Table Of ContentHIPPOCRATES’ WOMAN
In ancient Greece, gynaecology originated in the myth of the first woman Pandora, whose
beautiful appearance was seen to cover her dangerous ‘insides’.
Hippocrates’ Woman demonstrates how ancient Greek healers read the signs offered by their
patients’ bodies, arguing that medicine was based on ideas about women and their bodies
found in myth and ritual. Helen King deploys a wide range of comparative materials from the
social sciences to discuss religious healing, chronic pain, and the creation of a powerful self-
image by aspiring healers. She outlines how nursing and midwifery have tried to create their
own versions of the ancient Greek past to give themselves greater status, and presents a
detailed account of how doctors twisted ancient Greek texts into ways of controlling women’s
behaviour. Finally, she analyses how later medicine, by diagnosing ‘hysteria’ and by
recommending practices such as clitoridectomy, gave its decisions authority by claiming
ancient Greek origins which never existed.
Hippocrates’ Woman provides a controversial, provocative and stimulating insight into the
origins of gynaecology and the influence of the early study of medical texts on later medical
practices and theories up until the Victorian era.
Helen King is a Wellcome Trust Research fellow and Lecturer in the Departments of Classics
and History at the University of Reading. Her wide range of publications on women and
medicine includes Hysteria Beyond Freud (1993).
Praise for Helen King
‘Once Upon a Text: Hysteria from Hippocrates’, in Hysteria Beyond Freud, ed. Sander
Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, George Rousseau and Elaine Showalter
(Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993)
The definitive analysis of the historical construction of the ‘disease’ of hysteria/uterine
suffocation
Medieval Feminist Newsletter
Helen King has delivered a tour de force on the classical period . . . a triumph of original
scholarship
Times Literary Supplement
The opening essay, ‘Once Upon a Text: Hysteria from Hippocrates’ by the English
Classicist Helen King, is a scholarly and analytic tour de force and one of the most
exciting revisionist analyses I have recently read.
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
HIPPOCRATES’ WOMAN
Reading the female body in
Ancient Greece
Helen King
London and New York
First published 1998
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.
© 1998 Helen King
The right of Helen King to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or
in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
King, Helen.
Hippocrates’ woman : reading the female body in ancient Greece / Helen King.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-13894-9 HB. — ISBN 0-415-13895-7 PB
1. Gynecology—Greece—History. 2. Medicine, Greek and Roman. 3. Gynecology—Greek influences. 4. Women—
Greece—History. 5. Body, Human—Social aspects—Greece—History. I. Title.
RG59.K56 1998
618.1´00938—dc21 98–3728
CIP
ISBN 0-415-13894-9 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-13895-7 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-02599-7 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-14237-3 (Glassbook Format)
TO MY PARENTS
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
Note on texts xii
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1 Constructing the body: the inside story 21
2 Deceitful bodies, speaking bodies 40
3 The daughter of Leonidas: reading case histories 54
4 Blood and the goddesses 75
5 Asklepios and women’s healing 99
6 What does medicine mean? The pain of being human 114
7 Reading the past through the present: drugs and contraception
in Hippocratic medicine 132
8 Gender and the healing role 157
9 Imaginary midwives 172
10 Green sickness: Hippocrates, Galen and the origins of the
‘disease of virgins’ 188
vii
CONTENTS
11 Once upon a text: hysteria from Hippocrates 205
Conclusion 247
Notes 251
Bibliography 274
Index 311
viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Much of the material used in this book has been presented to a variety of seminar audiences;
some has been previously published, often in places which are not easily accessible, and
appears here in a revised form. The Introduction and first two chapters have not been
previously published; sections of Chapter 2 develop ideas first explored in ‘“We tried to draw
down the blood but she died”: women and death in Hippocratic medicine’, Classical Association
AGM, Oxford, 1992 and ‘Diagnosing the future’, Institute of Classical Studies, January
1991. Chapter 3 is a revised version of ‘The daughter of Leonides: reading the Hippocratic
corpus’ in History as Text (ed. A. Cameron; Duckworth, 1989, 13–32), which derived from a
seminar series at the Institute of Classical Studies.
I first became interested in the Hippocratic treatise On the Diseases of Virgins after hearing
Mary Lefkowitz speak on it at the Institute of Classical Studies, London while I was a student.
Chapters 4 and 10 use this text as their starting point. Chapter 4 develops ‘Bound to bleed:
Artemis and Greek women’, published in Images of Women in Antiquity (ed. Averil Cameron
and Amelie Kuhrt; London, Croom Helm, 1983; reprinted 1993, 109–27), and ‘Sacrificial
blood: the role of the amnion in Hippocratic gynecology’, Helios 13(2) (1987) = Rescuing Creusa
(ed. M.B. Skinner; Texas Tech University Press, 117–26). ‘Bound to bleed’ was based on the
first seminar paper I ever gave, delivered at the ICS on 5 November 1981. My work was
stimulated by attending J.-P. Vernant’s lectures at the Collège de France in spring 1981, and
subsequently benefited from comments from Geoffrey Lloyd, Jan Bremmer and Vivian
Nutton.
Chapter 5 is a version of ‘Comparative perspectives on medicine and religion in the
ancient world’, published in Religion, Health and Suffering (ed. Roy Porter and John Hinnells;
London: Kegan Paul, 1998), reprinted here with permission. Chapter 6 uses some material
first published as ‘The early anodynes: pain in the ancient world’ in The Management of Pain:
the historical perspective (ed. Ronald D. Mann; Carnforth, Lancs and Park Ridge, NJ: Parthenon
Press, 1988, 51–62), which is reprinted with permission. Another version of this chapter is
ix
