By Joshua Cohen

KATHARINA DALTON, 87 Not only did Dalton identify the most controversial affliction known to womankind, she also knew how to take a joke. An amiable, hardworking physician and researcher, Dalton identified premenstrual syndrome (PMS) in 1953 and spent the rest of her life lobbying for her findings to be taken seriously.

Born Katharina Dorothea Kuipers of Dutch parents in London in 1916, Dalton won a scholarship to the London Foot Hospital where she trained as a chiropodist. In 1942, after the death in action of her first husband Wilfred, she entered the Royal Free Hospital and studied general medicine. A practice in North London followed.

At the age of 32, pregnant with her first son, she found that her own premenstrual migraines stopped early in the first trimester. Reasoning that high levels of the hormone progesterone, released during pregnancy, might play a part, she entered into research with endocrinologist Raymond Greene. This collaboration led to numerous discoveries, the most famous of which Dalton defined as "a hormonal illness occurring in the 14 days after ovulation."

Dalton went on to research the wider phenomena associated with PMS, including post-natal depression. Still, many doctors persisted in the conventional wisdom that menstrual problems have psychological rather than physical causes; others argued that Dalton's prescription for PMS (huge does of progesterone) was based on flawed methodology. Indeed, most practitioners today use selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Feminists never took too kindly to Dalton either. Enraged by her mid-70s findings that women were more apt to lie and shoplift during their periods, few supported her 1978 handbook Once a Month, a bestseller since translated into 17 languages that urged women to plan their lives around their monthly cycle.

"Consult your diary before arranging your next dinner party," it advised. "Avoid those awkward days if you have an interview, an examination or a driving test… If you're at work, tell your employer or personnel manager."

The heaviest flow of criticism came in the mid-80s. In the UK, several women who had been found guilty of various violent crimes, including murder, walked free due in part to Dalton's expert testimony that PMS or post-natal depression had significantly impaired their judgment.

"If women know what's good for them," Margot Lawrence wrote then in the Daily Telegraph, "they will repudiate en masse the idea that premenstrual tension (PMT) renders a female less responsible for her actions."

In 1944, Dalton married her second husband, a Unitarian minister with whom she had three children. From 1957 up to three years before her death last week, Dalton ran the PMS clinic at University College Hospital—the world's first. o