greensick

When abundant seed is "over long retained in Bodies prone to lust, and full of heat," wrote Lazarus Riverius, it works like yeast in the seminal vessels, inflaming sexual desire and madness: "Vapors ascend unto the Brain, which disturb the Rational Faculty, and depose it from its throne." (2) This medically-based belief found its fictional expression in characters like the raging, greensick Jailer's Daughter in Two Noble Kinsmen, who is cured of her insanity once she has sex--one of the "pushes," perhaps, wenches are "driven to / When fifteen once has found us" (2.4.6-7).

"'An Infallible Nostrum': Female Husbands and Greensick Girls in Eighteenth-Century England." Literature and Medicine 21.1 (Spring 2002): 56-77.

The representation of the hysterical body does have a substantial and important life of its own in Renaissance drama, from the chlorotic, "greensick" girl to the lovesick virgin suffering from furor uterinus.