Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature, and Authority from Celsus to Galen

466 Pages·2000·2.025 MB·English

by  Rebecca Flemming

MEDICINE AND THE
MAKING OF ROMAN WOMEN
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Medicine and the
Making of Roman
Women
Gender, Nature, and Authority
from Celsus to Galen
REBECCA FLEMMING
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GreatClarendonStreet,Oxfordox26dp
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gir llA .de MedicineandLthiebrmaraykionfgCoofnRgFrolemesmsanmCawintoaglm,ogReinen:bggeiecnncadP.eurb,lnicaatutiroen,aDnadtaauthorityfrom
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PREFACE
This is a book about women and medicine in the first
centuries of the Roman imperial era. It is about the women
whopractisedmedicineandthewomenwhohaditpractisedon
them; about the contribution women and their place in society
made to medical discourse, and the contribution medical
discourse made to women’s place in society; about the ways
womenweredescribedandlocatedinthatdiscourse,andabout
the e(cid:128)ects it had. It is about how all these interrelate and
interact in their broader context. This is, therefore, a book not
justaboutaspecificandintegralaspectoftheRomanempire—
about its concerns with, its literary and organizational
responses to, health and disease, and how these played out
around women—but also about knowledge and power, about
the historical configuration of gender, nature, and authority,
more broadly. It is thus hoped that it will be of interest to all
thoseconcernedwiththesewiderthemesinwhatevertimeand
.d place, as well as those with more particular interests in
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vre antiquity.Theworkingsoftheclassicalworldintheserespects
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r sth are illuminating of far more than that world alone.
gir llA .d proCmerpttaeindlytheitrwesaesaracnh tihnatetrheasts liendtthoestheiswbidoeork.qTuehsistiorensseatrhcaht
eta was originally undertaken as a graduate student in University
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rofxO able ways, I must particularly thank Vivian Nutton, who has
.1 given so freely of his great expertise in the area; Ann Ellis
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th guidance;HelenKingandSimonPrice,foralltheircomments
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iryp as examiners and after; and Jason Davies, John North, Bob
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Sharples, Adam Sutcli(cid:128)e, and Rosalind Thomas who have all
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vi Preface
also given various versions of various chapters the benefit of
their attention at various times. I am also very grateful to
Charles Burnett for devoting his Arabic Reading Class at the
Warburg Institute to Rhazes’ Doubts about Galen; to Christina
Alverez Milla´n for further assistance with Arabic materials; to
IreneZwiepforsortingoutformebitsofGalenpreservedonly
in medieval Hebrew; and to my brother, William Flemming,
for his help with several more modern European languages.
My parents, Jean and John Flemming, have been most sup
portive of my e(cid:128)orts in a whole host of ways, and, I must also
acknowledgeamoredistantdebt(thoughnonethelessdeepfor
it) to Sarah Roelofs, Peter Purton, and Tom Loucas, in whose
comradely company many of the questions were raised that I
am still trying to answer.
Associated with these individual debts are various institu
tionalones:totheWellcomeTrustforitscontinuingsupportof
myresearchand,togetherwithUCL,forprovidingmycurrent
homeintheWellcomeInstitutefortheHistoryofMedicine;to
theFriendsofUCLandtheTsangadasFundandInternational
Partnerships Program of the University of Michigan for
enabling me to work with Ann Ellis Hanson at Michigan and
consultwithotherUSscholarsinthewinterandspringof1997;
.d totheWarburgInstitutewhereIwasaFrancesYatesFellowin
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vre theautumnof1996;andtotheBritishAcademyforitsgrantofa
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r sth graduatestudentship,from1993to1996,whichIenjoyedinthe
gir llA .d sfrtiemquuelanttinfograaytsmtoostphheeIrenstoitfutUeCofLClhaissstiocraylSdtuepdaierstm. ent, with
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CONTENTS
Notes to the Reader viii
Abbreviations xi
Introduction: Medicine and the Historical Relations of 1
Gender, Nature, and Authority
part i a brief introduction to
roman medicine
1. The Social and Cultural Formation of Roman 33
Medicine
2. A Rough Guide to the Conceptual World of Roman 80
Medicine
part ii before galen
3. The Medical Woman between Folk Tradition and 129
Philosophy
4. Sects and the Medical Woman 185
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r sth 5. Women, Power, and Knowledge in the World of 255
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.de 6. Galen’s Woman 288
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I ,sse Appendix 1: Listing of Medical Authors, Works, 375
rP Editions, Translations, and their
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.10 Glossary 421
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NOTES TO THE READER
Since this bookisintendedtobe accessibletothosewho are
notclassicalscholars,andwhomaybeunfamiliarwithclassical
languages and the various conventions of scholarly presenta
tion in the field, and also both deals with some material that
may well not be familiar even to those in the discipline, and
takes some liberties with those conventions, it is worth out
lining the various presentational principles and practices
adopted here in more detail than is usual.
Terminology and Translation
Anystudyofancientmedicine,oranyassociatedancientdiscip
line,confrontstheproblemofhowtodeal,inawaythatisclear
and accessible but not misleading, with the Greek and Latin
technical vocabulary involved, and the long dead, but vitally
important, concepts which are signified by it. Throughout the
.de bookIprovideboththeoriginaltextandmyowntranslationof
vrese anyquotationsfromancientworks,asbothareequallyessential;
r sth butthereisalsothequestionofhowcertainwordsorphrasesare
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.d specificcitation.Ihave,therefore,largelyoptedtopreservethe
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rP Latin as appropriate, and to explain the meaning at the first
ytisre occurrence, but simply reproduce the original term thereafter.
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ent manuscripts, none, or all, of which may accord with the
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Notes to the Reader ix
author’s designation(s) of the text. The translations of these
titles are similarly varied, and greatest standardization is
achieved in the customary scholarly abbreviation of these
titles. These abbreviations are, however, in Latin, regardless
of the language of the work to which they refer, and as this is
somewhatconfusingtotheuninitiatedbuthardtoescapefrom,
I have not used these abbreviations in the main text itself, but
confined them to the footnotes. For the medical writings with
whichthisbookiscentrallyconcerned,therefore,whenawork
initiallyappears(ineithermaintextorfootnotes)Iprovidemy
preferredversionofthefulltitleinbothitsoriginal(orearliest
surviving) language(s)and its English translation (anumber of
Greek medical texts survive only in Arabic and/or Latin
translation, Arabic titles are transliterated throughout, and
some texts survive untitled, in which case descriptive titles in
English may be provided alone). Thereafter a shortened form
of the English appears in the main text, and the Latin
abbreviation in the footnotes. This abbreviation is also intro
duced in such a way as to make the work (and/or author) to
which it refers as clear as possible; however, a full listing of
such abbreviations, together with the authors and works to
which they apply, is to be found in Appendix 1. These
.d abbreviations are, moreover, largely the standard ones, taken,
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r sth from H. G. Liddell, R. Scott, and H. S. Jones, A Greek–
gir llA .d Evenrgsliitsyh PLreexsisc,on1,996t8h) eadnnd. wS.ithHoSrunpbplol.w(eOrxafonrdd:AO.xSfopradwfUorntih
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ta (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edn. (Oxford:
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