Women in Antiquity: New Assessments by Hawley Richard;Levick Barbara.;

Author:Hawley, Richard;Levick, Barbara.; [RICHARD HAWLEY AND BARBARA LEVICK]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2011-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

She replied hesitantly or not at all, as if to show the folly of such questions, and finally turned over, buried herself completely deep in the blankets, covered her head with a small wrap and lay there as if wanting to sleep.5

Confronted with the battery of Hippocratic and Galenic treatments for women’s diseases—beetle pessaries, uterine clysters, fumigations, animal excrement,6 shaking and drenching with cold water—one can perhaps understand why the sensible response may be to refuse to answer questions and to put one’s head deep under the blankets.

This image of the silent patient—silent because of her ignorance of her own body, or silent because she does not wish to be involved in the medical encounter—may however be better understood simply as the corollary of the talkative doctor. The whole point of the Hippocratic assertion of the norm of female ignorance and silence is to make it obvious why the Hippocratic doctor is so necessary: the whole point of Galen’s emphasis on the absolute silence of the patient is to demonstrate his own brilliance in deducing what is wrong with her from observing her erratic pulse, which reveals the embarrassing secret of her love-sickness by speeding up at the mention of the name of the beloved. Her mouth is closed, but her body is an open book for the man who knows how to read it.

From an uncritical acceptance of this image of the silent woman patient, Hippocratic studies—with other areas of women’s studies7— moved on to ‘finding women’s voices in otherwise unpromising sources’. There are no named women medical practitioners in the Hippocratic texts—only an isolated cord-cutter or iatreousa8—so the type of history that recovers lost ‘famous women’ has not been possible here, in contrast to later classical medicine in which one can find women named in inscriptions as maia or even as iatros.9 Instead, the emphasis has been on finding traces of women’s traditional medicine beneath the male-authored texts, using in particular the collections of recipes which feature throughout the Hippocratic Diseases of Women but which are focused on what Littré saw as the ‘appendice necessaire’ of the closing chapters, 74–109, of the first book.10 For those trying to hear women’s voices, the recipes become the product of centuries of women’s experience. One may cite here Aline Rousselle’s view that they pass on traditional women’s remedies, based on detailed observations of their bodies made over many years, transmitted from mother to daughter.11 The role of the male doctors is to appropriate them, expressed in the act of writing them down.12 This requires a dramatic shift: the very remedies—such as beetle pessaries—that were once evidence of the male medical fantasies by which women were tortured must now be seen as women’s own chosen therapies, later appropriated and given a new theoretical overlay by male doctors. Ann Hanson has argued that men’s theory is superimposed on women’s remedies;13 this recalls Aristotle’s view that, in conception, woman provides the raw material and man the shaping force.14 She has more recently shifted the

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