Without surgery or X-ray imaging, bodily fluids became the ancient physician’s primary insight into the body. With this, it’s understandable why the wetness of the body was used as one of the principle physes to differentiate feminine from masculine. Referring to the “One-sex” Model entry, Hippocratic treatises constructed feminine flesh to be of the consistency of wool and masculine flesh to be of the consistency of cotton. Moreover, women’s flesh was thought to be able to absorb more fluids then that of a man’s, which explains why female bodies had to expel the unused fluid through menstruation. On the other hand, due to the less absorbent nature of masculine flesh, men could more readily use bodily fluids to nourish and energize their bodies, which constructed men to have a higher physical potential than women. The wet and dry dichotomy functioned at the center of sex differentiation in ancient Greece medicine.
Physicians, especially those practicing under Hippocrates, worked within the wet and dry dichotomy to further confirm the social conception that women were inferior, uncontrollable, and repulsive. Moreover, to be female, was to be constantly outpouring, constantly erupting with fluids that were themselves symbolic of their bodies’ failure to function with the physical perfection of a man’s. Men of ancient Greece were dry, contained, compacted, whereas ancient Greek women were overflowing, boundless, loose and dilapidated. These male physicians projected their desires to control and contain women onto their medical perceptions of them; such a situation exposes the danger of medicine, in that if we culturally assign truth to everything a doctor says, we forfeit our agency over the ways we understand our experiences in our bodies. Hippocratic physicians were able to convince both men and women of ancient Greece that female bodies medically required the help of men to be tamed and contained. Hesiod’s myth of Pandora compliments this Hippocratic construction of female bodies, as her deceptive nature as a woman and her refusal to be controlled by men leads to a familiar outpouring of evils and atrocities from her jar, which is often seen as a metaphor for her body (to be discussed in greater detail in a later post!).
Histories like this can expose to us the power of medicine as a tool of social injustice. What “scientific” franchises are you buying into? What agency over your body are you sacrificing when you forget to be exhaustively critical of the medicine you accept as truth?