Of all the medical constructions of the female body, the wandering womb stands out as one of the most distant from the contemporary understanding of female anatomy. With this, it should be analyzed significantly, as it is through these historical cracks of comprehension that shines the truest cultural perspectives from the time.
The hodos was what Hippocratic physicians identified as the full body channel that spanned the nostrils to the vagina, as a unique part of the female body. Hippocratic treatises detail the lack of ligaments or tendons tethering the womb down, so we can think of the hodos as a path upon which the womb could move or “wander” throughout the body. The womb, unlike the rest of the female flesh was considered dry, and therefore could be considered an entirely separate entity from the wet body that houses it. Plato, a relative contemporary of Hippocratic practitioners, details this in his Timaeus, where he describes the womb as “like an animal living inside an animal.” The remains of this animalistic characterization of the female reproductive organs can be seen in contemporary use of anatomical vocabulary, such as labia (lips) and cervix (neck), that construct the female body to have a second set of anatomical features. Hippocratic philosophy develops these ideas by saying that the womb wanders around the loose female flesh in search of moisture from especially wet organs, such as the heart or the liver. Hippocratic treatises even assign discrete sensitivity to the womb, detailing a cure for a wandering womb should be through placing pleasant smelling perfumes near a woman’s cervix and foul smells near the nostrils. Hippocratic physicians explained that a womb that drifted too far from its pelvic home can endanger the female body, as it will remove vital fluids from the important organs and will not have access to its the vagina, which was the primary and preferred orifice of menstruation. In such a case, blood would build up in the womb, thereby causing abnormal amounts of blood to collect in the chest, which was thought to lead to agitation, epilepsy, and eventually suicidal behavior. The word “hysterical” comes from this exact physis of the female body, as the Greek word for uterus is “hystera,” and according to Hippocratic treatises “the womb is the origin of all diseases in women.”
The doctors of the time aptly provide a solution for women suffering from wandering wombs and hysteria: sexual intercourse. Ejaculation into the womb was thought to be a means of moistening the womb, which would weigh it down and prevent it from further drifting in the body. From this, it can be deduced that to be a woman in ancient Greece meant that penetration from a man was a requirement for your health and continued life. Hippocratic treatises and practices told women that they were objects that needed men not only to cure them, but to protect them from the vicious animal that lived within them.