Bard College at Simon's Rock



The primary focus of my study is to expand the realm of inquiry into sexual differentiation and perceptions of the female body in classical Greece, to include an in-depth examination of sources aside from scientific texts. As I have summarized, much work has been done in examining how the female body was treated in works of medical writing and biology. Although this work has been done, however, I feel it is important to do my own analysis of the scientific works, in order to situate my position on the viewpoints represented in these texts vis-à-vis that of other scholars, and to compare the perceptions represented to those that I analyze through other, non-scientific sources.

The most significant sources on the nature of the body from the classical period are, as mentioned, the medical writings of the Hippocratic corpus and the biological writings of Aristotle. Although there is other writing out of the life sciences that come out of Greece from later antiquity, where the classical period is concerned, these are the two sets of texts that shape the scientific viewpoint on the body. The most significant question concerning the viewpoints represented by these texts is how differently each of the corpora portrays women’s bodies and men’s bodies. On one side of the debate is the claim that in classical Greek scientific thought, men and women were perceived to inhabit the same kind of body that simply differed in degree of perfection. On the other side, a significant distinction is seen between the viewpoint of the Hippocratics and that of Aristotle, assigning the former perception only to Aristotle, whereas the Hippocratics are considered to have seen woman as “a radically different animal from man in structure and processes.”[1]

Thomas Laqueur makes the earlier claim. He writes that throughout antiquity, the male and female bodies were seen as relatively similar. He believes that in this period, thought about the body was dominated by a “metaphysics of hierarchy in the representation of woman in relation to man.” By his estimation, the sexes were thought to merely represent different manifestations of the same body, and were “arrayed according to their degree of metaphysical perfection…along an axis whose telos was male.”[2] This is Laqueur’s “one-sex/flesh model” of historical perceptions of sexual differentiation. He makes no distinction between the viewpoints of the Hippocratics or Aristotle, but this seems to be primarily because he uses only a very few passages from the Hippocratic corpus in order to make his point. Of course, his arguments are based on antiquity as a whole, rather than zeroed in on classical Greece as mine are, so his approach is somewhat different; it should not be particularly surprising that I do not join with his position in this debate.

Lesley Dean-Jones and Helen King (classicists as opposed to Laqueur, an early modern historian) both take a position that rather sharply distinguishes the Hippocratic position sexual differentiation from that of Aristotle. They argue for the existence of, in the vocabulary of Laqueur, a “two-sex/flesh model” in classical antiquity as represented by the Hippocratic corpus. In this model, man and woman are of two completely separate, incommensurable bodies, distinct in their flesh, physical nature, and physiological processes. Both Dean-Jones and King, however, also maintain that there is a marked departure from this model in Aristotle; by their argumentation, the scientific view of the body was not uniform in classical antiquity. I agree with the general point made by the two scholars, and will demonstrate in this chapter the distinction between the perceptions of the Hippocratics and Aristotle.

Throughout my study, I will consider the question of what this divergence in opinion on the sexed body represents. Aristotle’s work is contemporary with only that of the very latest Hippocratic authors; does his idea of a sexual “continuum” represent a true change in Greek thought on the body and sexual differentiation? I consider how significant these two models actually are in the question of perceptions of the female body. Dean-Jones, for example, argues that although the Hippocratics and Aristotle believed differently about the extent to which the sexes were distinct, this particular belief was less important than the fact that both saw menstruation as the key differentiator between man and woman. I will explore this question beyond my consideration of the scientific texts, as I delve into literary and philosophical sources for the next chapter and examine how ideas represented in these texts compare to those in the life sciences.

The Hippocratic view of women

Helen King reminds us that “Medicine is not just about ideas; it is about making people feel better.”[3] And certainly the ultimate point of Hippocratic medicine was to heal the sick and injured. At the same time, though, these ideas that King mentions are what the basis for this healing, creating an understanding of the body on which to base an approach to treating it. What was the understanding of the female body – its physical nature, its processes – that drove the approach to healing of the Hippocratic writers? How did this understanding separate women from men? Although what these healers did to treat sick and injured people was ultimately the point of their writing, there is still much discussion about their theories of how the body functioned, and these theories are a significant aspect of how female nature was viewed in classical Greece.

The author of the Hippocratic treatise Diseases of Women (henceforth DW), the corpus’s gynecological text of perhaps the broadest scope, lamented:

“At the same time the doctors also make mistakes by not learning the apparent cause through accurate questioning, but they proceed to heal [women] as though they were dealing with men’s diseases. I have already seen many women die from just this kind of suffering. But at the outset one must ask accurate questions about the cause. For the healing of the diseases of women differs greatly from the healing of men’s diseases.” (DW 1.62).

While this perspective is not common to all the texts in the corpus, it still represents the approach that a large number of its authors seem to have taken to medical treatment of the sexes, particularly in the gynecological works. It shows a view of female nature that separates it distinctly from the male, providing a justification for the very existence of a distinct gynecology. While it would be unreasonable to expect a completely unified view of the physiology of women (or indeed of any particular medical concern) throughout the entire corpus, certain theories that influenced approaches to healing do dominate over others. King points out, “Creating an overview of ‘Hippocratic gynaecology’ is an artifice which always risks falsifying its object; however, even in antiquity an attempt was made to define the main characteristics of a Hippocratic approach to the body.”[4] Although the corpus is somewhat disparate because of the varied authors, dates, and geographical origins within Greece, there is still enough agreement (to a greater or lesser extent) to make it possible to attempt to create a picture of a “Hippocratic view of women.”[5]

G.E.R. Lloyd considers the question of how differently male and female patients are treated in various treatises of the corpus. He points out that several of the texts are for various reasons primarily concerned with the treatment of male patients, and thus pay little attention to the differences in treating female patients for the same maladies; these texts include On Fractures, On Joints, and On Wounds in the Head.[6] The reason for this seems to be that most of the injuries described in these texts were the sort that, in classical Greece, would normally have been sustained by men as a result of battle or heavy exercise. Lloyd questions why the authors of these treatises did not consider whether women would have a hard time enduring some of the more violent treatments described in the texts, or how certain injuries may have incite different emotions in men and women. This lack of consideration for differing psychological concerns among the sexes, however, does not necessarily imply that these authors did not consider any differences between the sexes at all, but rather seems to imply that these kinds of concerns were less crucial to these healers than those of a distinctly physical nature. The Hippocratic healers were, after all, chiefly concerned with bodies, not with emotions, and the lack of consideration for them does not mean that these authors failed to conceive of any difference in treating men and women. These texts were simply focused on injuries that were more commonly sustained by men and, because the writing comes from such an androcentric society, they were most likely less concerned about the rarer occurrences of women who sustained them. They didn’t discuss the differences because the differences were not important to them, not because they were nonexistent in their authors’ minds.

This observation is at odds with Laqueur’s claim that in antiquity, being male or female “was to hold a social rank, a place in society, to assume a cultural role, not to be organically one or the other of two incommensurable sexes.”[7] It seems that in Hippocratic medicine, there was somewhat less concern with the cultural roles that allegedly created the notion of sex, for their concerns with the differences in treating men and women are consistently seen to be more about their physiologies than about how classical Greek society expected them to react to their treatment. As Lloyd elaborates, concern for the differences between the sexes in healing actually is expressed in most of the writings of the Hippocratic corpus, even though the extent varied. And these concerns are almost always about the anatomy and physiology of men’s and women’s bodies. It is not just how the social expectations in approaching male and female patients that concerned the doctor above, who emphasized that healing men’s diseases was different from healing those of women’s; he was actually more concerned with the physical differences in their bodies that required specialized sets of knowledge for healing each sex.

The author of DW explicitly defined the differences between male and female bodies. He viewed women as being of a flesh that was “more spongelike and softer than a man’s” which therefore “draws moisture both with more speed and in greater quantity from the belly than does the body of a man” (DW 1.1). Conversely, “a man has more solid flesh than a woman” (DW 1.1). Though both were considered to be made of flesh, they were of completely different types of it, suggesting totally separate, unrelated bodies. Women were porous like wool, absorbing moisture readily and filling up easily, whereas men were like woven cloth, denser and more solid.

The characterization of male and female flesh was described not only in DW but also in the Hippocratic treatise Glands. Not a specifically gynecological text but rather one that describes only a certain feature of human anatomy, the author of this work still felt it important to point out the differences between male and female bodies, because the nature of each sex’s body affect how its glands worked. Like the author of DW, the author of Glands said that “le corps femelle est lâche, spongieux et comme une laine soit à l’œil soit au toucher; de la sorte, ce qui est lâche et mou ne laisse pas aller l’humidité” (translate? The female body is loose, spongy and like a piece of wool to the eye and to touch; of this kind, that which is loose and soft is not going to lay out moisture) (Glands 16). Make mention of flesh in Nature of Child (see D-J p. 55) if you ever get that book from ILL?

Although there is not much more explicit accord with this description of female flesh in other Hippocratic writings, the author of DW believed that the soft, spongy nature of female flesh was the basis of female anatomy that contributed to other distinctive characteristics of a woman’s body – characteristics that are explicitly described in quite a number of Hippocratic texts. First, in explaining that woman’s flesh was soft, the author said that it “draws moisture more readily and with greater speed;” in other words, it tended to be filled with wetness. As Ann Ellis Hanson points out, wetness is perhaps the most universally pervasive characteristic of the female body described in the Hippocratic corpus.[8] The way male flesh was described in DW, it seems that female nature is wet in contrast to a drier male physique. Hanson explains that “Hippocratics fastened upon wetness as the prime characteristic of female nature [because of]…the enduring popularity of the notion that human bodies were made up of constituent bodily humors,” which had distinctively opposed characteristics of wetness and dryness, coldness and warmth.[9] By painting female nature as wet and male nature as dry, the Hippocratics portrayed two incommensurable bodies of two distinct sexes.

In the treatise Regimen, its author described the formation of males and females (implying their development in the womb). He wrote that females, by nature “inclining more to water, grow from foods, drinks, and pursuits that are cold, moist and gentle…if a man would beget a girl, he must use a regimen inclining to water” (Regimen 1.27). Later, he explains that in all species are “the females moister and colder” (1.34). In part 5 of the text Aphorisms, which is largely concerned with gynecological matters, the author described many instances in which an irregular loss of some form of moisture would cause ill health, suggesting that losing wetness was seen as contrary and harmful to female nature. For example, diarrhea (5.34) and bleeding (5.31) during pregnancy were thought to be indicative of an upcoming miscarriage, and excessive menstruation was deemed to be a cause of disease (5.57).

Menstruation was another aspect of female physiology that was critical to the nature of women, according to most of the Hippocratics. In fact, the whole of female heath was thought to be dependent on proper menstruation. A “women’s body becomes sickly” when “the menses do not flow” (Nature of the Child 4), both “too copious” and “suppressed” menstruation caused certain diseases (Aph. 5.57), and in DW it was observed that the longer menstruation was suppressed, the worse became a woman’s symptoms (1.2). The valuation of menstruation even goes as far as to lead to a claim that women whose menstruation is insufficiently short (“less than three days or is meager”) had a “masculine appearance” and were not “concerned about bearing children nor do they become pregnant” (DW 1.6); in other words, they were less feminine. That their flesh was soft and absorbed moisture more readily meant that there was an excess of blood that needed to be evacuated every month, but women were apparently thought to be of an extremely delicate complexion, for if this evacuation of blood and other moisture was in any way irregular, their bodies came into the way of serious danger. On the other hand, proper menstruation was a sort of natural protection for women that made them less seriously prone to disease; for example, the author of Epidemics said that in a bout of a particular illness, he knew of “no woman who died if any of these symptoms showed themselves properly” (1.16), with one of the symptoms explicitly mentioned being menstruation.

Because of their wet nature and the resulting need to menstruate, women were thought to be weak and delicate, unable to perform much hard work. Though menstruation was considered by the author of DW1 to be a positive thing because it purged women of their excesses of moisture, it was a symbol of the woman’s weakness because it was seen as an absolute necessity to prevent pain and suffering. But the logic turns out to be a bit circular, as one author claimed that “inaction moistens and weakens the body…labor dries and strengthens [it]” (Regimen 2.60), and another says, “The fact that a man works harder than a woman contributes greatly to” his strength and his dryness, “for hard work draws off some of the fluid” (DW 1.1). Were women perceived moist and thus susceptible to pain because they did not work hard, or were they unable to work hard because they were moist and prone to pain? Here is one of the few places in which the social and biological cross each other in describing the nature of women in the Hippocratic corpus. Surely there were women in classical Greek society (though probably not those of the wealthy and privileged classes) who worked hard. Did the Hippocratics in this instance impose cultural expectations of women on their assessment of female nature?

In the end it seems that the idea that the female nature made it more difficult for women to perform hard labor was present in the Hippocratic corpus, and this is why they were less active and did not work as hard as men did. The womb, which was thought to wander about the body and cause various kinds of distress as a result of this, contributed to a woman’s vulnerability; the author of DW wrote that for some women “the womb falls toward the lower back or toward the hips because of hard work [emphasis mine] or lack of food, and produces pain” (1.7). He also explained that since a man’s body “is not soft, it does not become overstrained nor is it heated up by fullness, as in the case of a woman” (1.1). But men who did not work hard and were out of training were thought to

”suffer these [fatigue] pains after the slightest exercise [because]…untrained people, whose flesh is moist, after exercise undergo a considerable melting” (Regimen 2.66). Again the logic becomes circular as any state of being underworked is depicted as a cause of pain and weakness.

The point made in Regimen 2.66 actually did eventually reinforce the idea that the nature of female flesh and of a woman’s body caused difficulties with work. The author claims that

“whatever of this melted substance passes out as sweat, or is purged away with the breath, causes pain only to the part of the body that has been emptied contrary to custom; but such part of it as remains behind causes pain not only to the part of the body emptied contrary to custom, but also to the part that has received the moisture, as it is not congenial to the body but hostile to it. It tends to gather not at the fleshless, but at the fleshy parts of the body…”

This explanation emphasizes not only that moisture (the primary characteristic of the female body) was thought to contribute to weakness, for this moisture was hostile to the body, but also that it was believed moisture gathered in the most fleshy parts of the body – which in women was essentially their whole body. Although women are not explicitly mentioned in this passage, what is said here directly implies that in Hippocratic medicine, the wet and soft, fleshy nature of their body was thought to contribute to a female inability to work and a tendency towards pain and fragility.

Although characteristics of moisture and weakness tended to be assigned to female nature in the Hippocratic corpus, these were never treated as traits exclusive to women, nor were they completely universal. Indeed, in many treatises it is acknowledged that there were “manly girls” who were dry and had menstrual irregularities, as well as “feminized boys” who were unusually wet and had difficulty with strenuous work (except this might not exactly be what you’re describing, so try to look into this description/claim a little more).[10] As I described above, women who menstruated too little were said to look masculine, not care about bearing children, and be unable to conceive (DW 1.6). They were not unhealthy, but in fact robust, stronger – more manly. Yet they were still thought of as women, despite their masculinity, because they still were soft and moist by nature; the difference was that these characteristics were unusually lesser in them as compared to other women. Being masculine was an irregularity and an affliction, but it did not mean that women were no longer women, because the essence of their flesh and their female anatomy could not change, despite abnormalities.

Similarly, not all men worked hard, even though there was a cultural expectation that they ought to, and being untrained meant their flesh became moist, as described in Regimen 2.66; however, their manhood was not thought to be affected by this moisture. They might have been considered to be less masculine, but they remained in a male state of being, even if it was not “male enough.” Need to elaborate on this, especially in light of Hanson (1992) p.44; why on earth does she not have specific citations here? I can’t find that to which she refers and so I can’t really elaborate on this (salient!) point without quotes. Might have to rewrite (or remove? I hope not) this in order to accommodate what I am able to find in my sources. The point is that feminine men are still men in the nature of their flesh, just as masculine women are still women.

Although obviously women and men were both considered to be a)nqrw/poi (anthropoi, humans), women’s different type of flesh, wet nature, need for menstruation, and general fragility all suggest that in Hippocratic medicine, men and women were conceived of as two separate forms of human being. Female nature was defined by bodily processes very specific to women, and there was little concern for any differences between the sexes that we today would consider sociocultural; the Hippocratic gunh\ (gyne, woman) was defined first and foremost by the nature of her body. This is not to say that social expectations of the female role did not show up at all in Hippocratic writings about women. Indeed, as Hanson argues, “the medical writers’ woman is most often assigned the role of wife and mother,” for many of the Hippocratic authors advised that sexual intercourse and reproduction were necessary for the health of a woman, enforcing just this idealized role that Hanson describes.[11] Nonetheless, despite this, the construction of female nature in the Hippocratic corpus is based on certain qualities which they found characteristic of the female body. The distinction between male and female in Hippocratic medicine was primarily a physical one.

Aristotle’s continuum of sexual differentiation

One claim that has little dispute amongst scholars studying the body in classical Greece is that Aristotle viewed the male and female sexes as being opposite ends of a continuum of possibility for one body. For Aristotle, man and woman were relatively similar, variants of one basic model of human being. In other words, his theory was Laqueur’s “one-sex model.” As has been demonstrated by the evidence from the Hippocratic corpus, this view could not have dominated throughout antiquity, as Laqueur claims. At the very least, though, Aristotle represents a different strand of thought out of classical Greece about sexual differentiation, and because of his lasting influence on western culture in general, his perspective is not insignificant.

Aristotle’s belief in “one sex,” or the idea that man and woman were different permutations of the same ideal, seems odd when one considers how infamous he is for sexism in much of his writing, as well as his belief in the inferiority of women. Aristotle defined sex, however, in terms of the absence or presence of certain characteristics, and thus the superior characteristics of man were absolutely vital to the definition of him; he would not be man if he did not possess these superior characteristics. Thus although it seems odd that Aristotle would have believed in such a similarity between man and woman when he also believed so firmly in the inferiority of the female, this similarity actually rendered the differences between the sexes as paramount in importance, and reinforced the prominence of the superior characteristics of man.

Aristotle was straightforward in his assertion that “the female is as it were a deformed male” (Generation of Animals 737a28), as well as “an infertile male” who was “female on account of inability of a sort, viz., it lacks the power to concoct semen” (GA 728a18-20). In other words, the only thing that defined woman as female for him was her lack of maleness, rather than her distinctly womanlike characteristics. Aristotle saw the adult male as the standard of the human form, and any other type of person was mere variation thereof.[12] For every characteristic of the female that he described, there was an analogous male characteristic that was in some way better – and vice-versa.

Aristotle constructed the opposition of male and female both physically and psychically. He felt that the female genitals were “opposite in structure to that of the male: the part below the pubes is receding, and does not protrude as in the male” (History of Animals 493b2-4), implying an inversion of the sexual organs. He also argued that “the upper and front parts of the males are better, stronger, and more fully equipped than the females’, in some females the rear and lower parts are stronger” (HA 538b3-5), again characterizing the female body as an inversion of the male.

Aristotle also saw menstrual blood and semen as analogous, with the former being the less complete form of the latter. Both were considered to be “residues” from nourishment that start in the form of blood not used up by the body. However, the female as the “weaker creature,” although she was thought to produce residue, made one that was “greater in amount and less thoroughly concocted…must of necessity be a volume of bloodlike fluid” (GA 726b31-727a2). Aristotle took this as evidence “that the menses are less concocted, as you would expect, he says, in the weaker and colder sex, for, being colder, women are less able to concoct the useful residue.”[13] This analogy was not so much representative of an inversion in the bodies of the sexes as it was of Aristotle’s view that women were less perfect and less able than men, “female on account of inability.”

With regards to their bodies, Aristotle did not view men and women as being two distinct types of people with separate bodies, but rather one kind of person with slightly different physical characteristics. A man and a woman were significantly different from one another, but not enough to make them different types of people. Just like a fat man and a thin man were essentially the same kind of being with their major difference being in respect to weight, a man and a woman were the same kind of physical being, and their major differences were in respect to “privy parts” (protruding versus receding), strength (front and upper versus hind and lower), and residue (fully concocted, minimal in quantity, and useful versus unfinished, abundant, and not very useful).

Aristotle repeated this theme of opposition where characteristics of disposition were concerned, as well. He asserted that “females are softer, more vicious, less simple, more impetuous, more attentive to the feeding of the young, while the males on the contrary [emphasis mine] are more spirited, wilder, simpler, less cunning… these characters [are] in virtually all animals, but they are all the more evident in those that are possessed of character and especially man” (HA 608b1-7). As a biologist, he paraded these traits as “natural” characteristics, even when he said that “a wife is more compassionate than a husband and more given to tears, but also more jealous and complaining and more apt to scold and fight” (HA 608b8-11). It is also significant to note that although the Balme translation uses “wife” and “husband,” the actual Greek words in the text are gyne and aner, which are just as likely to mean man and woman; the context of jealousy and scolding and fighting could suggest a situation of marriage, but this is not necessarily so. What is important is that Aristotle ascribed the very nature of a woman to what we today would consider personality traits; although these same characterizations of women’s personalities still exist now, it is widely acknowledged that they are stereotypes in a sea of tremendous variation. Aristotle acknowledged no such thing, but argued for these traits as defining of woman.

In many ways, Aristotle did have a similar perspective on the body of the female to that which was represented in Hippocratic medicine. He observed that “in the male the flesh is firm, whereas in woman it is spongy and full of passages” (HA 493a14-16), contrasting flesh exactly as did the Hippocratic author of Diseases of Women. He also claimed that “blood is thicker and blacker in females, and while it is less plentiful on the surface it is more plentiful inwardly” (HA 521a23-25); although the Hippocratics did not focus much on the quality of blood in men versus women, Aristotle was definitely in agreement with them in his claim that the female body was more filled with blood.

However, a few similarities between how the two viewed female anatomy do not suggest that they constructed female nature in the same way. I would contest Laqueur’s claim that “Aristotle…did not need facts about menstruation or metabolism to locate women in the world order”[14] because it is clear that Aristotle was at least somewhat concerned with the physical and anatomical differences between the sexes, and did to some extent situate men and women in terms of certain physical characteristics. I would also, however, be inclined to disagree with Dean-Jones, who argues that menstruation was the “linchpin” for Aristotle’s theory of how men and women differed,[15] as it is clear that he concerned himself with quite a range of features, both physical and psychical (better adjective, maybe?) but the ultimate difference was not about one anatomical or physiological aspect of the female body, but was constructed somewhat apart from individual features.

Aristotle’s concept of sexual differentiation was defined by opposition of men and women in all respects, and a concept of a “continuum” of sex. The most telling evidence of this is that he believed in the possibility of “moving” along this continuum in, at least, animals; although he did not make explicit statements on the mutability of sex in humans, so many of his observations on the sexes were common between animals and humans that even if he did not think that humans could explicitly change their sex, it is clear that he believed that sex was not an absolute and unchangeable state of being, but rather an expression of degree of certain characteristics. He claimed that

“through undergoing a change in small parts animals appear to have a major difference in their whole bodily nature. It shows in the case of castrated animals: for after a small part has been mutilated the animal changes over towards the female; so that it is clear that in the animal’s original constitution too if some tiny part changes, provided that it is an originative kind of part, one becomes female and another male, and if it is wholly destroyed the animal becomes neither.” (HA 589b31-590a5)

And also said that “gelded animals show a change of voice in opposite directions: they really change over into the female state” (HA 545a19-21).

This principle was repeated in GA 715b5-12, where Aristotle developed the claim even further, asserting that “it is clear, then, that ‘the male’ and ‘the female’ are a principle. At any rate, when animals undergo a change in respect of that wherein they are male and female, many other things about them undergo an accompanying change, which suggests that a principle undergoes some alteration.” The “change” he referred to here was, again, castration, suggesting that taking away one aspect of an animal’s male state caused a rapid decline in other “masculine” characteristics. We do not see any claims from Aristotle about the possibility of changing from female to male, however, implying that a movement along this sex continuum could only be downward. This only reinforces the claim that Aristotle found men inherently superior to women; although a male who was “damaged” could degrade to the female state, a woman could not “improve” to the male state, as she was simply incapable of it.

Aristotle’s sexual continuum placed women in such a position that they were defined both physically and psychically as the opposite of men, at the other end of this continuum. He did not zero in on how different the sexes were physically, but rather used the physical differences as only part of the supporting evidence for their lower place in the hierarchy of perfection in humans. That Aristotle saw sex as mutable at least in animals suggests that for him there was neither a masculine woman nor a feminized man; once the characteristics began to favor any one side obviously, the sex could switch. Woman and man were not labels that encompassed the whole of one’s flesh and being but rather the manifestation of the appropriate characteristics, and thus were variations of the same base.

Comparison and summary

From the analyses of each group of writings, it is clear that the Hippocratics and Aristotle had rather different ideas of sexual differentiation. The Hippocratic authors constructed a distinct female nature that separated women from men; women were composed of a different kind of flesh than men, one that was innately wet, and their physiological processes created a body that was weaker, less resistant, and more prone to pain than that of a man. One Hippocratic author asserted that treating women was different from treating men because their very diseases were different; their bodies were so separate that women became ill in ways that men simply did not. Other authors suggested that even when a male or female person possessed characteristics that were rather atypical for his or her respective sex, this person’s sex was not mutable; an underworked (and thus overly wet) man was still a man, albeit unusual, while a masculine girl was still a girl.

Aristotle, on the other hand, described sex as a mutable characteristic more than once. For him, sex was similar to how Laqueur described it: the possessing of specific but flexible characteristics, rather than an ontological category. Although he never related any incidences where humans could change their sex (as he did with some animals), he still arrayed sex as a continuum, from female up to male, where the former was an inherently inferior, “deformed” variable of the latter. Women were for him the people lesser in degrees of superiority than were men. Aristotle did identify certain physical characteristics of woman that were opposed to those of man, but they were manifestations of her lesser perfection, her place on the inferior end of the continuum: she menstruated because her body was unable to fully concoct residue into semen, she had more blood which meant she was unable to put much of it to good use.

These two schools of thought on sexual differentiation in classical Greece did not radically differ with regards to how they viewed women’s bodies. Indeed, there were many similarities between the two theories about their bodies, including the nature of their flesh, their wetness and excess of blood, and the important differentia of menstruation. But Hippocratic medicine and Aristotelian biology ultimately were at variance with respect to how much the female body, constructed of its soft, blood-filled flesh, actually differed from the male, and what those differences meant. In Hippocratic medicine, they meant a totally separate type of human with a body that required of healers a specialized approach; for Aristotle, the differences were only a manifestation of woman’s inherent inferiority.

In the next chapter, I will be exploring how the female body is represented outside of the realm of science in classical Greece, but throughout the chapter these two portraits of female nature from the natural sciences will be used as marks of comparison. How differently are women and men portrayed in literature and philosophy (etc etc), and how does the genre of each non-scientific source affect the representation? Is there any real unity amongst these various representations, or are the viewpoints jumbled? If there is no unity, can we really say that any one of these viewpoints truly represents the “popular” ideology on female nature? (I know I need to tone down my excesses of rhetorical questions, and I will in the final copy, but right now as I am drafting, this is the best way for me to formulate what my main ideas are. They are not necessarily a method of explanation and argumentation, just one of outlining!)

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[1] Lesley Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994), 225.

[2] Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990), 6.

[3] Helen King, Hippocrates Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1998), 21-22.

[4] Helen King, Hippocrates Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1998), 21.

[5] Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science, 113.

[6] G.E.R. Lloyd, Science, Folklore, and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), 63-64.

[7] Laqueur, Making Sex, 8.

[8] Ann Ellis Hanson, “Conception, Gestation, and the Origin of Female Nature in the Corpus Hippocraticum” in Helios, Vol. 19, Nos. 1 and 2 (1992), 36.

[9] Ibid., 36.

[10] Hanson, “Conception, Gestation, and the Origin of Female Nature,” 44.

[11] Ann Ellis Hanson, “The Medical Writers’ Woman” in Before Sexuality by David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990), 334.

[12] King, Hippocrates’ Woman, 10.

[13] Lloyd, Science, Folklore, and Ideology, 97,.

[14] Laqueur, Making Sex, 29.

[15] Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science, 225.

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