recognized. You can read the research and still want a small ritual that is entirely yours. None of it competes for the same space in your life.
There are many non-pharmaceutical things a woman may choose to explore: time with a provider who listens, rest, food you enjoy, people who understand. Ours is a cream made with a root that has a long record, in a base of shea butter and sweet almond oil, made carefully in the USA. It is one of those many things, and never the first one to reach for.
If your cycle has changed, your bleeding is heavy or unpredictable, you take prescription medication, or something is disrupting your life, that is a conversation for a qualified provider, and a good one will take your questions seriously.
Common Questions
Who coined the word hormone?
The English physiologist Ernest Starling, in lectures given in 1905. He drew on a Greek root meaning to excite or arouse, to describe chemical messengers carried in the blood.
When were estrogen and progesterone first identified?
Researchers showed in the early 1920s that ovarian fluid contained an active substance, estrone was isolated in 1929, and progesterone in 1934. Teams in different countries were working on them at the same time.
Why were women left out of clinical trials?
For many years women were underrepresented, and in 1977 the FDA recommended excluding women of childbearing potential from early drug trials. A 1993 U.S. law, the NIH Revitalization Act, required that women be included in federally funded clinical research.
What was the Women's Health Initiative?
A large U.S. study of women's health that stopped one of its arms early in 2002 after finding increased risks with a combination of estrogen and a progestin. It is often cited as a moment when long-standing advice was publicly revised.
Are women better represented in clinical trials today?
In many areas, yes. A Nature Communications study published July 22, 2026 found that 67 percent of pivotal trials for FDA-approved drugs from 2015 to 2023 met or exceeded expected female participation, though gaps remain in some fields and researchers say how results are analyzed and reported matters as much as headcount.
Do botanical traditions replace modern medicine?
No. They are a different kind of record, kept by women over many generations, and they sit alongside medical care rather than in place of it. Whether to explore one is your choice.
The word is only a little over a century old. The women who passed down what they knew about their own bodies were doing it long before anyone had a name for what they were paying attention to — and you are free to keep paying attention, and to keep choosing what feels good to you.