As I mentioned before, there was pluralism to Greek medicine. In the rare situation that a woman was given the choice of practitioner (whereas usually the male head of household would choose for her), she would probably opt to go to one of several female healers, whose existence we can glimpse only through critical references in Hippocratic and Aristotelian texts. A female healer is referred to as maia, literally ‘granny’, who was supposedly a nosy and drunken bawd, according to the Greek males who did not want to admit a female practitioners as a doctor, or iatros. While the aforementioned Greek texts present an image of learned physician versus empirics and quacks, female healers might have used less abstract and more ‘founded’ practices than reported in the Hippocratic Corpus, but we cannot know this because there is no evidence to the contrary.
When not ignoring the idea of women possessing medical knowledge, medical texts from the Greco-Roman world often dismissed them instead. Often women’s words were doubted much more than a male patient’s report would be doubted; it is reported, for example, that ‘sometimes… the women do not recognise when they are sick’ (Women I, chapter 62). As cited above, a medical examination might be carried out by the patient (who must be sufficiently alert to communicate), an assistant (who must be experienced in the matter in order to make an accurate interpretation) or the male doctor himself. If a female patient presented more symptoms or illnesses than a male doctor wanted to, or could, treat, he might use his status as a man (in possession of superior knowledge to the woman) and a doctor to make a diagnosis more appropriate to his medical beliefs and skills. In this way, the male doctor used a status quo external to the medical sphere to ‘win’ the duel of words within it.
It is important to remember that the authors of these medical texts had a vested interest in portraying their concept of medical healing as rational, compared with the ‘quacks’, because the ‘audience or readership to which these treatises are principally addressed consists of the writers’ own male colleagues and pupils’ (Lloyd, female sex). In other words, in a society where male dominance and superiority was so pervasive, and where competition between forms of medical healing was high, an author of a treatise could lose reputation amongst his peers, pupils and patients for supporting the medical beliefs and knowledge of women healers. Women (as patients or healers) did not hold enough authority within most of the forms of medicine to be cited as support for any one medical ideology. Female patients were even referred to anonymously in case histories in the Epidemics (e.g. Epidemics III, case 9) or only in association with the male head of the household (e.g. Epidemics III, cases 10 and 11), compared with naming men like ‘Autonomus’ and ‘Hecason’ (Epidemics V, cases 27 and 30 respectively), in case the author was presumed to be using female reports as substantiating his ideology. ‘In general, the social status [of female patients] varies, as does that of the males… but only a very small proportion of the women are named’ (Lloyd, 1983).
One element of medicine, which is less skewed than others by the male bias of medical literature, is the negative connotations associated with women in relation to men. For the Hippocratics, woman is ‘a radically different animal from man in structure and processes’, while for Aristotle, she is ‘a substandard man’ (Dean-Jones, 1994). Plato suggests women are just as capable as men in becoming philosophers, but in The Republic he asserts women are weaker than males, and declares his belief in the notion of transmigration in Timaeus: ‘all those creatures generated as men who proved themselves cowardly and spent their lives in wrong-doing were transformed, at their second incarnation, into women’. More specifically within the realm of medicine, women are connected to with evil and are held responsible for illness and disease across the world. According to Greek mythology, in Hesiod’s Works and Days, ‘before [the creation of women] the tribes of men lived on earth free from evils and hard toil and grievous diseases… but the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered dire sorrows for men’ (chapters 70-105). However, if illness and disease are inherently tied up with the presence of women, all medical treatment should be concerned primarily with them; for curing the origins of disease (Pandora and all women) would remove illness and disease from the rest of society (men).
In Greek mythology, women are often presented much more powerfully than they are in reality, and it may be fear of this potential power that caused Greco-Roman men to exercise more extreme and repulsive treatments upon women (I shall discuss this element of control later in the essay). In the Odyssey, Helen has the power to spike drinks with analgesic: ‘The daughter of Zeus had such cunning drugs, excellent ones that the Egyptian woman… gave her’ (Homer, Odyssey, 4, 219-32). It was assumed women knew about drugs more so than men and were often associated with foreigners in fables, to emphasise the danger of a knowledgeable woman. In Foucauldian terms, knowledge and power are synonymous, and Greco-Roman society could not accept the role of powerful woman providing healing to a male patient. This was seen as ‘deeply unnatural’, as presented in suspicions of the ‘woman who prepares healing drugs for her husband’s household’ who ‘may also prepare poisons, and the woman who cares for a sick man may be able to influence his behaviour to her own ends’ (King, 1998). Paradoxically, the reverse (a man in control of a woman, being able to influence her behaviour to his own ends) was not seen as hypocritical in Greco-Roman society. More to the point, a real woman could never aspire to the ideology of the mythical woman because she was inherently inferior, substandard and incapacitated. To be a woman was an unfortunate circumstance but it was her own fault and required severer medical treatment as a result.
Such severe treatment would often take place in the form of excrement therapy. Among the variously negative views that early Greek culture held, there was a ‘recurrent, well-known tradition according to which women are exceptionally susceptible to impurity and dirt’ (Von Staden, 1992). This concept of pure and male versus soiled and female (the causes of illness and disorder) were available in temple medicine and the Hippocratic Corpus; the common treatment in both cases was purification, katharsis. The use of animal faeces is unusual, however, in its prescription by ‘the Hippocratic healing hand’ only for women (Von Staden, 1992). Excrement therapy follows the naturalistic homeopathic notion of treating like with like: the female body was dirty, non-conforming to social ideals (being a man) and held the origins of disease, so it ought to be treated with bodily dirt that also caused disease and disorder in society, i.e. excrement. Even in temple medicine, male healers used the notion of cleanliness to suppress females in society: ‘before uttering a prophecy, the priestess of Apollo chews laurel’, which was considered cleansing, because ‘prophecy requires purity, while womanhood… entails susceptibility to impurity’ (Von Staden, 1992).
Alongside the inherent inferiority of womanhood in society, medical treatment of women was heavily influenced by an activity in which men, ‘who had no part in the experience, were reluctant to vouchsafe women any sphere of superiority’ (Dean-Jones, 1994): menstruation. Dean-Jones deems this to be the linchpin of Hippocratic and Aristotelian theories regarding women as different from men. Male healers could only base their theories on the functioning of the female body on ‘the fluids women excreted’ (Dean-Jones, 1994), because it was unlikely that women would partake, never mind be injured, in sports nor battle, and dissection of a female corpse simply would not occur in this period. The monthly loss of blood was tied up with social ideals of reproduction and authority – although it is interesting to consider how bloodletting fits into this – and, again, women’s lack of social conformity meant men were either overwhelmingly negative about it, or refused to give it even the slightest significance by problematizing it. Hippocratic authors went as far as denouncing any sort of social taboo for a man to have intercourse with his wife during menstruation, because acknowledging menstruation (as temple medicine did, requiring women not to enter shrines during or soon after) would create an arena of experience in which women were superior. Male authors realised men could not menstruate, hence they created the notion that men had to have nosebleeds: an unusual model of males being built on a conception of women, rather than the other way around.
Instead of focusing on menstruation, male authors heavily channelled their interests into women’s reproductive role, essential to ‘the survival and perpetuation of the Greek male, his property and his polis’ (Von Staden, 1992). Infertility was seen as a ‘disorder of exceptional difficulty’ for a woman, primarily because of the ‘ultimate danger to the male citizen and his community’, but also because this was almost the only useful and necessary role the woman could provide. Of course, there was little recognition that ‘failure to conceive may be due to the male as much as to the female’ (Lloyd, 1983) and pregnancy was seen as a treatment for various female maladies. One Hippocratic author orders young girls of a marriageable age ‘to have intercourse with a man as soon as possible’ when ill and ‘if they conceive, they become healthy’ (On the Diseases of Young Girls). Intercourse as a treatment for women’s complaints corresponds to the general ‘male-oriented view that the chief role of women was simply to produce children’ (Lloyd, 2003), yet even in this field women were not acknowledged to be experts nor knowledgeable. The author of Eighth Month Child is of the view that ‘women who say they suffer most during the eighth month of pregnancy speak correctly… yet women do not speak of the days in the same manner, nor do they understand them; they are mistaken because it does not always happen in the same way’ (chapters 6 and 7). Had there been literary sources providing the perspectives of women healers and midwives (it is debatable whether the two terms are synonymous), there would, no doubt, have been a counter-argument to this Hippocratic author’s views, but his ideas were probably dispersed into and a result of general social norms. Male healers had to exert their authority into the gynaecological arena, following on from the myth about Zeus giving birth to Athena from his head: the male mythmakers replaced the worship of the Great Goddess, mother of all growing things, with that of the male sky-god Zeus, as if to say a woman was not necessary to bring forth new life. The easiest way for a woman to win anything in this battle over reproduction was to play by the rules: if she fulfilled the expectation of filling her household with male heirs, she could improve her status within the domestic sphere; if not, she was relegated to being ‘barren’ or ‘sterile’ and, thereby, useless, because the preoccupation with pregnancy and generation was both medical and socio-political.
Another aspect of medicine where socio-political views influenced treatment and therapy was the control of women. Male healers were likened to politicians ‘curing’ social disease. A woman who, by the very nature of being female, caused social disorder was labelled medically-diseased. Doctors did not distinguish between physical and mental disease. The Peri Parthenion treatise On the Diseases of Young Girls suggests women are more affected by daimones (Lloyd, 2003) than men because ‘the female nature is less courageous and weaker’.
In concordance, naturalistic (Hippocratic) medicine claims that signs of madness include women shouting obscenities (Epidemics III, case 1), women being unable to restrain themselves (Epidemics III, case 11), women being too silent (Epidemics III, case 15), an insensitivity to pain (Aphorisms II, section 6) and blood around a woman’s nipples (Aphorisms V, section 14). The first thing to notice is the gender specificity of these ‘signs’; in other words, a woman was more liable to be diagnosed as mad rather than a man, because the words specify a woman acting in a socially-inappropriate manner. The second point of interest is how each statement refers to a woman acting in a way that men consider inappropriate because they cannot easily control it. In medical treatment, the physical and psychological control of the patient is deemed most important. While Celsus might suggest starvation and flogging as a cure for madness, Caelius Aurenianus of the fourth century C.E., a Methodist, would promote milder and more simplistic remedies, such as the induction of love (On Chronic Diseases); either way, both treatments are designed to control the woman’s behaviour to fit with social norms.
As disease implies a disordered state, Plato’s Phaedrus concedes ‘it was when they were mad that the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona achieved so much for… when sane they did little or nothing’. This is acknowledgement of the prophetic/oracular skills that women may possess, yet this recognition comes with the precondition that they are mentally diseased, to prevent contemporary women aspiring to be as outspoken as the priestesses. Such psychological control, the fear of being an outcast in society, was probably more effective than any other treatment for ‘madness’; naturalistic medical healers could only provide speculative physical causes for mental diseases (just like doctors of our contemporary society) which offered little comfort to men who were worried about their uncontrollable wives, daughters and servants.
Finally, Greek sacred laws regarded giving birth, defecating and urinating as three things against which there is a taboo on sacred ground. ‘Varying periods of exclusion from sanctuaries and temples are prescribed after pollution by… giving birth’ (Von Staden, 1992), effectively controlling access to (temple) medicine during an essential female capability of giving birth. In this way, men relegated birth to the category of expulsion of waste: an ordinary, common and universally-dismissible activity, and not a specialised field of expertise in which women could thrive. Personal experience of birth was given little significance compared to the theorising of male medical healers, thereby indirectly controlling access to knowledge, because new mothers did not believe their knowledge had value. Socially – men being synonymous with society – I suppose it did not.
If my discussion in this essay has thrown light on anything, it is to highlight the arena of medical treatment of women (rather than general ‘medicine’) as the actual battleground; female healers, after all, had little or no say in the medical treatment of men. The rivalry between naturalistic doctor and priest of temple medicine was a ‘competition between two radically-opposed paradigms of treatment’ (Lloyd, 2003) that left little room for female healers to gain repute, ‘cultural factors making it seem inappropriate and possibly even dangerous for a sick man to be nursed by a woman’ (King, 1998). The female patient was also pushed into insignificance; hence, sometimes the ‘war’ over women’s bodies excluded women themselves.
Again, my analysis is weakened by the lack of ‘direct access to the woman patients and women healers themselves’ (Lloyd, 1983). If more sources from female healers were in existence, then perhaps we could analyse this ‘war’ more critically. As it is, male healers and scribes had a vested interest in not copying, transmitting or dispersing texts written by women, so we cannot tell how literate the female healers were, never mind any tensions between the sexes. In effect, the medical battleground was hugely unequal because Greco-Roman men had control and dominated the field of scholarly transmission, so any strengths the female healers had are restricted to their contemporary era, and we have little knowledge of their practice. In conclusion, to talk of a ‘war’ between the sexes is misleading: it implies a two-sided argument. As it is, our sources do not let us hear the female perspective with accuracy, and the perception of medicine we can gauge from male texts suggest social norms did not entertain the possibility that women could ‘fight’: their knowledge was not valid compared to male healers, patients and citizens, and it is likely many women were more eager to go along with the social norms than contest them.
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References:
Dean-Jones, L (1994) Women’s bodies in classical Greek science, Oxford: Clarendon Press
King, H (1998) Hippocrates’ woman: reading the female body in ancient Greece, Routledge
Lloyd, G.E.R. (1983) ‘The Female Sex: Medical Treatment and Biological Theories in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.’, in Science, Folklore and Ideology, Cambridge University Press, pp58-110
Lloyd, G.E.R. (2003) In The Grip of Disease: studies in Greek imagination, OUP
Lloyd, G.E.R. (1970) Early Greek science: Thales to Aristotle, London: Chatto and Windus
Von Staden, H (1992) ‘Women and Dirt’, Helios, 19, Spring/Autumn, pp.7-30
