Hippocrates' Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (review)

Helen King. Hippocrates' Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece. London: Routledge, 1998. xvi + 322 pp. $U.S. 85.00 (cloth), $U.S. 27.99 (paperbound); $Can. 128.00 (cloth), $Can. 39.99 (paperbound).

The work of Helen King is important enough to warrant a collection of her major articles of the last fifteen years, particularly as some have appeared in less accessible journals. However, even though the majority of the material in this book has appeared in print previously (in addition to the introduction, only chapters 2, 3, and 7 are completely new), this is far more than a simple collection of articles. All the chapters have been brought up to date with recent work in the field, and much has been expanded. In addition, the divers articles have been reworked and ordered into a whole so that the points King wishes to make are developed and amplified as the book proceeds.

King's main theses are that the misreading of Hippocratic gynecology by later physicians resulted from (1) a misplaced faith both in the Hippocratics as observers of disease and in the ontological status of some diseases, and (2) the desire of gynecologists to construct a doctor-patient relationship that placed the physician in a position of even greater power than in his relationship with male patients. This latter consideration was also, she argues, an important factor in the Hippocratics' own reading of the female. I do not doubt that she is correct in this, although I would argue that observation of physiology and pathology and women's own testimony played a larger part in the construction of the female than King would allow. Most disagreements I have with her over the anatomy and physiology of the female body that inform the Hippocratic Corpus are matters of detail, and I find her knowledge of the Nachleben of Hippocratic ideas truly impressive. She is conversant both with their immediate successors in antiquity and with the overt and covert use that has been made of the texts from the early Renaissance to modern times. Her tracking down of the dates when various texts became available to physicians in the West, and of the influence they exerted once they began to circulate, is wonderful detective work.

My most substantial objection to King's work is the degree to which she believes that disease and medicine are cultural phenomena. I would agree that many of the things we take for facts about the body are not facts at all, but King takes the position that there are NO "raw materials" (p. 58), that there are NO human universals that escape the control of culture (p. 118). She is dismissive of the value of using our own experience of the body to explicate Hippocratic observations, and of attempts to ascertain the efficacy of Hippocratic medicine in terms of its pharmacopoeia; and she is, I feel, too ready to criticize others for using "modern filters" (p. 171). Two examples will have to suffice to illustrate my objections. (1) In arguing that "far more important than chemical efficacy may be the shared cultural matrix of doctor and patient which enables the drug to make sense" (p. 154), King takes aim particularly at the work of John Riddle, who has recently argued, primarily with reference to contraceptives, that the ancient pharmacopoeia can be shown to include active chemicals that are considered effective today. King asks: "In chemistry, has Riddle found a universal language which can be applied to every human society, everywhere?" (p. 144). Yet in demonstrating the difficulty of introducing Western therapeutic methods into traditional societies, she cites the example of a patient who would traditionally treat an infected wound by sprinkling silt or termite powder on the sore and who uses penicillin powder in the same way, even though the Western orderly "knows that there is a risk of a hypersensitivity reaction" (p...