The Favourite documents endocrine function through obsessive visual repetition.

Anne's bleeding appears onscreen multiple times—not as plot device but as the organizing principle of court power, tracked by the film, the women, and the camera alike.

Georgian physicians, lacking germ theory or hormonal nomenclature, still maintained meticulous menstrual records because they had to — fertility determined inheritance, succession, legitimacy. They observed patterns because the stakes were too high to theorize without data.

Compare this to Victorian medicine, which had microscopes and chemistry but abandoned empirical tracking in favor of moral frameworks — hysteria, wandering wombs, the medicalization of female autonomy as pathology. The Victorians knew more about cells; they understood women's bodies less. Lanthimos films Sarah Churchill's miscarriage as pure biological fact — her body failing to maintain what Abigail and Anne's bodies accomplish — with no moralizing, no diagnosis, just evidence.

The dialogue never names hormones or cycles in modern terms; it uses period vocabulary like 'indisposed,' the coded language court women themselves employed. By refusing to translate into scientific jargon, the film shows us what the original observers actually saw without the interpretive overlay that came later. The Victorians invented the concept of scientific progress while actually losing ground on female physiology — and that reversal matters now, when we're watching institutional medicine rediscover things nineteenth-century doctors actively suppressed.