Uterus

The uterus (from Latin uterus, plural form: uteri) or womb is the organ in the reproductive system of most female mammals, including humans, that accommodates the embryonic and fetal development of one or more embryos until birth. The uterus is a hormone-responsive sex organ that contains glands in its lining that secrete uterine milk for embryonic nourishment.

Quotes

• Thou art he who createst the man-child in woman, who makest seed in man, who giveth life to the son in the body of his mother, who soothest him that he may not weep, a nurse [even] in the womb.
  • Great Hymn to the Aten (tr. J. H. Breasted)

• But thou art he that took me out of the womb: Thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother's breasts. I was cast upon thee from the womb: Thou art my God from my mother's belly.
  • Psalm 22, 9–10 (KJV)
    • The Hebrew word is רחם (rechem)

• Our mothers’ wombs the tyring-houses be
  Where we are drest for this short comedy:
  • Sir Walter Raleigh, in Orlando Gibbons’ First Set of Madrigals (1612)
    • Tiring-houses = dressing-rooms.

• Your brother and his lover have embraced:
  As those that feed grow full, as blossoming time
  That from the seedness the bare fallow brings
  To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb
  Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry.
  • Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, I, iv.

• A prettie rysing wombe without a weame,
    That shone as bright as anie siluer streame;
  And bare out like the bending of an hill,
    At whose decline a fountaine dwelleth still;
  A pretty rising womb without a wenn,
  That shine[s] as bright as any crystal gem,
  And bears out like the rising of a hill,
  At whose decline the[re] runs a fountain still,
  • Thomas Nashe, The Choise of Valentines, 107–110.
    • Weame, wenne = Wem, spot or blemish.

• And Venus, thou, with timely seed,
  Which may their after-comforts breed,
    Inform the gentle womb;
    Nor let it prove a tomb:
    But, ere ten moons be wasted,
    The birth, by Cynthia hasted.
    So may they both, ere day,
    Rise perfect every way.
  • Ben Jonson, "Epithalamium", in The Masque of Hymen (1616)

• To Eve's womb, from our sweet to-morrow,
  God shall greatly multiply sorrow.
  • D. G. Rossetti, "Eden Bower", in Poems (1870); revised in Poems. A New Edition (1881)