Traditional Chinese medicine's attempts to grapple with pregnancy are documented from at least the seventeenth century. According to Charlotte Furth, "a pregnancy (in the seventeenth century) as a known bodily experience emerged [...] out of the liminality of menstrual irregularity, as uneasy digestion, and a sense of fullness". These symptoms were common among other illness as well, so the diagnosis of pregnancy often came later in the term. The "Canon of the Pulse" or the use of pulse in diagnosis stated that pregnancy was "a condition marked by symptoms of disorder in one whose pulse is normal" or "where the pulse and symptoms do not agree". Just as in the normal diagnosis process, women were often silent about suspected pregnancy, this led to many men in the households not knowing their wife or daughter was pregnant until complications arrived.