Women

Galen’s references to nurses and midwives remind us that some of the alternatives to a doctor using Greek medicine were female (Demand 1994). While no writings by women survive in this field, Galen attributes some recipes to women, and Pliny refers to other named women healers (Flemming 2007). For example, Galen gives us “Spendousa’s remedy for pus in the ears”; using pig bile and Attic honey, this does not seem any different from the remedies used by Greek men (Comp. Med. Loc 3.1, 12.631 Kuhn; Flemming 2000).

The sheer amount of recipes in the Hippocratic treatises on women’s diseases has sometimes been seen as evidence for a female origin for this material (von Staden 1992a; Dean-Jones 1994; H. King 1998). However, other than in its quantity, the material is very similar to what is found elsewhere in the corpus. Women are also described as the source for some of the more esoteric claims of the Hippocratic texts, for example the comment that prostitutes know when they have conceived and can make the conceptus fall out at will (On Flesh 19); this recalls the claim of the anonymous writer of History of Animals 10 that women emit “seed” after erotic dreams (HA 634b29-31; 635a34-36). But rather than real women, these may be imaginary women made up to impress one’s fellow doctors (H. King 1995).

In response to any suggestion that women in the ancient world had their own, separate, medical knowledge handed down from mother to daughter, we may consider the story of the slave entertainer who finds she is pregnant and tells her owner, given in the Hippocratic On Generation/Nature of the Child. Far from having access to “women’s lore,” here the (female) owner of the girl does not know how to solve the problem and goes to her kinsman, the Hippocratic writer of the text. As in the idealized medicine of Rome, medicine functions within the family, and the owner has no hesitation in giving her relative, the doctor, access to this unrelated patient. This recalls the “Hippocratic Oath” and its quasi-familial structure, with each doctor enjoined to treat his teachers’ family as his kin. The “Oath” also reveals considerable unease at giving non-family members access to the women of the family, described elsewhere as “possessions very precious indeed” (The Doctor 1); it seems that this is of less concern where the woman is a slave.