King - Hippocrates 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 womens 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

First published 1998
by Routledge

Published 2014 by Routledge
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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

Typeset in Garamond by Keystroke, Jacaranda Lodge, Wolverhampton

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 0415138949 HB. ISBN 0415138957 PB
1. GynecologyGreeceHistory. 2. Medicine, Greek and Roman.
3. GynecologyGreek influences. 4. WomenGreeceHistory.
5. Body, HumanSocial aspectsGreeceHistory. I. Title.
RG59.K56 1998
618.100938dc21 983728
CIP

ISBN: 978-0-415-13894-9 (hbk)

TO MY PARENTS

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 is a revised version of The daughter of Leonides: reading the Hippocratic corpus in History as Text (ed. A. Cameron; Duckworth, 1989, 1332), 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. 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, 10927), 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, 11726). 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. Vernants lectures at the Collge de France in spring 1981, and subsequently benefited from comments from Geoffrey Lloyd, Jan Bremmer and Vivian Nutton.

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, 5162), which is reprinted with permission. Another version of this chapter is scheduled to appear in Constructions of the Classical Body (ed. Jim Porter; University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), and is reprinted with permission.

has not previously been published. An early version was presented to the ICI Staff Seminar in Runcorn, and shorter versions were presented at the American Philological Society in San Diego, 1995, and the History Department, University of York in November 1997.

from a very different angle in Agnodike and the profession of medicine, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 32 (1986), 5377, but the argument of this chapter derives from a paper delivered at the invitation of Larissa Bonfante at the Onassis Hellenic Foundation, New York in 1995.

A version of was published in the International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2 (1996), 37287, and was based on papers given at the Third Meeting of the International Society for the Classical Tradition, Boston University, 812 March 1995, at the universities of Leeds, Bristol and Birmingham and at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford. In particular I would like to thank Irvine Loudon for his encouragement when an earlier version was presented at the Wellcome Institute, London in 1987, and Vivian Nutton for his invaluable comments on the present version. Its completion as an article was made possible by the British Academy Research Leave Scheme.

A longer version of was published in Hysteria Beyond Freud, written with Sander Gilman, Roy Porter, George S. Rousseau and Elaine Showalter (University of California Press, 1993), 390. Sections were presented to the Pybus Club (Newcastle, 1985), the Classical Association Triennial Meeting (Oxford, 1988), a conference organised by the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (London, 1990) and the Liverpool Medical History Society/Society for the History of Science (Liverpool, 1991). The previously published version had the benefit of the comments of Monica Green and Mark Micale.