Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece

Students and scholars intrigued by ancient obstetrics and gynecology will first seek such tracts in the Hippocratic corpus, the presumed crown jewel of ancient Greek medical writing. Probing into the English translations (the best are now the eight volumes in the Loeb Classical Library), they will find almost all of the Hippocratic works—except those that consider specifically women’s ailments. If such students are unaware of the Littré edition (in ten volumes, published in Paris [1829–61; reprinted twice in the twentieth century]), they will become puzzled, since much of ancient Greek medical knowledge of women’s diseases emerged from the Hippocratic Diseases of Women, On Young Girls, and several more titles of similar content in the corpus, as found especially in the Littré edition, vol. 8 (Greek text, with facing French translations). The Littré texts (and the rather good translations) contain a rich lode of information on women’s diseases and on general obstetrical problems, and are equally well stocked with lists of drugs, a topic fairly uncommon in the remainder of the Hippocratic corpus. These texts reveal just exactly how obstetrics and gynecology (as we would term them) were perceived, and the theoretical contexts assumed by the anonymous authors.

This most obvious facet of medical practice in any society has now received long-overdue attention from some feminist scholars, the best of whom command the Greek and do not rely completely upon what Littré thought to be certain oddities in the Ionic Greek. Too often, unhappily, feminist or quasi-feminist scholarship leans far too heavily upon an initial premise: no male could possibly understand what a woman goes through in giving birth, the role of motherhood, and the overarching emotions attached to the death of a girl or woman in classical Greece. While this premise is reasonable in its essentials, one cannot accept that a male gynecologist or obstetrician (in ancient Greece or modern times) should be unable to treat or care for a female in distress. In fact, in the case of the Greek texts (both medical and nonmedical, including epigraphical evidence), it is clear, as Nancy Demand quietly argues in her extremely well balanced study, that there is much interweaving of expertise among midwives (literate or not) and healing practitioners of numerous stripes (including Hippocratic physicians).

There is also a rich mixture of traditions intertwined among women, traditions we might choose to call magical or amuletic. Demand reminds us that the ancient mind did not wall off “rational” medicine from magic, showing that she has broken from the scholarly fashions most eloquently set down by Ludwig Edelstein in the first half of the twentieth century. I think this break is very salutary in the study of ancient gynecology and obstetrics, and Demand’s book will be particularly useful to scholars who wish to test her opinions, since here one finds almost all of the essential sources cited with careful documentation to ensure that the reader can find a path into the confused and confusing textual details that bristle in Hippocratic scholarship.

Birth, Death, and Motherhood probably will become one of the most frequently cited works in the twenty-first century on Greek gynecology and obstetrics. Feminist scholars may growl at my opinions, but the History of Medicine is littered—as is medicine itself—with fads and fashions of a specific era, in turn coloring the assumptions of writers in any century. Demand builds on the best and most reliable of foundations: the sources. Her interpretation of those sources will continue to engender controversy, but debate is the centerpiece of all historical interpretations. Her book is one of the best yet to be produced on the heated topic of male vs. female medicine in ancient Greece. I hope that it will lead to a full translation and commentary into English of the Hippocratic Diseases of Women and similar tracts.