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One— Once upon a Text: Hysteria from Hippocrates
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Hippocratic Hysteria: the Womb and Its Destinations

For the Hippocratic writers, however, the texts that have been used in the construction of hysteria described something resulting from a firmly organic cause, the movement of the womb. It is to the role of the womb that we must now turn. The Hippocratic texts suggest that movement of the womb is caused by menstrual suppression, exhaustion, insufficient food, sexual abstinence, and dryness or lightness of the womb, and that it can be cured by marriage and/or pregnancy, scent therapy, irritant pessaries, and various herbal concoctions administered by mouth, by nose, or direct to the vulva.

Since the womb is believed capable of movement around much of the body, these texts attribute a wide range of symptoms to womb movement. In searching for Hippocratic hysteria, we could therefore narrow down the field by identifying some combination of symptoms which so closely resembles the picture of hysteria in later historical periods that the problem of the absence of a disease label might be dismissed. The question raised by this approach is, of course, which historical period's image of hysteria we should take as our ideal type against which the Hippocratic texts are to be measured—hysterike pnix in the early Roman Empire? or the hysteria of the mid-nineteenth century? Another, more productive, way of approaching the problem is to start from the opposite end, asking which sections of the Hippocratic corpus have traditionally been used as evidence that hysteria was found in classical Greece. Robb's "Hippocrates on Hysteria"[69] translates the Aphorisms passage and five chapters of the gynecological treatises: Nature of Woman , chapter 87; Diseases of Women book 1, chapter 7, and book 2, chapters 123-125. He also gives brief summaries of Diseases of Women book 2, chapters 126-127.

It is significant that these chapters are among the very small group of Hippocratic texts used in recent discussions of hysteria, the other major chapter most commonly brought into the debate being Diseases of Women 1.32.[70] Robb also cites the appendix to Regimen in Acute Diseases , which distinguishes between pnix —a breathing difficulty usually translated as "suffocation"—caused by the womb and that caused by spasm


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or convulsions: if the patient feels pressure from the fingers, it is from the womb; if not, it is a convulsion.[71] However, close study of the above passages from Diseases of Women and Nature of Woman , so often the only examples of Hippocratic hysteria given in contemporary discussions, reveals that they have in common only a reference to the womb moving to another part of the body, and the symptom of pnix . The affinity between these is not, however, constant. For example, the womb may move in the absence of pnix , as in Diseases of Women 2.127 (L 8.272-274); this section is headed "Hystérie" by Littré. It is also worth noting that such features of nineteenth—and twentieth-century hysteria as grinding the teeth, loss of voice, cold extremities, and limb pains or paralysis do feature in the Hippocratic texts, often in the company of movement of the womb and suffocation, but may be found in the absence of either or both and may be attributed to a named organic cause; for example, in Diseases of Women 2.110 (L 8.234-238) they arise from a red flux.

The difficulties of finding a passage in the Hippocratic texts to serve as a paradigm for Hippocratic hysteria are increased when we look at Littré's classifications and at the texts themselves. Thus, of the six texts used by Robb,[72] only four are in fact headed "Hystérie" by Littré: one chapter from Nature of Woman , 87 (L 7.408), and three from Diseases of Women , 2.123-125 (L 8.266-270). Not only do they give largely different combinations of symptoms and prescribe different remedies, but in none of them does even the adjective hysterikos , "from the womb," appear.

This last point is of particular interest. Since the noun is not used in this period, it is entirely irrelevant for M. R. Lefkowitz, in a discussion of fourth-century medicine, to claim that "the term hysteria means 'wombiness'."[73] Maybe it does; but since it is not used, this is of little importance. One also searches for it in vain in the later gynecological writers of antiquity, such as Soranus and Aretaeus of Cappadocia, in whose work there does exist a condition thought to originate in the womb and to cause symptoms of suffocation, tooth grinding, loss of voice, and so on, but which is called not hysteria but hysterike pnix , "suffocation caused by the womb." The classic description of the symptoms that came to be collected under this label is Soranus's Gynecology 3.26-29; section 2.11 of Aretaeus is also headed "On hysterike pnix " (CMG vol. 2, PP. 32-34) but, unlike Soranus, he lists the remedies in a separate section, 6.10, "Treatment of hysterike pnix " (CMG vol. 2, pp. 139-141).[74]

The theories of Aretaeus and Soranus will be discussed in detail below. However, it is worth discussing why neither the category of hysteria nor that of hysterike pnix has a place in Hippocratic medicine. Not


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only does pnix exist as a symptom in the Hippocratic gynecological texts, and hysterikos as an adjective, but one of the sections used by Robb and many others—Diseases of Women 1.7 (L 8.32)—even introduces the description with "If pnix suddenly occurs." Nevertheless, in these texts the two are not explicitly brought together. Why should this be so?

One of the reasons why neither hysteria nor hysterike pnix is a Hippocratic category is simply that Hippocratic gynecology does not work by fitting collections of symptoms into preexisting categories. We can learn a great deal from studying the ways in which the Hippocratic writers choose to describe and to name disease. In many cases, ancient gynecology distinguishes and separates different combinations of symptoms according to cause and treatment, rather than subsuming many symptoms under a single disease label that "covers over all the clinical detail";[75] it emphasizes description of symptoms rather than diagnosis.[76] Any attempt to impose the diagnosis of hysteria on the Hippocratic texts may therefore risk distorting their approach to illness.

Indeed, looking at the Hippocratic corpus in general, not all Hippocratic texts name the diseases they describe. V. Di Benedetto distinguishes four ways of presenting a disease in these texts: as "another disorder," as "if" or "when" followed by one or more symptoms, as "if" or "when" followed by the name of a disease, or by giving the name of the disorder at the very beginning of the section. He suggests that these different ways of presenting disease reflect a culture in which the relationship between doctor and disease is defined in more than one way. The "if symptom x, therapy y" form is the most ancient, found also in Assyrian and Babylonian medicine, but in Hippocratic medicine it is slightly modified because the patient and the disease are separated and the possibility admitted that different patients may suffer in slightly different ways from what is nevertheless the same disease. Turning this last point on its head, the Hippocratic writers thus have the notion of a disease as something unitary which, due not only to the differences between patients in age, sex, temperament, and coloring, but also to variations in climate and season, may nevertheless manifest itself in a variety of ways. One disease: different symptoms, according to other factors affecting its presentation.[77]

When the Hippocratic texts give a specific name to a disorder, it may be taken from the affected part; from the way in which the disorder presents itself; from the specific sensation caused; or from something that happens in the course of the disease.[78] Although there is no name given to the disorder, or disorders, in the texts usually seen as "Hippocratic hysteria," their opening words are relevant here. These fall into two


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categories. Some start by describing the movement of the womb: "When the womb turns to the head" in Diseases of Women 2.123 (L 8.266). Others start with the symptoms of pnix , suffocation: the opening of Diseases of Women 1.32 (L 8.76) translates as "If pnix suddenly seizes a pregnant woman." The later name hysteria comes from the part believed to be affected: the womb. However, in the Hippocratic texts being considered here, the focus is either on the part that causes the symptoms or on the symptom that seems to have a central position: pnix . I will shortly return to the specific significance of this sensation in classical medicine.

The texts traditionally used as examples of hysteria in the Hippocratic corpus exhibit several features that make it difficult to merge them into one picture. I now propose to discuss those most commonly used by later commentators in order of their appearance in the gynecological treatises, and to set them within the context of the imagery associated with "woman" in ancient Greece.

The first description of interest is the second chapter of Diseases of Women book 1 (L 8.14-22), a discussion of menstrual suppression in a childless woman. Menstrual suppression is of central importance in Hippocratic gynecology,[79] due to a physiology of the female outlined in the previous chapter, Diseases of Women 1.1 (L 8. 10-14). Regular menstrual bleeding is seen as essential to female health—after maturity, outside pregnancy, and before the "drying out" of the menopause—because of the quality of female flesh. In women who have given birth, the body is "broken down" and its internal channels opened by childbirth and the lochia. A woman who has not given birth will suffer more pain if the flow of her menstrual blood is obstructed; because her body is more resistant, firmer, and more "thickly-packed," there is less open space into which the blood can travel. The writer of this chapter goes on to say that a woman's flesh is softer and of a looser texture than that of a man, and draws an analogy between female flesh and sheepskin, and between male flesh and a rug. If a fleece and a rug of equal weight are placed over water or in a damp place for two days and nights, the fleece will be found to have become much heavier than the rug. This is because sheepskin has a greater capacity to absorb water: a capacity shared with female flesh.[80]

Aristotle's characterization of woman as "a deformed male" and "a mutilated male" is well known, as is its persistence in Western culture.[81] However, Aristotle's biology may be seen as only one manifestation of the classical Greek belief that women are both fundamentally different from, and inferior to, men. In the seventh century B.C ., the poet Hesiod expressed this belief in chronological terms; women, the genos gynaikon


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or "race of women," were created later than men. Before Zeus sent the first woman and mother of the "race," Pandora, as one stage in the sequence of gift and counter-gift between gods and men, men lived like the gods. The arrival of Pandora and her daughters creates the need for sexual reproduction and agricultural labor, since women are voracious consumers of all that a man can produce.[82] In the Timaeus , Plato too presents women as a late addition to the human race; in the second generation of humanity, men who acted in a cowardly or unjust way in the first are reborn as women.[83]

Defining the female in terms of the male is one way of expressing difference; chronology is another. Other images of male/female relations express it in other ways but show similar persistence: the agricultural metaphor, in which man ploughs the field that is woman and sows the seed in her passive body, or the war/childbirth opposition, in which man sheds the blood of others to defend the city in war, while woman bleeds from her own body and replenishes the city's stock of men.[84] By locating female difference at the level of the flesh, Hippocratic medicine incorporates the ideas of fundamental difference, sexuality, and bloodshed into its image of woman.

The direct consequence of the difference between the flesh of the two sexes is that women absorb more fluid from the digestive process, needing menstruation to remove the excess from their bodies. As a result, in the Hippocratic texts women are often described as "wetter" than men. Women are loose-textured and soft to the touch, thus by their very nature retaining moisture, and this retention is even presented as the explanation for women having breasts.[85] A further factor mentioned in Diseases of Women 1.1 is their way of life. A man does more strenuous and tiring work, which dries out any excess moisture he may have accumulated; women live sedentary lives, leaving menstruation as the only way of purging them of the excess fluid building up in their bodies.

It is in the context of these beliefs about the female body that Diseases of Women 1.2 should be read. In certain circumstances, even in the wet body of a woman, the womb may be deprived of sufficient moisture. The childless woman, due to the lack of spaces in her body in which moisture can be stored, is at particular risk, above all if she abstains from the "moistening" activity of sexual intercourse. In such a woman, the "dry and light" womb may suddenly "turn around"[86] and move up in search of moisture. Menstruation stops, and if it does not occur for three months there will be pnix from time to time, intermittent fever, shivering, and pain in the limbs. If there is no bleeding by the fourth month, these symptoms will worsen and will be joined by those of thick urine,


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a swollen abdomen, grinding the teeth, loss of appetite, and difficulty in sleeping. In the fifth month all symptoms will be worse; if the condition persists into the sixth month with no menstrual loss, it will have become incurable, and the woman will suffer the additional symptoms of vomiting phlegm, extreme thirst, discomfort if touched, gurgling sounds from the blood in the womb which is unable to come out, loss of voice or difficulty in making herself understood, and irregular breathing. Finally the abdomen, legs, and feet will swell: death is imminent.

The disorder described in Diseases of Women 1.7 is similar, although it does not follow this month-by-month pattern, but the explanation for the symptoms is different, since the central point seems to be that they depend on the location to which the dry womb moves. The affected group is described as women not having intercourse, but older rather than younger women because their wombs are lighter in weight. Elsewhere in these texts it is explained that the younger the woman, the more blood there is present in her body.[87] If a woman's vessels are emptier than usual and she is more tired, the womb, dried out by fatigue, turns around and "throws itself" on the liver because this organ is full of moisture. This causes sudden pnix , by interrupting the route of the breath through the belly. During this pnix , the whites of the eyes are turned up, the woman is cold, and her complexion is livid; she grinds her teeth and has excess saliva, like a sufferer from Heracles' disease, another name for the condition that the Hippocratics usually called the sacred disease and which we would probably call epilepsy. Sometimes phlegm will run down from the head, causing the womb to leave the liver and return to its proper place, and the pnix will stop because the womb is now full of fluid and heavy. If the womb stays on the liver or in the area of the hypochondria for a long time, however, the sufferer will be choked; if it moves to the mouth of the bladder, it will cause strangury; or it may go to the limbs or side.

Diseases of Women 1.32 (L 8.76) gives an almost identical etiology for pnix and a very similar picture of symptoms, but it concerns the condition in a pregnant woman. Not only fatigue but also insufficient food can cause the womb to move; the womb itself is described as being overheated as well as dry. As in 1.7, phlegm—described as cold—may run down from the head and cause the womb to return to its proper position; if the womb does not return quickly, there is danger to the fetus.

The alleged hysteria texts in Diseases of Women 2.123ff. are much shorter than those so far discussed and give little information on the women most likely to be affected or on the mechanisms by which the


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symptoms are produced. Instead, they start by naming the location to which the womb has moved (without saying why it has traveled there), then give a short list of "signs," and finally outline the treatment. Diseases of Women 2.123 (L 8.266) opens: "When the womb moves to the head and the pnix stops there, the head is heavy." The signs are that the patient says she has pain in the channels in the nose and under the eyes: there is lethargy and foaming at the mouth. The first treatment is to wash her with warm water; if this does not work, cold water or cooled boiled laurel or myrtle water should be put on the head, and the head anointed with rose oil. Sweet smelling fumigations should be applied below, foul smelling substances to the nostrils; she should eat cabbage and drink cabbage water.

Diseases of Women 2.124 (L 8.266-268) has an identical format and concerns movement to the heart; Diseases of Women 2.125 (L 8. 268-270) and 2.126 (L 8.270-272) concern movement to the hypochondria, for which drinks of castoreum and fleabane[88] are among the recommended remedies. As is usual in these texts, a range of different substances is given, perhaps in order to aid the doctor in catering for a range of abilities to pay, or to allow for seasonal difficulties in obtaining the substances. In general, in addition to pessaries, washing, bandages around the body to keep the womb in place,[89] oiling, and drinks, these texts make much use of fumigation, a frequent remedy for gynecological conditions.

The most detailed description of fumigation occurs in a text that is not traditionally used by later writers on hysteria: Diseases of Women 2.133 (L 8.284-286). This covers a forty-day program of pessaries and fumigations for a condition in which the womb moves to the hip joint, the mouth of the womb is closed and tilted, and the menstrual blood, unable to leave by its usual route, moves instead to the breasts. It is worth translating in full not only because of the details of the fumigation process, recommended to return the womb to its place and open it so that the menstrual blood can come out—part of the treatment for hysterical suffocation for many centuries—but also because it is only one of many chapters that could be used to show the existence of womb movement texts, the details of which the hysteria tradition chooses to ignore. Contributing to its neglect by the hysteria tradition is the fact that Littré diagnoses it not as hysteria but as "Obliquité latérale devenant chronique" leading to menstrual suppression, swollen breasts, and, eventually, breast cancer.

The description of fumigation reads as follows.


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First give a fumigation to the womb. Take an earthenware pot with two-sixths capacity, put on it a dish, and fit them together so that no air can get in. Then pierce the bottom of the dish and make a hole. Put in the hole a reed, about a cubit long. The reed must be properly inserted in the dish so that no vapor escapes. When you have prepared this, place the dish on the pot and plaster it round with clay. When you have done these things, dig a hole in the ground, two feet deep, large enough to make room for the pot. Then burn firewood, until you have made the hole red-hot. When it is red-hot, take out the wood and the biggest and hottest pieces of charcoal, but leave the ashes and embers in the hole. When the pot is heated up and vapor rises, if the vapor is very hot, hold back; if not, she is to sit on the end of the reed, and pass it into the mouth [of the womb], then fumigate. If it cools, throw on red-hot charcoal, taking care that the fumigation is not too fiery. If, by adding the charcoal, the fumigation becomes more fiery than it should be, take away the charcoal. One should construct the fumigation in fine, still weather, so she is not cold: she should be covered with garments. In the pot you should put dry garlic, and pour in water so that it rises two digits above, and soak it well, and pour in seal oil too. Heat this. The fumigation must go on for a long time. After the fumigation, if she is able, she should wash her whole body as she pleases, the lower back and below the navel in particular. Give for dinner barley cake or wheat bread, and boiled garlic. On the next day, if she is weak from the fumigation, intermit that day: if not, go back to the fumigation. While she is being fumigated, if she is able to examine it, order her to touch the mouth [of the womb]. The fumigation itself inflates the womb, makes it more upright and opens it. It is because it is like this, and can do such things, that you should use a fumigation.[90]

On the constituents of this fumigation, it is noteworthy that elsewhere in this treatise seal oil is described as the best substance to use in a fumigation for movement of the womb to the hypochondria.[91] Garlic, like castoreum and fleabane, features because of its strong smell. In descriptions of therapy for womb movement, the olfactory qualities of substances often account for their use. The pattern is usually that fragrant substances are applied to the vulva, in order to attract the womb back, while foul-smelling substances are placed under the nostrils to drive the womb away from the upper parts of the body.[92] In addition-and in apparent contradiction—fragrant oils may be rubbed on the head and strong-smelling substances drunk, often in wine.

Littré's diagnosis apart, there seems little reason why the womb movement described in 2.133 should have been omitted from the construction of the hysteria tradition. That section demonstrates the prevalence


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of the combination of womb movement and menstrual suppression throughout Diseases of Women . Returning to the alleged hysteria texts, Diseases of Women 2.127 (L 8.272) is another description of movement of the womb to the liver, which defines the affected group in a way different from that of the writer of 1.7. Where 1.7 saw the most likely sufferer as an older woman not having intercourse, 2.127 suggests movement to the liver is more common in older unmarried women and young widows, especially the childless and the sterile, because these women lack the beneficial purging of childbirth and the lochia. Here the argument is more reminiscent of 1.2. Section 2.128 (L 8.276) discusses movement to the hypochondria, for which a fumigation followed by intercourse is recommended, and 2.129 (L 8.276) covers movement to the ribs, which can cause a cough, pain in the side, and what feels like a ball in the side. Section 2.130 (L 8.278) concerns movement to the hips or flanks, and 2.131 (L 8.278) movement to the middle of the waist, in which the drawing up of the limbs is mentioned as a symptom.

A further set of texts concerning womb movement may be found at 2.200ff.; two significant points for the later history of hysteria occur in 2.201 (L 8.384), where it is recommended that the patient's groin and inner thighs should be rubbed with aromatics to cure movement of the womb to the diaphragm, and 2.203 (L 8.388), where we read, "When the womb causes pnix , light a lamp and snuff it out under the nostrils" and, later in the same chapter, "Take a lamp, throw on it a little oil, light it, and when it is extinguished hold it near the nostrils." The first therapy is used in a famous passage of Galen, which will be discussed below: the second, also found in one of the texts used in the hysteria tradition, Nature of Woman 87 (L 7.408),[93] occurs in many later discussions of hysteria.

It can be seen that the Hippocratic texts do indeed work by describing symptoms rather than giving a single disease name to these chapters, and that where they group symptoms and therapies together they do so according to the part of the body to which the womb is believed to have moved. Of these therapies, the recommendation of marriage/pregnancy occurs only in the discussion of womb movement to the hypochondria in Diseases of Women 2.128 (L. 8.276), which ends by saying that, after fumigation, the patient should sleep with her husband: "release from this disease, when she is pregnant." Nevertheless, it is this treatment for womb movement that has received most attention in the secondary literature, above all in the work of the psychoanalyst and classicist Bennett Simon, in his Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece . This includes a chapter titled "Hysteria and Social Issues," which opens with the familiar error:


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"Hysteria, the disease of the 'wandering uterus,' was given its name by the Greeks."[94] Simon's overall approach to hysteria combines that of I. M. Lewis's study of spirit possession, trance, and shamanism, which presents the possessed state as an indirect mode of protest used by powerless and peripheral sectors of society,[95] with a Freudian model. According to what Simon calls a "psychodynamic understanding of hysteria," "a hysterical symptom, for a Greek woman, permitted a safe expression of certain unmet needs," as a result of which expression the doctor would intervene on the woman's behalf as the "wished-for good father."[96] To summarize the "culturally sanctioned dumb show"[97] that Simon envisages, an unmarried or widowed woman is supposed to feel sexually frustrated and to express this frustration by hysteria: the doctor then legitimates her wish by announcing that the cure consists in letting her have what she wants, since it is precisely marriage and childbirth that will make her healthy again.

This approach is inadequate because it shows little understanding of the institutional position of women, the ideal of marriage as universal, the ideal age at first marriage of fourteen for girls, and so on.[98] It also fails to come to terms with the fact that, in most of the texts labeled "Hystérie" by Littré, the marital status of the sufferer is not given[99] or she is explicitly described as married.[100] In his discussion Simon cites only one Hippocratic passage, Diseases of Women 2.151 (L 8.326), in which the woman patient is said to suffer in the same way as those who are struck with the sacred disease. In another passage on this last disease, Simon reveals that, like Veith, he has not studied the Greek text of the Hippocratic corpus in sufficient detail. After a brief discussion of the "madness of Heracles," which "was considered by some to be a case of epilepsy,"[101] Simon states, "To my knowledge, the Hippocratic corpus contains no mention of the mythical characters who went mad and were portrayed so vividly on the Athenian stage and in vase painting." However, as I have mentioned above, in Diseases of Women 1.7 (L 8.32) the writer states that women with the condition he describes resemble sufferers from "Heracles' disease"; hypo tes herakleies nousou , which Littré translates "aux épileptiques." The characters of myth, who had influenced the folk names of diseases, are thus present even in the Hippocratic corpus.

It is, furthermore, inappropriate to describe hysteria as a "safe expression" of a woman's needs when loss of voice, grinding the teeth, and "movement of the womb to the liver," far from being a safe way of attracting attention, may be the signal for the Hippocratic doctor to tie bandages around the patient's waist, place foul-smelling substances under her nose, insert beetle pessaries, inject hot oil into the womb, or


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shower her with cold water. As examination of the texts has already shown, and contrary to what Simon implies, marriage and childbirth are rarely the prescribed remedies for this combination of symptoms,[102] and it is also unusual for the remedy to consist of something that could be seen as a form of indirect sexual gratification; for example, fragrant ointments to be rubbed on the vulva[103] or the vaginal insertion of objects specifically described as resembling the male sexual organ.[104] Finally, it is inappropriate to use Simon's "psychodynamic model" when in Hippocratic medicine there is no line drawn between psychological and organic illness.[105]

A similar approach to that of Simon is taken by Rousselle, who states that "Greek women had no legal right to make any decision regarding their own marriage: they could not ask a man to marry them, or even decide that they wanted to be married or to accept an offer of marriage, so it is perhaps not surprising that their impotent anger should take the form of a disease in which their womb was literally suffocating them."[106] D. Gourevitch traces the disappearance of "the hysterical virgin from medical literature" between the Hippocratics and the medicine of the Roman Empire; she attributes this disappearance to institutional change since, if the age at first marriage falls even further, fewer girls will remain to become hysterical.[107]

However, such approaches are rooted in our own society's views on what is normal for a woman, on the nature of hysteria, and on the relationship between medicine and sexuality. Yet for the writers of the Hippocratic texts—and probably for the patients they treat—intercourse and pregnancy rightly belong to the domain of the pharmacopoeia, due to their dramatic and beneficial physical effects. Not only does intercourse moisten the womb, thus discouraging it from moving elsewhere in the body to seek moisture, but it also agitates the body and thus facilitates the passage of blood within it. Furthermore, childbirth breaks down the flesh throughout the body and, by making extra spaces within which excess blood can rest, reduces the pain caused by the movement of blood between parts of the body. It causes complete purgation (katharsis ) of excess blood and may thus cure many women whose problems originate in menstruation. Since all disorders of women ultimately result from their soft and spongy flesh and excess blood, all disorders of women may be cured by intercourse and/or childbirth, to which marriage and pregnancy are the necessary precursors. There is thus nothing special about the prescription of these in cases of movement of the womb.

Hippocratic medicine thus gives a pharmacological interpretation to


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what we may be tempted to see as the social processes of marriage and motherhood. We should, of course, never forget that the Greek word for mature woman, gyne , also means "wife." Womb movement, however, calls up a battery of other therapies, many of which-like the fumigation described above—make use of foul—and sweet-smelling substances. These therapies lie behind the assertion frequently made in later writers—but not in such authors as Soranus and Galen—that the Hippocratic womb was thought to be an independent living being, fleeing from foul smells but moving to seek out more pleasant odors. We must now decide whether any such belief is necessarily implied by the use of scent therapy.

Such therapy relies on the idea of connections existing between parts of the body, and in particular in the gynecological texts on the presence of a hodos or "way" from the nostrils and mouth to the vagina.[108] This is never anatomically described but is implicit in many therapies used. For example, a test to determine whether a woman can conceive involves putting a clove of garlic or another strongly scented substance at one end of the hodos and discovering whether the scent reaches the opposite end. If so, there is no obstruction present, and the woman can conceive.[109] Disorders of the womb can also be treated by using the hodos . A summary of treatments of the womb in Diseases of Women 2.137 mentions the top and the bottom of this tube as appropriate sites for the administration of medication.[110] If the womb has moved upward, foul-smelling substances are held at the nose, pleasant-smelling substances to the vulva, so that the womb is simultaneously repelled from above and attracted down to its correct place.[111] If the womb moves down, or starts to come out of the body through the vulva, foul smells are placed there and sweet smells at the nostrils to draw it up again.[112] There is no explicit discussion of the mechanism by which such therapy is supposed to work.


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